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Why is it so hard to build an airport?

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Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#181

Post by colingoodman »

Gare wrote: post #103
freeopinion wrote: post #94

O'Hare airport sits some 40km outside Chicago. It seems like a long way away from the city. Narita airport is about 80km east of Tokyo. Osaka is about 500km west of Tokyo. Osaka's airport is just 15km outside of Osaka. To travel from downtown Osaka to downtown Tokyo would involve 95km of ground transport in addition to the flight. Or you could take the train, which would involve about 20km of transport besides the hi…

> You might think that nobody wants to live next to a train station, either. Huh? Properties next to train stations usually have higher prices. Electric trains are clean and quiet.

I understand that suburban communities sometimes fight public transit stops in attempt to preserve "neighborhood character" and whatnot. That could be what the other user is referring to.

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#182

Post by pbsladek »

backpackviolet wrote: post #172
pbsladek wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If flying into NRT and on the way to Tokyo, ~$200ish for the taxi ride. Ooops.

In addition to the fantastic trains the other commenters mentioned, you could also take a bus for $20 to any major hub or hotel.

Depends what time you get there and what you are willing to put up with especially when it isn’t on your dime.

Took the bus back from the hotel.

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#183

Post by daveoc64 »

jgeada wrote: post #169

> Most NIMBY difficulties stem from the asymmetric nature of the costs and benefits of a new project: a new apartment building, for instance, will benefit a city overall (slightly lowering housing costs and slightly increasing the size of the city’s labor market), but those benefits are diffuse. The costs, on the other hand – traffic, parking, construction disruption – will be borne almost entirely by the surrounding…

>I have always wondered why we don't structure payments of some form to balance out the local costs of infrastructure etc. NIMBY is rational with the economics as they are; but would you really be as opposed to a local power plant if energy costs for the area near the plant were subsidized by some percentage? Balance out the local costs with a local benefit.

I've seen this proposed for various things like onshore wind farms (e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60864097), but there usually has to be a limit to the subsidy/discount/bribe - otherwise it wouldn't be viable for the company that wants the infrastructure.

I saw something suggested in the region of 25% discount on electricity bill for people near such a site, for up to 10 years. I don't think that such a temporary benefit would be enough to convince me of having something nearby if I thought it was permanently detrimental to the neighbourhood or my property. (Not that I'm claiming to be a NIMBY).

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#184

Post by michael1999 »

Mirabel was well planned, but was undone by events.

Montréal in the 19060s was the undisputed centre of Canada for business, culture, population, sport, politics, and international relations. Canada expected to grow by millions of people, and we expected a large number of them to settle in Montréal. 35 miles was a modest buffer zone anticipating enormous suburban sprawl.

The whole project was derailed in the 70s by the terrorism of the FLQ, and then the 1980 secession referendum. Suddenly, banks, insurance companies, and foreign offices took flight and moved on down the road to Toronto. Montréal _lost_ hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs, and hundreds of thousands people as anglos and jews fled. Montréal sunk into a 15 year depression. Toronto became the new centre of Canadian business, culture, and sport. Toronto became a major Jewish city, and immigration shifted for good. The influx triggered a property bubble (and then the condo-crash of 1989).

The growth of Toronto of the last 40 years was planned for Montréal, and had it happened there, Mirabel would be a thriving international airpot. Toronto was unprepared, but Montréal had been planning for decades. To this day, Montréal _still_ has more subway track than TO.

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#185

Post by [deleted] »

JohnMakin wrote: post #177

Good article but it's many thousands of words with one simple answer: noise pollution. I lived directly under the path of an airport's takeoff vector. Planes would frequently take off just a few hundred feet above my house. You actually get used to it, but as I've gotten older my hearing loss is more than it should be and I suspect that was a major reason.

[deleted]

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#186

Post by duped »

nradov wrote: post #167
duped wrote: post #145

Airlines should go build their hubs in a better geographical location than major cities, like O'hare. And pay for it with their own money. At ORD for example, something like half of all the air traffic are connecting flights. There's a bit of money to be made by gate fees, but the pressure on the surrounding suburbs (I don't even know if the neighbors even get those fees, since the airport is technically within Chica…

What's untenable about it? The busy airport has been there longer than most people have been alive. People who live in the suburbs knew what they were getting into.

Tell that to the people who lived in the heart of Bensenville that's now a runway.

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#187

Post by spdustin »

JohnMakin wrote: post #177

Good article but it's many thousands of words with one simple answer: noise pollution. I lived directly under the path of an airport's takeoff vector. Planes would frequently take off just a few hundred feet above my house. You actually get used to it, but as I've gotten older my hearing loss is more than it should be and I suspect that was a major reason.

Sounds like Midway (MDW). Even with noise abatement procedures, planes take off and land “hot and heavy” which is louder than usual nearest to the airport.

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#188

Post by floxy »

bradley13 wrote: post #62
polycaster wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every other non-native speaker like me, lmgtfu: NIMBY (/ˈnɪmbi/, or nimby), an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard", is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed infrastructure developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations.

Your definition is accurate, but I think it is incomplete. The stereotypical NIMBY doesn't want something in their backyard, but they still want the advantages of it existing. They want it to be place in someone else's backyard. People opposing airport construction still want to fly. They just want someone else to have the noise.

>People opposing airport construction still want to fly.

In this age of big data, is there a way to quantify this? My gut feeling is that this is a very heavily Pareto-like distribution, with maybe say 5% of the population accounting for 90% of the passenger miles or flight segments. With the majority of the people flying a handful of times (or less) in their life. And even then, "want" is probably a strong qualifier, since I'd also think the majority of the flight miles are for business travel. You may "want" to keep your job, so you have to fly sometimes. If we had to drastically curtail flying in the future, I'm guessing that not too many people are going to regret missing out on the business meetings to Detroit in January, compared to say, vacations in Florida.

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#189

Post by michael1999 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #177

Good article but it's many thousands of words with one simple answer: noise pollution. I lived directly under the path of an airport's takeoff vector. Planes would frequently take off just a few hundred feet above my house. You actually get used to it, but as I've gotten older my hearing loss is more than it should be and I suspect that was a major reason.

Noise pollution _and_ air pollution. I love the pretty browns and purples of my sunset over YYZ, but it's filthy. Every time I come home, the smell is disgusting.

Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?

#190

Post by Kon-Peki »

DrBazza wrote: post #129
Kon-Peki wrote: post #79

As the article points out, expanding the two airports in Chicago are out of the question. And because it is more or less impossible to build a new airport, they are planning to build a "new" airport. Which means that this tiny little thing [1][2], which handles a dozen or two Cessna flights per day, is intended to "grow" into a 4000 acre major international airport. When it grows to its full footprint, the western ed…

Unfamiliar with this, but are you suggesting that the airport would cover the railroad, or simply just finish before it? If it covers it, then from the satellite pictures it would be trivial to bury the line in a cut-n-cover tunnel for little expense. The fact that a rail line runs there already seems ideal for a modern airport.

The property line would end at the railroad right of way. A passenger station would be built to provide service to the airport.

The current talk is to build it as a cargo airport, but the original concept was a passenger airport to serve the growing population in Illinois and Indiana that find access to the existing airports inconvenient. There is every reason to believe that if it is built it will start serving passengers just as soon as they can get airlines to agree to use it for passenger flights. As you can see from the recent law, they are adding cargo to the list of reasons for building the airport; they are not replacing passenger service ;)

https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=2531&...

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