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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?

#351

Post by bombcar »

mikestew wrote: post #308
BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you thinking of Boeing Field? Paine is a tiny little luxury airport with 4 gates.

Maybe you've got them reversed? I've never been to Boeing Field, but I've been to Paine, and... "Paine Field is home to the Boeing Everett Factory, the world's largest building by volume..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paine_Field

Exactly. Paine Field is tiny as a commuter airport, but it's got huge tracks of land (it's more than half the size of SEATAC and has a 9000 ft runway).

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

#352

Post by mtalantikite »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #96
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, it is basically always is a bit pointless without context. Same with e.g. Paris. Paris itself is "tiny". But Île-de-France (the Paris region) has over 12 million people.

Sure, but Paris is also one of the most densely populated cities in the world, so Paris proper feels large even though it's only, what, 2 million people or so?

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

#353

Post by _v7gu »

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."

Not even that, Istanbul airport is in the top 10 too. Maybe he meant EU? But that’s not really Europe as a whole

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

#354

Post by asdff »

throwup238 wrote: post #319
bombcar wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of it is people not recognizing "San Diego greenspace" because it's mostly brownspace. San Diego is built on a huge sprawling system of canyons, many of which are parks and have trails, but they're brown and ignored. https://www.alltrails.com/lists/san-diego-canyons If San Diego was as wet as some European cities, those would all be amazingly green.

I think people’s perception is colored by coming out of the decades long drought in the California megacycle. We’re back into the wet part of the cycle and everything is vibrant green now!

Well, vibrant and green for another 2 months maybe.

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

#355

Post by _v7gu »

bluGill wrote: post #347
TulliusCicero wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Trains take a lot of passengers away from air travel

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

#356

Post by class3shock »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #109
class3shock wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what? It got hammered in covid but is back in a big way now.

general aviation, small airports have been closing down for years. It’s not a growing hobby.

TIL general aviation = non-commercial civilian aviation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_aviation

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

#357

Post by Jensson »

asdff wrote: post #329
NegativeLatency wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t spent a lot of time on the US east coast but on the US west coast we have low density sprawl with also not that many parks.

Western US generally has a huge edge on the east in terms of parkland. Both in terms of urban parks that can be quite substantial in size and amenities offered (e.g. golden gate park in SF or griffith park in LA, about 2x and 5x larger than central park in nyc, respectively), but also the vast amount of acreage that is either nature preserves or publicly owned state or federal land. 80% of nevada is federal land. In…

What you want are local parks you can walk to, so you can go out for a walk in the park. I don't see much of that in San Francisco, there are some parks but they haven't put local parks in every neighborhood as you would need.

The cities I am used to have parks at most 100 meters away from any home and a pretty large park 200 meters away, then anyone can go out and enjoy the park. San Francisco on the other hand seems to require driving to the park, but there isn't enough parking for everyone to enjoy the park anyway so most people don't have reasonable access, not comparable at all, the parks are giant though but they don't do anything for local neighborhoods. New York is kinda bad at local parks as well, but much better than San Francisco.

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

#358

Post by balderdash »

I would be pretty upset if all of a sudden my house was under the flight path of a new airport (and the associated economic consequences) but I always find it surprising how annoyed people get that put a house near an airport and then complain about it, where one of my parents lives there is a small but fairly busy private airport that has been there close to a hundred years, so almost no one that lives by it now can claim to have been surprised by its existence when they moved into (or built) their houses, yet their is perpetual noise complaints and a surprisingly vociferous group that wants it shut down. Similar thing happened where I went to college (house prices were lower near campus - because you had to put up with being near several thousand college kids) and then people move in and complain about the college kids!

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

#359

Post by asdff »

jmyeet wrote: post #199

In short, it's short-term interests and skewed incentives. A classic example particular to US airports is why transport links are almost universally terrible. The answer is: parking. Parking is a huge revenue source for airports [1] so airports don't actually want good public transport links and when you do have them (eg the JFK AirTrain) they're unreasonably expensive. Airports are making up for "lost" revenue. This…

LAX actually bought out a lot of the built neighborhood land around it and cleared it for expansion, so its not an impossibility.

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

#360

Post by asdff »

Jensson wrote: post #357
asdff wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western US generally has a huge edge on the east in terms of parkland. Both in terms of urban parks that can be quite substantial in size and amenities offered (e.g. golden gate park in SF or griffith park in LA, about 2x and 5x larger than central park in nyc, respectively), but also the vast amount of acreage that is either nature preserves or publicly owned state or federal land. 80% of nevada is federal land. In…

What you want are local parks you can walk to, so you can go out for a walk in the park. I don't see much of that in San Francisco, there are some parks but they haven't put local parks in every neighborhood as you would need. The cities I am used to have parks at most 100 meters away from any home and a pretty large park 200 meters away, then anyone can go out and enjoy the park. San Francisco on the other hand seem…

SF is one of the best ones in fact. In SF in particular, every resident lives a 10 minute walk to a park. They have 220 of them.
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