Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 75 posts

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#21

Post by sokoloff »

anticensor wrote: post #12
SeanLuke wrote: post #7

This article mentions Dulles Airport's "mobile lounges", but doesn't explain their extraordinary history, which has absolutely nothing to do with the issues discussed in the article itself. [Dulles has no train connection yet]. If you've gone through DC's Dulles Airport, especially its international terminal, you may have experienced traveling in what must be described as a moving room, a kind of huge, wide bus. Long…

> a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports. Why could you not replicate the security procedure across all lobbies?

Presumably, instead of TSA, you'd need TTSA instead (Tens of Thousands Standing Around).

There's a certain minimum staffing level for any TSA checkpoint and the overhead doesn't scale down linearly to checkpoints serving fractions of the lanes today. I don't know what the minimum is, but it seems like it's at least 7 or 8 (1 on ID inspection, 1 on baggage scan, 1 on backscatter, 1 supervisor, 1-2 on baggage manual inspection who could also metal detect/manually inspect wheelchairs, 2 available for "male/female assist", 1 supervisor)

Surges are also better handled by centralizing the checkpoints. Whatever lounge is headed towards flight 123 is going to have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates in a current-design airport. If you have a queue at security outside the single lounge, are you really going to close the door and tell everyone in the queue they're missing their flight? Or will you put pressure on security to overlook things to keep things moving (providing an obvious attack vector for adversaries)? Add it all up, average it all out, move it 100 meters away, and a security delay seems more reasonably a passenger fault to arrive early enough.

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#22

Post by jcranmer »

anticensor wrote: post #12
SeanLuke wrote: post #7

This article mentions Dulles Airport's "mobile lounges", but doesn't explain their extraordinary history, which has absolutely nothing to do with the issues discussed in the article itself. [Dulles has no train connection yet]. If you've gone through DC's Dulles Airport, especially its international terminal, you may have experienced traveling in what must be described as a moving room, a kind of huge, wide bus. Long…

> a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports. Why could you not replicate the security procedure across all lobbies?

There's effectively two main schools of designing multiple-terminal airports. One school is to design each terminal as a separate island in a vast sea of tarmac, so that all of the inter-terminal transportation has to be done post-security. This is the model of, say, ATL or IAD. The other school is to put all of your terminals around a central cluster such that every terminal can have independent pre-security access. This is what, say, ORD or DFW do.

In the latter setup, each terminal gets independent security lines, but there is often (although, as in DCA, not always!) post-security connections between terminals that allow you to choose any security line you want, although at the potential expense of a lot of extra walking. But in the former setup, there really isn't any alternative to a single security line for everybody. And if you have an airport like IAD where space was never budgeted for that security line in the original terminal construction, it can get pretty bad.

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#23

Post by crote »

ghaff wrote: post #8
Clewza313 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large airports outside the US often do have one station per terminal, or a station conveniently between two terminals. See eg London Heathrow, Tokyo Haneda, Tokyo Narita, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi and many more.

Some do. Mostly when they're at the end of the line because you're mostly not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route such as in the case of San Francisco, say. Which didn't originally have a BART connection at all. (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.)

Schiphol disagrees with you. Its railway station services about 45 trains an hour, none of which terminate there.

Making a stop is a lot less of an issue if it also serves as a transfer hub. This can greatly reduce the congestion of downtown stations.

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#24

Post by treis »

I'm pretty sure this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Every airport in the US in a city with a subway (or equivalent) has a station at the airport. Off the top of my head ATL, ORD, JFK, SLC, OAK all do.

And the point of the plane trains is to move people between different terminals. I have less international airport experience but the only way they don't have them is if they use buses instead.

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#25

Post by hef19898 »

m4rtink wrote: post #18

There was an interesting issue with a rail connection on the Narita International Airport serving Tokyo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narita_International_Airport#C... The airport was build in big style on the 60s on farmland forcefully bought from local farmers and should have been served by a Shinkansen high speed line directly from Tokyo station, making it's 50+ km distance from the city center an non-issue! Lets…

You don't need guerilla farmers to end up in a situation like that. MUC, the Munich airport, has two rather shitty metro lines connecting it to Munich. These lines aren't even direct ones, instead they have stops at every tree and milk bottle.

Once they had a test with an ICE train stopping at the MUC metro train station. Worked like a charm.

Well, but politicians wanted the Transrapid, so no conventional train connection was done. Direct metro connections, which would already be fast enough for most purposes, usually vet shut down by disputes between the city of Munich, the counties of Erding and Freising, various political parties and DB (the German train company).

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#26

Post by metalliqaz »

treis wrote: post #24

I'm pretty sure this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Every airport in the US in a city with a subway (or equivalent) has a station at the airport. Off the top of my head ATL, ORD, JFK, SLC, OAK all do. And the point of the plane trains is to move people between different terminals. I have less international airport experience but the only way they don't have them is if they use buses instead.

is your contention that he is lying about the existance airport-only rail lines? Or that he is lying about the PFC subsidy restriction?

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#27

Post by crote »

ghaff wrote: post #3

The funding angle aside, there are still reasons why large airports have their own "terrible trains" (and buses) to connect to the transit system. There's usually just one airport stop in any case, which in a major airport, may (or may not) be convenient to one or two terminals but will require some sort of separate transportation system from at least part of the airport.

It really depends on your airport design. Schiphol and Brandenburg both have a single centralized departure / arrival hall, with a train station right underneath it.

Using public transport is by far the fastest and most convenient way to get to or from the airport.

A lot of other airports simply aren't designed for convenience, but that doesn't mean that it isn't possible with a different design.

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#28

Post by ghaff »

jcranmer wrote: post #11

> This unique type of U.S. transportation has no commonly-recognized name, and I will soon arbitrarily assign a term for them just to make everything easier. They're a kind of tram. I suspect the author is from New York, because the train-to-the-train of which he speaks largely doesn't exist in any other city in the US, and the concept of a two-car light rail-esque system seems astonishingly foreign to him. Especiall…

>San Francisco, SFO: BART stops at the airport terminals (although it does a funny Y setup to get in there).

I'd call SFO a train to a train. There's one BART station (which as you say is sort of a spur off the main line--which is why it didn't originally exist as part of the BART system). I'm not sure if you can walk to the BART station from any terminal but in my experience you take the AirTrain. There's probably a similar pattern at a fair number of major airports where you technically can walk to the transit station but, in practice, you may not want to.

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#29

Post by treis »

metalliqaz wrote: post #26
treis wrote: post #24

I'm pretty sure this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Every airport in the US in a city with a subway (or equivalent) has a station at the airport. Off the top of my head ATL, ORD, JFK, SLC, OAK all do. And the point of the plane trains is to move people between different terminals. I have less international airport experience but the only way they don't have them is if they use buses instead.

is your contention that he is lying about the existance airport-only rail lines? Or that he is lying about the PFC subsidy restriction?

I added in a paragraph with an edit that you probably didn't see, but to be clear these are separate problems. The plane trains are to get people around an airport. The subway/train connections are to get people to/from an airport.

He's wrong two ways. (1) most if not all major US airports are connected to rail and (2) international airports use plane trains and if they don't they have buses that do the same thing.

Re: U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

#30

Post by currymj »

treis wrote: post #24

I'm pretty sure this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Every airport in the US in a city with a subway (or equivalent) has a station at the airport. Off the top of my head ATL, ORD, JFK, SLC, OAK all do. And the point of the plane trains is to move people between different terminals. I have less international airport experience but the only way they don't have them is if they use buses instead.

JFK certainly doesn't have a subway stop at the airport. You have to get off the subway, get a separate AirTrain ticket, and ride the AirTrain to the airport.
Post reply on HN