Why is it so hard to build an airport? • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by fsckboy » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:06 PM UTC

acchow wrote: post #326

treflop wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan is well known for violent political clashes. There is still a very obvious house in the middle of Narita Airport that you can see when flying in or out. There are roads to it underneath the airport.

This is shocking to me https://www.cbsnews.com/news/narita-airport-farm-takao-shito... "The best outcome would be for the airport to shut down," he said. "But what's important is to keep farming my ancestral land." I imagine most countries would just use eminent domain?

that article says that what he refers to as his ancestral lands have been farmed by his family for only a 100 years. hard for me to get worked up about such a short time

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

#342

Post by bombcar » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:07 PM UTC

humansareok1 wrote: post #110

vemv wrote: post #107

> In the early 1980s, Dallas Fort-Worth Airport covered as much land as the city of Dallas did, and Denver International Airport is as large as the city of San Francisco. This... doesn't fit into my head.

Cities are smaller than you think and Airports are larger.

Remember the famous "freeway interchange the size of Florence" image. It takes the small size of "old Florence" and compares it to a modern cloverleaf. Area goes up real fast because it's the square.

Central Park in NY is about seven times the size of Vatican City.

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

#343

Post by bluGill » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

werdnapk wrote: post #112

sremani wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the forest for the trees. US cities are smaller in a pedantic sense. That is why planners and intelligent people use Metro area statistics for population, traffic, infrastructure planning etc. Dallas population about 1 million. Dallas metro - 7.7 million. This is an important distinction missed out.

That just goes to show you how sparse american cities are built... the sprawl just builds up outside of the city with low density.

The sprawl isn't always low density. Normally it is but some have dense areas.

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

#344

Post by brewdad » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #227

thaumasiotes wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit of having security outside the airport? 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 a…

The point of doing it this way is that the secure perimeter would extended all the way to the central station. That's the whole idea. Essentially, this urban hub is "the airport" in terms of traveling to it. Think of the actual hub -> board gates/runway connections as like a really long people mover, not just extending a subway line and drawing a new dot. Trains could travel on a totally grade separated route with st…

The trouble with this plan is that downtown land is more expensive than rural land. The land area you need to efficiently build the check-in facilities will be similar whether you put it on site or away from the airport. So you'd spend more for the off-site and then still have to build a people mover that provides zero benefit to anyone not going to and from the airport.

It makes far more sense to build the airport far away and add a public rail service to it that can also serve non-airport passengers.

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

#345

Post by bombcar » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

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…

This has been done in various ways, I seem to remember a nuclear power plant that just took over property tax for everyone around it.

The problem with these kinds of "structured bribes" is that they're made with the people living there at the time, but those people move or die, and the newcomers grumble.

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

#346

Post by mdasen » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

newhotelowner wrote: post #255

perlgeek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the interesting ideas [...] is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there. While reading this article, I thought about something like that too. Build an airport quite a while away from the big city, and provide a high-speed, maybe even maglev train there. Make it free for customers. Also, make it very inconvenient for passengers and staff to approach the airport…

I don't think you ever traveled international or your plane got delayed or cancelled. I don't want to carry 4 big bags in the train when I travel international I don't want to travel 30 miles if my plane get cancelled.

I certainly understand that sentiment, but a ton of people commute 30 miles daily (or more). Even if you live "near an airport", you probably live 15+ miles from an airport. Tottenham London to Heathrow is 24 miles by car. The British Museum to Heathrow is 19 miles. Columbia University on the Upper West Side to JFK is 17 miles. DC to Dulles is 26 miles. Downtown Denver is 25 miles to the airport. SF to SFO is 14 miles. LA to LAX is 20 miles. The Loop in Chicago to O'Hare is 17 miles. Dallas to DFW is 21 miles. Houston is 22 miles. Seattle to SeaTac is 15 miles.

Most cities don't have airports that close to the city. Maybe you live in San Diego and the airport is right there downtown, but most people are traveling to get to their airport. Ok, maybe you don't want to take a train and can hire an airport van or whatever, but you're likely traveling a distance to get to an airport.

I'm not saying that it isn't nice to have a more convenient airport, but if we're being realistic about climate change air travel is going to have to be something we do sparingly rather than often. People in the US, UK, Germany, and France currently emit an average of 15t, 5t, 8t, and 5t of CO2 respectively. A trip from NYC to London will be 2t of CO2 - which probably needs to be around 40% of your annual CO2 budget. That is to say, an inconvenient airport should be an inconvenience very few times per year.

Making other things in your life more conveniently located should be a much higher priority - the things you'll use daily, weekly, or monthly. An airport is something you'll use infrequently - or will have to use infrequently if we're going to be realistic about climate change. Plus, as I noted, 30 miles isn't really that inconvenient compared to current situations in most cities. Even the "close" airport in London is 20+ miles away from most of London. Is there a huge difference between 20 miles and 30 miles? That's less than a 10 minute difference by car. With a high-speed train it could be a lot less. Paris to Lyon on the TGV averages 167 MPH. At that speed, 30 miles is covered in 11 minutes.

I certainly understand the desire for convenience, but airports are something individual people use infrequently (or will have to use infrequently given the reality of climate change). If getting to the airport is annoying, it's probably not an annoyance in your life frequently.

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

#347

Post by bluGill » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #286

busterarm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has 14 of the 35 busiest airports in the world. Europe has 6, if you count the UK/Heathrow. If you discount Heathrow, Europe doesn't even have one in the top 10, whereas the US has 5 in the top 10. The airports are different because the traffic volume is different.

> If you discount Heathrow, Europe doesn't even have one in the top 10, whereas the US has 5 in the top 10. What a silly statement. "Europe doesn't have one in the top 10 if you remove its one entry in the top 10."

Considering population and size I'd expect more. It would be interesting to see what is different that they don't have more.

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

#348

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

arnon wrote: post #150

jorisboris wrote: post #24

When building https://randomairport.onrender.com/ I noticed that US and Euro airports always look very different Somehow US airports always seem to be surrounded by densely populated residential areas, even in the direction of the runways, while Euro airports don’t seem to have this problem. And secondly Us airports always seem to take huge plots of land compared to Euro airports. My assumption is that Us cities are…

The US has no alternative forms of transport. Taking an airplane is the most convenient way. In Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, and the UK taking a train is faster and more convenient (even if more expensive often)

[deleted]

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

#349

Post by asdff » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #89

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The distinct lack of green space in US cities is very noticeable to the non-US observer. Huh? I felt the exact opposite in France. Many French cities have a bunch of nice parks, but everything else is wall-to-wall pavement. I always felt the common refrain about there being dog shit all over Paris is because on many streets there is barely a patch of grass for a dog to even go, so if you have a rude person that doe…

I think it's less about the inner cities and more about the suburbs. In the US there are certainly lots of little bits of curb with plants on, but little in the way of large useful green space. Comparing the LA metro area to almost any European city, it's stark how much more unused or usable green space there is in Europe. The US seems much more binary – you're either in a city, or you're outside one, it's not like t…

European cities are nicer about having a manicured park but not an actually useful park beyond sitting with a book or a smoke perhaps. LA metro area (and a lot of american style in general) parks are chock full of amenities europeans would be lucky to have. For example look at Pan Pacific Park. Three baseball fields. A soccer field. A rec center. Playgrounds. A couple tennis courts. A public pool. A library branch. A post office. A holocaust museum. Bathrooms. Exercise equipment. Picnic tables and grills. And yes, plenty of grass for sitting with a book or a smoke too.

Then there are also much bigger parks with some hiking trails through more natural/unmanaged areas like griffith park or the sepulveda dam area or the hansen dam area, that also have all of these amenities (save for the holocaust museum) and even more. Sepulveda dam has archery, a rocket launch pad, and a model aircraft field. Hansen dam also has the archery but also a lot of equestrian activity and people keep horses in the area.

To act like the greenspace is not available or unusuable doesn't speak to what is actually there for use today.

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

#350

Post by mtalantikite » Fri, Mar 22, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #68

Beijinger wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The US doesn't even have 10 cities which are above 1 million people. reply" I did not believe this and googled it. It is true. 1 Million would be tiny in China. Province.

Counting "city population" is nearly a pointless exercise. What matters is the metro area, otherwise you get some pretty useless results. Austin, TX is tenth by city size in the US, with just under a million people, while San Francisco is 17th, with about 800k. But Austin is a much bigger percentage of the total Austin metro area, while the Bay area is ~8-10 million people total. As such, SF feels like a much bigger…

I'm not sure I'm following, are you saying that SF feels bigger than Austin because of the surrounding metro area? I guess I'd assume that feeling is from population density (SF being 18.5k/sq mi vs 3k/sq mi in Austin), rather than the metro area. But maybe that's because I'm a new yorker that doesn't have a license, so cities to me are what I can get to on foot, which means the denser they are the more like a real city it feels to me.