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

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

#61

Post by bobthepanda »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34
mattm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thanks for the background on this. I lived in Japan previously and I had always assumed that there was no Shinkansen to Narita due to airline lobbying. Most international flights go through Tokyo. If you live in Nagoya or Osaka and a direct Shinkansen connection was available to Narita for your international flight, I think a lot of people would choose to take the Shinkansen to/from the airport rather than the d…

Osaka has plenty of international flights. I don’t think they are served by a shinkansen either, though definitely by a lot more trains than Narita.

Part of the lessons learned by Japan at Narita was that a flat land parcel big enough for an airport is extremely difficult to assemble, extremely unpopular to assemble, and will probably be located way too far out to be convenient. After all, Haneda is still the busier airport today.

So now new airports tend to get built as artificial islands, since you are probably not trampling on anyone’s centuries-long family farm.

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

#62

Post by bobthepanda »

Clewza313 wrote: post #4

OMG. I'd long wondered why the US had so many of these ridiculous boondoggles (eg AirTrain JFK) and now I know. Unfortunately this comes too late for one airport that has absolutely miserable public transport, since they're already building their $2 billion boondoggle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAX_Automated_People_Mover

AirTrain JFK exists because

- the circle of terminals is too wide to be well served by one or two stations without significant walking, but too small to have a full length subway or commuter train stop every terminal. If you built a direct heavy rail link, you would probably need something like the AirTrain still; BART has a similar setup at SFO, as does DFW

- JFK itself is located awkwardly. It is too far away from straight path rail lines. So you are either diverting everyone passing through on a time consuming detour via every terminal, or you are splitting frequency upstream and depriving commuters of train capacity they used to have.

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

#63

Post by bobthepanda »

crote wrote: post #23
ghaff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Schiphol also is one of the largest examples of a one-terminal airport, though.

This approach would work less well at, say, JFK, which features terminals arranged in a circle that is too wide to serve with a station or two without significant walking, but too small to have trains feasibly stop often enough to eliminate the walking problem.

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

#64

Post by bobthepanda »

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…

LAX is getting a people mover from the light rail.

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

#65

Post by bobthepanda »

ghaff wrote: post #57
jacurtis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new law simply removes the requirement for airports to manage their own internal transportation. So it leaves the possibility for public transit to connect riders directly to terminals, which was previously not allowed. This doesn't force airports to use Public Transportation or restrict them from doing what they are already doing. The fact that most large airports where this would apply are already built to use…

>which was previously not allowed. That wouldn't seem to be universally true. As noted elsewhere, the Silver Line in Boston (buses with a dedicated lane) serves terminals at the airport from one of the city's train stations in addition to serving some locations that were largely undeveloped when most of the city's subway system was created.

The issue is more with the specific pot of money. One could totally build what you’re describing, just not with Passenger Facility Charges.

Given the general poor state of public transit funding in the US not using that money means not building a train at all.

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

#66

Post by bobthepanda »

mbreese wrote: post #32
sokoloff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> have a much more spiky load on security than the average of all gates That’s a very good point. And, the airport itself has already balanced the departure times for all flights across the airport. Every flight has a pre-assigned departure window, so in theory, when you average all flights, you shouldn’t have (many) peaky surges in passenger load. Or at the very least, they would be predictable.

Hub airports tend to have large departure banks where all the flights arrive, hold, and depart within a certain time frame, for ease of connections. So this isn’t strictly true.

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

#67

Post by bobthepanda »

mattm wrote: post #19
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…

Wow, thanks for the background on this. I lived in Japan previously and I had always assumed that there was no Shinkansen to Narita due to airline lobbying. Most international flights go through Tokyo. If you live in Nagoya or Osaka and a direct Shinkansen connection was available to Narita for your international flight, I think a lot of people would choose to take the Shinkansen to/from the airport rather than the d…

It also didn’t help that by the 90s the JNR was so burdened with Shinkansen debt that the government took on all the debt in a dedicated bad bank and privatized the rest.

Now Haneda is taking international flights again so the point is moot. I think there is enough demand for both to exist, but Narita’s current situation is just a touch better than Montreal Mirabel.

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

#68

Post by greenburger »

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…

Here’s a wonderful original marketing video [0] in support of the Dulles design.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyb4nLFeg5M

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

#69

Post by throwaheyy »

bobthepanda wrote: post #61
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Osaka has plenty of international flights. I don’t think they are served by a shinkansen either, though definitely by a lot more trains than Narita.

Part of the lessons learned by Japan at Narita was that a flat land parcel big enough for an airport is extremely difficult to assemble, extremely unpopular to assemble, and will probably be located way too far out to be convenient. After all, Haneda is still the busier airport today. So now new airports tend to get built as artificial islands, since you are probably not trampling on anyone’s centuries-long family fa…

There’s still a taxiway at Narita which has a kink in the middle of it that blocks use of the adjacent runway when any plane is travelling on it. The kink is there because of a parcel of private land that the owner refuses to sell.

Link: https://goo.gl/maps/G83NUkot4i7JwwWBA

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

#70

Post by ronhav3 »

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…

Built by the great Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen.He also designed the St.Louis Arch.
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