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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

#31

Post by ghaff »

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.

I think he's arguing that, with a different funding model, transportation between airport terminals would be integrated with the main transit systems. Which mostly works if the airport is at the end of the line--and, even so, it introduces some complications to the degree that intra-airport transportation is usually free.

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

#32

Post by mbreese »

sokoloff wrote: post #21
anticensor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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.

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

#33

Post by halfnormalform »

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.

LAX would like a word with you. Bring your walking shoes.

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

#34

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

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.

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

#35

Post by jcranmer »

ghaff wrote: post #28
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…

The setup at SFO is really the exception to the rule. At ATL and DCA it's actually easier to get to the airport by train station than it is by car, since the connections are inside and above the main passenger pick-up/drop-off loops respectively. It is slightly less convenient in ORD, where the connection is underneath the main parking garage, but I'm also not a big fan of going through their pick-up loop. Those are the ones I've personally used on this list.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

jcranmer wrote: post #15
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…

I have twice been in a situation where I had to deplane by mobile lounge at Dulles. For your standard modern medium-haul airplane, it takes at least two mobile lounges to fully support the passenger load, and it's a decently crowded standing-room-only affair. Continuing the original vision, it's clear that passenger counts are absolutely incapable of supporting the "lounge" aspect of the mobile lounge design. You don…

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by jameshart »

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…

Boston Logan's 'Silver Line' (hybrid bus/trolleybuses using special dedicated tunnels) is its equivalent of the airport-only rail connection. The blue line 'airport' stop is literally over a mile from the checkin desks at Terminal B or C.

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

#38

Post by treis »

ghaff wrote: post #31
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.

I think he's arguing that, with a different funding model, transportation between airport terminals would be integrated with the main transit systems. Which mostly works if the airport is at the end of the line--and, even so, it introduces some complications to the degree that intra-airport transportation is usually free.

That doesn't work because you would have to go through security when transferring between terminals.

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

#39

Post by ghaff »

ipsi wrote: post #13
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.)

> (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.) Terminal 4 at Heathrow is a different "route", in that trains go to Terminal 2/3, then 5 or 4 IIRC (and you have to switch if you get on the wrong one), but they go there. > not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route Generally, but see Sydney Airport here, where the Domestic and International terminals are ve…

I didn't remember what the details were. I just remember staying at a hotel connected to a Heathrow terminal and at the end of the day, getting to and from was a sufficient hassle thinking I should just have stayed in one of the non-connected hotels in the general area.

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

#40

Post by mbreese »

ghaff wrote: post #28
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…

But you don’t pay for the AirTrain, do you? I got the impression that this was the authors main gripe. I don’t think an airport having an internal transportation system is all that controversial.
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