There is a huge political battle in Poland right now regarding a new airport. It's more controversial than nuclear plants and new rail combined.
Why is it so hard to build an airport?
371–380 of 574 posts
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
A park and ride high speed rail system in those cities would probably stand on its own if it actually does save you time and cost.
Park and rides are somewhat of a stopgap measure. You really need walking/biking/bussing to rail to be effective last/first-mile options, in order for rail to be effective and popular too.
Its not perfect but that doesn't mean its the enemy of good, it can do a lot to reduce trips. Its also a drop in replacement for how a lot of people presently use their airports with long term economy parking lots, and it makes it a lot easier to justify connecting that up with more substantial transport down the line once you have that initial park and ride station.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#373Long & interesting...but a pretty good tl;dr; is: "NIMBY's are why we can't build any major infrastructure any more".
Sure, this is classic NIMBYism. I understand: we live in a very quiet area, and would certainly oppose something that would dramatically change that. However, what I do not understand are the people who move next to an existing airport, and then complain about the noise. We used to live near a major, international airport. Planes flew overhead. That noise was implicitly factored into the price we paid, and we certain…
people will complain about anything - in my very little town, about 25% of the roads are not paved. People would move into town, buy a house on a dirt road and then come to the town council to complain that their road was not paved.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#374> 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…
> Then there were plans for a maglev train (Transrapid) which were cancelled in the early 2000s.
Edmund Stoiber explained these plans in a legendary speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7TboWvVERU
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Park and rides are somewhat of a stopgap measure. You really need walking/biking/bussing to rail to be effective last/first-mile options, in order for rail to be effective and popular too.
Its not perfect but that doesn't mean its the enemy of good, it can do a lot to reduce trips. Its also a drop in replacement for how a lot of people presently use their airports with long term economy parking lots, and it makes it a lot easier to justify connecting that up with more substantial transport down the line once you have that initial park and ride station.
Yeah I'm not against them, but it's very much a modest, incremental measure, like going from no bike lanes to painted bike lanes in the door zone.
You need much bigger changes to truly make HSR viable imo.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're being willfully argumentative. ORD is critical not only to travel and commercial interests in the region and nationally, but also to military and national interests globally. I'm not even going to sit here and try to explain to you the geographically strategic nature of Chicago's location to the US because you clearly aren't here to listen to reason. I'll just say that you asserting that suburbanites d…
Your reply is quite rude. I didn't say we should tear up ORD, I was pointing out the flaws with expansion. And every government except Chicago seems to be in agreement with that, which is why the Peotene project exists.
No, every suburban politician is in agreement with it and have demanded a study for a boondoggle go forward to placate entitled suburbanites like yourself. This exact plan has been tried, and failed, in many cities around the world. The only places it worked are places with high-speed rail. Does Chicago have high-speed rail?
The problem in this country is that we coddle lefties and righties even when they have ideas deleterious to our own good. But I get it, politicians have to play to their crowds. No matter how ill-informed and uneducated those crowds may be. So we spend billions on billions doing things like moving water from Colorado to the middle of the desert for Scottsdale Arizona. Building airports to nowhere like COU so people can attend college football games I guess? And replacing bridges in Minneapolis that never would have fallen if we had put the infrastructure dollars into maintenance where they belong in the first place, instead of pork barrel projects for entitled special interest groups demanding things that make literally no sense at all.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fly into Haneda whenever I can, because even though the train is super convenient, for a train, it’s nicer to just throw your bags in a taxi and head straight to your hotel after 13 hours on a plane.
I tend to travel pretty light but trains get inconvenient with any amount of luggage. I'm coming into NY by ship after a longish trip, continuing on home by train at the end of May. I came to the conclusion I should take advantage of a not too expensive luggage shipping service because dealing with the luggage was going to be just too big of a hassle.
How very 1800s of you. Curious minds wonder what you do to be able to have that kind of time for travel. The amount of time you require in just travel is more than most Americans receive in a year's vacation
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#378I 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…
Why wouldn’t you? It’s a land arb. You get cheaper land then use political power to raise its desirability. Common trick. You can do it a few ways. Get a place near a nightclub then force the club to shut down. Almost certainly they have some regulation they’re not following. Same with schools etc. Or sometimes the city will be planning an affordable housing thing on a lot. No one likes that so you’ll get the homes n…
This shouldn't be down voted, this type of arbitrage is common and the parties engaging in it know the baked in risks. It is no different from the common gambit of buying land outside of cities zoned as industrial or agricultural and then waging politics to have it rezoned as residential to dramatically increase its value.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#379As 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…
South suburban airport is dead as dirt. Rockford and Gary have more than picked up the slack.
Re: Why is it so hard to build an airport?
#380Earlier 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 realize not everyone can just pack a carry-on, but as one of those types, traveling with "4 big bags" anywhere just seems insane to me. What do you bring that takes up so much space?