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Earlier quoted context omitted.
...same as with major roads, train lines, power lines, power plants (including but not limited to nuclear and wind), affordable (i.e. high density) housing etc. etc.
Not all of that. Railways are relatively quiet and very useful, someone living near one will might well use it very frequently.
Has anyone ever tried to build an airport where the terminals and actual flight ops area was miles away (noise, etc). Basically I'm picturing something like an urban train station (plus TSA, and customs) that would be located downtown. This is where you'd have check-in, security, baggage claim, etc. After clearing security, you'd get on some sort of rail transit (monorail, maglev, subway, whatever, doesn't matter THA…
There's been discussions where the "next" airport should go in the Seattle region, and the consensus is that nobody wants it. The State Legislature created a commission to try and identify some potential sites, but the public backlash was so great that they ended up submitting it's final report with no actual recommendation. One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runw…
Paine Field is about 35 mins away from Seattle and serves airline traffic as of a few years ago.
Has anyone ever tried to build an airport where the terminals and actual flight ops area was miles away (noise, etc). Basically I'm picturing something like an urban train station (plus TSA, and customs) that would be located downtown. This is where you'd have check-in, security, baggage claim, etc. After clearing security, you'd get on some sort of rail transit (monorail, maglev, subway, whatever, doesn't matter THA…
There are tons of airports that connect to cities by rail transit. Within the recent past, I've been in three of them, PVG, HKG, and KHH. In no case do they put security outside the airport.
For one thing, subway lines have multiple stops. In order to make sure that everyone who's going to the airport has to go through security, you'd want security to occur after the last stop before the airport... and the site after the last stop before the airport is the airport.
For another thing, why would you want to subject people who aren't going to the airport to airport security?
When was the last time you thought "this check-in process would be better if it took up a lot of space in the city center, even though the time requirements wouldn't change"?
Now, rail transit to PVG takes multiple hours. But if you replaced the subway connection with a dedicated rail line with one stop in the city center and one at the airport, that wouldn't help much - that just means that people living nearer to the airport have to travel backwards to the city center, subject to the speed of the subway, so they can take the dedicated airport express to the airport.
> And an airport can’t be too far from a city and remain useful, since travelers need to access the city, workers need to be within commuting distance, and so on. In Canada, Mirabel airport was built 35 miles from Montreal, surrounded by a 79,000 acre buffer zone to prevent any issues of incompatible land use. Mirabel was expected to replace Dorval (today Montreal-Trudeau) as Canada’s main eastern airport, but, in pa…
That sounds like exceptionally poor planning. Just to confirm, the new airport served pretty much only international flights? It should have been the nexus for domestic travel to connect to the big hop to Europe, meaning it should have had a ton of domestic routes as well feeding it.
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.
Lots of complex issues, but the distance one is manageable: put the check in / security part of the terminal in the city or at its edge and then send the passengers straight to the appropriate terminal (and their luggage straight to the baggage management) via HSR. You could have multiple check in terminals to expand the catchment area.
> And an airport can’t be too far from a city and remain useful, since travelers need to access the city, workers need to be within commuting distance, and so on. In Canada, Mirabel airport was built 35 miles from Montreal, surrounded by a 79,000 acre buffer zone to prevent any issues of incompatible land use. Mirabel was expected to replace Dorval (today Montreal-Trudeau) as Canada’s main eastern airport, but, in pa…
Moving an airport is even harder than just building one, because the airport often doesn't own all the businesses and land around said airport, and so is negotiation making those less valuable. And at some point, it's stuck - LAX is so enclosed in Los Angeles and LA is so big that you'd be quite far from it to add a new airport. You're more likely to repurpose Ontario or even a military base instead.