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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

#51

Post by supernova87a »

I think this guy is living in a mass transit dream world, at least in the American context.

Even if city mass transit systems were now allowed to serve multiple airport terminal buildings, the number of cities able to pay for, let alone plan for and build such extensions to their lines is near 0.

Basically, this provision only provides benefit to a new airport (or new terminal building) going up, with a willing city metro system planning for a subway line that the airport planners also design to be integrated. The uncoordination of city infrastructure in the USA is too pervasive for us to have some NRT/HND/LHR/FRA style rail-to-airport intermodal paradise.

I cannot think of a single existing US airport where this could be taken advantage of in practice in the next 20 years. And the number of new major airport terminal buildings that have gone up in cities with metro systems in the last 20 years I can count on a single hand. We will be forever stuck with a shitty bus to LaGuardia.

And btw, our problem isn't getting subway lines to go to more terminals. It seems to be getting the subway to stop before it hits the terminal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEe5b_KkACw

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

#52

Post by realityking »

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…

> I'm not sure if you can walk to the BART station from any terminal but in my experience you take the AirTrain.

The BART station is right at the international terminal and a reasonable walk from Terminal 3.

It’s a pretty good way to get to San Francisco from abroad.

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

#53

Post by tbrownaw »

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…

> but I think, at least with Dulles Airport's design, it mostly failed because it was completely incompatible with a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports.

MCI (Kansas City) has separate security areas for each handful of gates.

Here's a map showing the general shape of one of the three terminals: https://www.ifly.com/kansas-city-international-airport/MCI-C...

I don't see an online map with the security areas marked, but the way it works is that the outer edge is divided into segments for each few gates, and each segment is separate with its own security.

.

For a "mobile lounge" setup, I'd assume each docking area for the lounges would have a security entrance and it ought to work about as well as what MCI has.

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

#54

Post by ghaff »

gammarator wrote: post #43
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.

OAK is exactly the system the article describes: there’s a BART station far away at the Coliseum. To get to the airport you have to take a separate monorail that is slow and adds $6 to your fare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliseum%E2%80%93Oakland_Int...

I haven't flown into OAK for years. (Used to do it semi-regularly when I was flying JetBlue.) Back then it was buses which would get terribly backed up and overcrowded to the point where you might have to wait 30 minutes to get on one.

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

#55

Post by jacurtis »

eatbitseveryday wrote: post #2

What happens with the existing ones? We already have many large airports, and this article seems to imply new airports don’t have to do this.

The new law simply removes the requirement for airports to manage their own internal transportation. So it leaves the possibility for public transit to connect riders directly to terminals, which was previously not allowed.

This doesn't force airports to use Public Transportation or restrict them from doing what they are already doing.

The fact that most large airports where this would apply are already built to use the system the way it is, seems to me that it is unlikely we will see any change for at least a few decades. This change is a significant overhaul of the organization and layout of an airport. Airports aren't changing that often and new ones don't pop up very often. Likewise, I am not sure the demand for the change is really there to pressure airports to change.

From the airport user's perspective, the only change is that they could now take public transportation directly to the terminal that their plane is at. This is different than the current system where you get off of public transportation at a main terminal, check your bags, get tickets, go through security, etc and then board an automated train to go to an auxiliary terminal where the plane is located.

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

#56

Post by sofixa »

supernova87a wrote: post #51

I think this guy is living in a mass transit dream world, at least in the American context. Even if city mass transit systems were now allowed to serve multiple airport terminal buildings, the number of cities able to pay for, let alone plan for and build such extensions to their lines is near 0. Basically, this provision only provides benefit to a new airport (or new terminal building) going up, with a willing city…

Maybe we read a different article, but in this one it literally says:

> Silver Line in D.C

Is the one for which the rules were changed and the one in the process of being built, so that's at least one

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

#57

Post by ghaff »

jacurtis wrote: post #55
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #2

What happens with the existing ones? We already have many large airports, and this article seems to imply new airports don’t have to do this.

The new law simply removes the requirement for airports to manage their own internal transportation. So it leaves the possibility for public transit to connect riders directly to terminals, which was previously not allowed. This doesn't force airports to use Public Transportation or restrict them from doing what they are already doing. The fact that most large airports where this would apply are already built to use…

>which was previously not allowed.

That wouldn't seem to be universally true. As noted elsewhere, the Silver Line in Boston (buses with a dedicated lane) serves terminals at the airport from one of the city's train stations in addition to serving some locations that were largely undeveloped when most of the city's subway system was created.

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

#58

Post by [deleted] »

sofixa wrote: post #56
supernova87a wrote: post #51

I think this guy is living in a mass transit dream world, at least in the American context. Even if city mass transit systems were now allowed to serve multiple airport terminal buildings, the number of cities able to pay for, let alone plan for and build such extensions to their lines is near 0. Basically, this provision only provides benefit to a new airport (or new terminal building) going up, with a willing city…

Maybe we read a different article, but in this one it literally says: > Silver Line in D.C Is the one for which the rules were changed and the one in the process of being built, so that's at least one

[deleted]

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

#59

Post by Someone »

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…

I’ve been on them a couple of times, an am not sure I would prefer them over a walk on the tarmac.

These things differ from buses in that they are noisier (big engines that probably are old, too, because replacing them is expensive), smellier (I don’t remember whether windows open at all but they have fewer windows per m²), slower (their high center of gravity makes turning more difficult) and don’t give passengers a nice ride (again likely because of their high center of gravity).

Because they take more passengers than regular buses and passengers enter through relatively narrow entries loading passengers also takes longer than with a regular bus. If they used regular buses, the first bus could often already be unloading before the first of these departs.

When I used them, it was easily 15 minutes or so between entering one of these and the start of the ride. You could walk a mile on the tarmac in that time. Certainly in evenings outside Washington’s snowy winter and hot summer, I think I would rather walk.

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

#60

Post by treis »

gammarator wrote: post #43
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.

OAK is exactly the system the article describes: there’s a BART station far away at the Coliseum. To get to the airport you have to take a separate monorail that is slow and adds $6 to your fare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliseum%E2%80%93Oakland_Int...

That makes it clearer what he's talking about. But still doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. OAK and the others mentioned have spurs because of geography, not money. As an example, It'd be impractical to shunt the BART over to OAK and it would make the service a lot worse for those not going to OAk.
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