Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
All this rushing and purpose-building led to suboptimal decision making that ultimately made it a completely wasted investment.
A similar story can be told about Olympic stadium in Montreal.
From what I've heard, the Olympics have failed to benefit every city that's hosted them except LA, and the reason they were good for LA was specifically that no new infrastructure was built to accommodate them.
Same reason, all infrastructure was either already there or usable after (the Olympic stadium was sold to a football team).
Generally the larger a city is, the better able it is to host an event like this for obvious reasons.
> Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
That's just poor and short sighted planning, nothing specific for the Olympics. Paris for instance isn't making any such short term infrastructure decisions, only rushing to finish some stuff before the Olympics (e.g. line 14 to Orly, while failing others like line 15 South which was supposed to be ready but won't).
It was a pretty common urban planning concept for a large city to have one airport devoted mostly or entirely to domestic flights, and one mostly or entirely for international flights.
New York domestic: EWR
New York international: JFK
New York freight: LGA
Chicago domestic: MDW
Chicago international: ORD
Houston domestic: HOU
Houston international: IAH
Dallas domestic: LUV
Dallas international: DFW
Paris international: CGD
Paris international: ORY
Washington domestic: DCA
Washington international: IAD
It worked fine for a very long time until the airlines optimized into the hub-and-spoke system we have today, where connecting flights has become normalized.
Because people think now it's normal to have connecting flights all the time, the domestic airports have added international flights, and vice-versa.
What was once orderly and predictable has become very messy, and had a number of other side-effects.
I'm pointing out the use of "International" in airport codes, not names.
And sure, IAH is the bigger international airport in Houston, but it also carries an absolutely massive amount of domestic travel as well. My comment was about having an airport be almost exclusively international travel with few domestic connections.
That's more than a little revisionist: following the CAB's demand for a joint international-class airport (Dallas refused to use GSW, and DAL had gotten way too small for the traffic, and its runways too small for international jets), Dallas, Fort Worth, and the existing airlines signed an agreement to phase out cross-state operations at local airports and move them all to DFW. When DFW opened, all the airlines moved their non-local operations there per the agreement.
Except Southwest, who'd been created after the agreement, decided they were not bound by it, and enjoyed a now empty and easily accessible airport. And since Southwest's operations were initially intrastate, they didn't fall under CAB jurisdiction, which was the reason for DFW existing in the first place.
The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 then meant Southwest was able to expand to interstate traffic without being restrictible by a dying CAB.
Wright was passed to protect an airport which CAB had all but forced on the area (though to be fair CAB was paying for airports, which was why they wanted them regrouped). Plus bankrupting DFW would have completely broken DAL and aviation to the region.
FWIW I do agree this was ultimately a good thing in the end though. It would not have been good for DFW airport to fail, and the region definitely did need a larger airport.
It seems like we do agree with this line though:
> nobody would have bothered going out there if they weren't forced to by federal law.
Since this is HN, we'll get ultra-pedantic...
IAH is technically "Intercontinental Airport of Houston", not "international" for some reason (full name is "George Bush Intercontinental Airport").
Which, like urban highways, really doesn't make a sense in most cases if one spends a few minutes thinking about it. And especially doesn't make sense for an airport whose main traffic is connecting international and domestic flights.
Urban planners in many places in the 1950-1990 time were... special. Blindly copying bullshit that didn't make sense originally and definitely didn't make sense in their city.
Yes, they decided they'll try to do it like Paris with CDG and Orly, but fundamentally misunderstood the differences the traffic - Orly mostly serves tourist destinations or places where lots of people living and working in France have origins in such as Portugal and the Maghreb from where there will be limited amounts of changes to international flights; and Air France is abandoning Orly and focusing entirely on CDG because even the small opportunity misses aren't worth the extra costs. And both are well connected to the city they're serving, including to each other with the RER B (okay it takes 1h30m, but at least it's a mostly direct connection). And CDG even has high speed rail to other cities.
Montreal isn't even close in terms of traffic patterns... and even if it was, the connectivity to Montreal (and ideally Ottawa) really wasn't there.
As soon as the design/planning teams gets big enough that there are many people who barely know eachother, they start competing to the detriment of the whole...
Nobody wants their part late/over budget, so they do things to screw other parts of the project just so their part isn't late or over budget.