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Comment by siwatanejo | Hacker News Reader

And the time spent in commuting door to door and the radiation you get by flying 4 days a week? Not worth it.

But you realize that this isn't meant to propose a viable working plan, rather to highlight an absurd situation.

Indeed, going by train I can just walk up and get on.

I've never been on a flight that didn't take a long time to get through all the corridors, wait for plane, fly and then walk the corridors at the other end not take hours. Even short haul from smaller London airports to a Spanish city.

The system is set up to take up a significant amount of time.

Try out Singapore and fly for example to Phuket. It’s a very lean process with optimised waiting times (read: nearly none) and walking distances on both sides.

It can be done, most airports are just amazingly inefficient. No idea why that is.

To sell meals, drinks and other goodies. Tired travellers that are forced to wait are easy targets. Add in the occasional perfume store and Bob's your uncle.

At least in the US the problem is that you can’t afford to shut down existing airports and so a lot of the remodeling ends up being hodgepodge and convoluted extensions and fitting whatever goes into a nook or cranny.

The last major airport to be built in the US was DEN in 1995.

Because the UK really doesn't do regional airports. If they did it would help, but basically I dont have many option outside of the London three or Manchester.

Funnelling everyone through such a small number sounds efficient for the airport, but isn't from a travellers perspective. Heathrow and Gatwick, are massive.

I haven’t been to UK airports, but often I find one of the more prominent bottleneck to be central checks per terminal instead of distributed checks at each gate like they happen at more efficient airports. The latter is a major improvement: You can directly go to the gate and bag checks happen there.

Yeah it's a 2 hour 30 flight apparently, times two, that's five hours spent flying alone, and the quickest time through an airport is 30 minutes or so even with all the VIP access. Cost of flying has gone up since then too, and probably rents on both ends as well.

I've long ago realised that cost, comfort, and commute are like the project management triangle, you can pick two: Short commute in a comfortable home is expensive, cheap home with a short commute is uncomfortable, and cheap and comfortable home means a long commute.

This is why work from home is so valuable, in that you can live comfortably and affordably (say, a three bedroom apartment in Barcelona) without the cost or time spent commuting.

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