If you fly into Tokyo you might come in via Narita Airport (NRT) which is actually quite a distance out from tokyo. Violence is extremely uncommon in modern Japan but NRT was the site of violent resistance over several decades.
Opposition forces killed several police officers, rioted on several occasions and constructed a giant 200 ft tower to interfere with test flights. Hundreds of acts of vandalism have occurred over the years, even into recent times.
I flew into Kansai in 2003(?), with a J-rail foreigner pass and fell asleep on the Shinkansen (which I wasn't supposed to be on). 9 hours & ~1100 miles of train rides later I ended up at my buddy's place in Tokushima. It cost 110 yen, locally.
That was the first time I appreciated how hard it is to navigate the modern world if you're illiterate.
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.
My wife and I landed in NRT a couple months ago and had a taxi leave us high and dry. We had to book a taxi there and then and it cost $450 to Tokyo in a standard taxi. The pre booked taxi that left us H&M was $200.
Agree with others just take the train to Tokyo Station or Shinigawa station.
If it’s your first time just remember to exit on the gate that is staffed because gate adjustments can get tricky.
The ticket I selected at NRT was apparently not enough money, as expected they were super helpful and nice about it though.
There's been discussions where the "next" airport should go in the Seattle region, and the consensus is that nobody wants it. The State Legislature created a commission to try and identify some potential sites, but the public backlash was so great that they ended up submitting it's final report with no actual recommendation.
One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runway) is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there. I'm doubtful it happens, since that means building a major airport _and_ a new train.
> 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 by other means, only allow cargo delivery there through the road network. This disincentives people from e.g. building hotels close to the airport, which would then attract further settlement, which would ultimately lead to noise complaints again.
>> Also, make it very inconvenient for passengers and staff to approach the airport by other means, only allow cargo delivery there through the road network. This disincentives people from e.g. building hotels close to the airport, which would then attract further settlement, which would ultimately lead to noise complaints again.
Or go one step further and just put on barriers to block the trains too. Don't let anyone near the airport unless they walk/bike the few miles. That will drive up servicing costs but will dramatically lower congestion. If don't correctly, virtually nobody will ever get to the airport. It can then be closed altogether, thereby eliminating any and all future noise complaints.
The aforementioned setup nearly always means the closer airport ends up getting upgraded later to meet convenience demands, leaving the newer-but-inconvenient airport out to dry.
See: Haneda (HND) vs. Narita (NRT) in Tokyo, Itami (ITM) vs. Kansai (KIX) in Osaka, etc.
-I- would be entirely fine with an airport with those transit restrictions.
mdk (Shadowcat's resident responsible adult / business person) however has three kids, and two adults trying to wrangle three children as well as luggage makes trains much, much less attractive as an option.
So I think "fantastic to imagine, DOA as an idea in practice" applies, I'm afraid.
That is often the experience already when using a big hub airport. Because by their very nature they draw people in from across a region. And that naturally leeds to congestion and inconvenience. Rail is a help but may not be fast if you don't live close to the right stations.
I think hubs are often setup to serve airlines running lots of connecting flight rather than the regional population. They would be happier flying out of a small local airport on a narrowbody and flying direct or connecting elsewhere.
> make it very inconvenient for passengers and staff to approach the airport by other means
Absolutely not! High-speed train have many advantages, but serving stations with large, long-term parking lots is not one of them.
After all, you don't need to disincentivize the approach: you just need to make it clear that the airport is there to stay, and maybe to grow three-fold, and that noise complaints will never be receivable.
What’s comical is how hard it is to get to many urban US airports - why their isn’t the equivalent of the Heathrow express to serve New York city’s three airports is absurd
> There's been discussions where the "next" airport should go in the Seattle region, and the consensus is that nobody wants it. The State Legislature created a commission to try and identify some potential sites, but the public backlash was so great that they ended up submitting it's final report with no actual recommendation.
The commission was hampered by rules that stated they couldn't look into increasing the existing airports capacity.
"Survey responses also conveyed members’ views on what kind of options the Legislature permitted them to consider — the 2019 legislation prohibited considering sites in King County, or those near military bases. Some members noted that those constraints hindered their search efforts, with some doubting whether it’s possible to have a new airport operational by 2040." https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/state...
The "next" airport is basically just expanding SeaTac. There's plans to add a second terminal in SAMP
https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/1805...
And then even WSDOT's project for the new 509 extension is to allow freight traffic to reach the seatac airport.
Outside of that the other regional airport to be used is king county international airport -- even back in 2005 southwest looked into using it.
Paine field, while it has the capacity is not where the demand is for passengers. Secondly, I don't think many people realize the bottleneck for SeaTac airport is not just passenger traffic but freight traffic. It's why the airport commission keeps choosing sites south of Seattle aka Pierce County or Thurston County because it's close to the port of tacoma. They aren't going to choose Paine field.
I regularly fly to SFO from Paine field, it is 20 more minutes drive for me from Mercer Island but the experience of the airport is worth it. The lobby that is like a nice W, no security lines whatsoever, and seeing all the green pickle birds being assembled is really nice. I'd fly other places if they were offered. The place can handle a lot more traffic but yeah, the freight isn't going to go there...
Paine Field is also unnaturally large for a "little suburban airport" because it's the site of the largest building in the world, because it's a Boeing assembly plant.
One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runway) is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there.
That would have been an interesting idea before the railroad right-of-way was turned into a multi-use trail. There's another rail corridor that goes through Stampede Pass, but I don't know that it would be usable for "high-speed rail" (nor do I know that it even goes anywhere useful).
It's been 35 years they've discussed that possibility. It's never going to happen. The costs of high speed rail across the mountain are simply too high.
Wasn’t that the idea behind Denver? It’s outside the city by a decent amount (or was when started). I assume proximity to the mountains was also a consideration.
What is a bit interesting to think about Denver was that rocky mountain arsenal closed in 1992 about the same time as stapleton in 1995. They ended up spending about 2 billion to clean up the rocky mountain arsenal to make it a wildlife refuge and meet all those standards, and spent five billion on Denver international airport. I'd imagine the environmental cleanup would have been substantially cheaper if they just devoted that swath of land (much nearer to downtown Denver actually) for the airport and devoted the swath of unpolluted land Denver airport presently sits on for a wildlife area, maybe one that won't end up being hemmed on all sides by Denver suburbia in time like the present rocky mountain arsenal. There is nothing but empty fields east of dia until you hit Omaha or Kansas City, so wild populations wouldn't be trapped in the preserve so much like they are in these nature preserves surrounded by urban areas and busy roads.
I don't think they believe Paine Field on its own is going to be able to accommodate the expected air travel growth. Yes, it's serving some commercial air travel now, but the consensus was there needs to be a new airport for all this growth.
Paine field can't support what is needed and can't be expanded. But it will continue to service a small percent of the overall need.
The state has created a new commission to start the new airport site selection process over again, but this time it will just be a recommendation.
The previous project that had been going on for many years was site selection and not just recommendation, but their selection(s) pissed off the people and so the whole thing got just got killed recently.
Paine Field would seem to make the most sense but there really isn't much room to expand it. It can probably help in the short/medium term while a new, from scratch airport is built elsewhere.
The other problem was that the legislature restricted the commission of where they could look for a new place, it had to be less than X amount of people and other restrictions.
In theory there was a good place for an airport if those restrictions were removed
Consider how the FAA handled the Nextgen project and continually gaslight anyone negatively impacted over the last 10 years, I would be against any airport built within 10 miles of where I live too. Not surprising people would be against it. It doesn't have to be so bad, but it is.
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 just bigger, both in population and in the amount of surface they claim (lower population density)
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.
> US airports always seem to be surrounded by densely populated residential areas
The US in general is very densely built up. The distinct lack of green space in US cities is very noticeable to the non-US observer.
So I think its more of a case that US airports are surrounded by "less" densely populated areas.
> And secondly Us airports always seem to take huge plots of land compared to Euro airports.
With the exception of the limited number of buildings of historical interest, In general the US doesn't do history in its buildings. They'll happily tear stuff down and build a shiny new thing in its place.
As I understand it the whole concept of green belt / urban conservation is also fairly minimal in the US mentality, so large land grabs for building and expansion of airports are easier in the US.
Meanwhile, in Europe, most airports have history and grew organically. And the whole green belt / urban conservation thing is much stronger in Europe. For example, London Heathrow started off life as a single grass runway with a few simple buildings and grew organically over time. Its growth ultimately limited by the city that grew around it, and so you end up with for example the present controversial discussion over the possibility of a third runway. I would hazard a guess that if Heathrow were in the US, the third runway would have been built and operational by now !
> 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 doesn't clean up, the shit is going to be where you're much more likely to step on it.
The distances involved often lend themselves to air travel being more convenient even if there are trains. There's a sweet spot for distance where trains make the most sense, but after that a plane will end up being faster even with all the dead time at the airport.
I live in Dallas. Door to door, a train would be faster and more convenient than a plane for me to go to Houston or Austin. A direct flight will always be faster and more convenient for me to go to Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Seattle, etc.
Dallas to New York is ~1,400mi. That's like Madrid to Warsaw. It'll take me ~6 hours everything included to go that distance by plane. What's the travel itinerary for Madrid to Warsaw? Is it direct (same level of convenience)? Is it faster?
The US is also much, much bigger. Germany is about the size of Nevada. France is about the size of the entire Eastern seaboard.
The US would definitely be better served with better rail infrastructure, but there's no getting around the fact that Seattle to Boston is 200 miles longer than Lisbon to Moscow, and slightly longer than Edinburgh to Aleppo.
> 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
London Heathrow is entirely hemmed in by surrounding urban areas. Flights landing at Heathrow fly directly over central London (with great views of iconic buildings).
It is technically possible to extend the runways somewhat but actually doing so is a planning / political nightmare. Heathrow is located just inside the M25 (the main London orbital motorway) immediately adjacent to the junction of the M25 and the M4 (the busy motorway that goes West from London). So not only is Heathrow virtually impossible to expand, it's in an area known for its horrendous rush-hour traffic. It does have a railway connection to central London, but this is a partially underground line with multiple stops (every few minutes in practice). Journeys to Heathrow from most places in the UK can be horrendous.
Gatwick, London's second airport, is ~30 miles South of the city, and does have reasonably fast rail connections. Gatwick does have space for a new runway, but lots of factors have prevented this.
A lot of British airports emerged out of WWII air bases. I am not sure how they were chosen exactly. But they probably wanted places that were flat, dry and grassy with lots of space. They could have considered proximity to places that needed to be defended or suitability for launching attacks. And they knew that airfields were likely to be bombed.
Most US airports were built early before we had the current population. When they began as airports, they were mostly on the periphery, with exceptions.
In Munich/Germany plans for a new airport (as a successor to München/Riem) started in the 60s. Construction started in 1980. The airport went into operation in 1992.
Obviously the people in the Erdinger Moos didn't like the decision to build the airport there and many lawsuits ensued that lead to a stop of the construction for three years. In the end and the last lawsuit I think there was no option of another appeal so that was that.
In the end I think it just came down to a question of national interest where you can't have some individuals stop a project like this because an airport is needed in the area and it has to be built somewhere.
> you can't have some individuals stop a project like this because an airport is needed in the area and it has to be built somewhere.
Environmentalist opponents of airport construction will often disagree with that premise - for example, pointing to the rise of videoconferencing and remote working.
> 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 part because of its long distance from the city, this never happened, and Mirabel stopped serving passenger traffic in 2004.
It was because of very stupid mismanagement and lack of connections, not the distance.
The old airport remained opened and continued serving domestic flights, while international ones were moved to Mirabel... which was extremely dumb because Montreal was the major interchange point between international arrivals and smaller locations not served directly by international flights in Canada. So most of the utility of Montreal airport was killed, and airlines started serving other airports in Canada to do the same thing.
Also, there was no good link to the airport - it shouldn't have opened without a direct at least somewhat fast rail link, but it had no good road nor rail connection.
Also, it was put in the wrong place - one of the potential locations was midway between Ottawa and Montreal and could have served both cities, but politicians decided they don't want that.
Montreal isn't the only city that failed with a too-far-away airport. Tokyo built Narita against much local opposition (they still check your ID before you're allowed inside the airport, to make sure you're not an angry local resident), and the opposition resulted in not being able to build the transport link they wanted (the Narita Shinkansen). The result is a good hour wasted on conventional rail to get to Tokyo. (Sky Access kind of fixed this, but I think it's limited to 160km/h and still takes 40 minutes.)
Meanwhile, in the 2010s they expanded Haneda and started accepting international flights, and you can get to Tokyo via a variety of normal trains (and buses if your destination is on the Shinjuku side of things) in 15 minutes.
The whole thing is landfill, so no residents to be mad either.
Last time I flew to Haneda they made all the flights from the US arrive and depart at times when public transportation wasn't running, to discourage those flights, but it seems like they stopped doing that. So now it's more convenient for everyone, and Narita is largely pointless for everyone that isn't an extreme budget traveler (but I think Haneda built Terminal 3 for that use case... so... is there any reason for Narita to exist if you aren't visiting Chiba?)
Eh, I get all that, but Narita is still quite useful as a transfer hub for passengers traveling between North America and East Asia. Haneda’s gate capacity is also a limiting factor, Narita is a necessary companion airport to soak up excess passenger demand.
It also should be connected to the national rail network so long distance trains go there directly. It greatly reduces time to switch trains when you're not directly from the nearest city.
Yep, Paris CDG has a small version of this (high speed trains only, but this allows for connections between planes and rail to be made) which is getting expanded with a link to the regional network of the region right to the north of the airport.
That sounds like exceptionally poor planning. Just to confirm, the new airport served pretty much only international flights? It should have been the nexus for domestic travel to connect to the big hop to Europe, meaning it should have had a ton of domestic routes as well feeding it.
It's the main counterexample to 'The Olympics are good because they force the development of infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't get built' argument.
Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
All this rushing and purpose-building led to suboptimal decision making that ultimately made it a completely wasted investment.
A similar story can be told about Olympic stadium in Montreal.
Just to confirm, the new airport served pretty much only international flights?
It was a pretty common urban planning concept for a large city to have one airport devoted mostly or entirely to domestic flights, and one mostly or entirely for international flights.
New York domestic: EWR
New York international: JFK
New York freight: LGA
Chicago domestic: MDW
Chicago international: ORD
Houston domestic: HOU
Houston international: IAH
Dallas domestic: LUV
Dallas international: DFW
Paris international: CGD
Paris international: ORY
Washington domestic: DCA
Washington international: IAD
Notice how some airports (IAD, IAH) specifically have "International Airport" in their codes.
It worked fine for a very long time until the airlines optimized into the hub-and-spoke system we have today, where connecting flights has become normalized.
Because people think now it's normal to have connecting flights all the time, the domestic airports have added international flights, and vice-versa.
What was once orderly and predictable has become very messy, and had a number of other side-effects.
> Just to confirm, the new airport served pretty much only international flights
Yes, they decided they'll try to do it like Paris with CDG and Orly, but fundamentally misunderstood the differences the traffic - Orly mostly serves tourist destinations or places where lots of people living and working in France have origins in such as Portugal and the Maghreb from where there will be limited amounts of changes to international flights; and Air France is abandoning Orly and focusing entirely on CDG because even the small opportunity misses aren't worth the extra costs. And both are well connected to the city they're serving, including to each other with the RER B (okay it takes 1h30m, but at least it's a mostly direct connection). And CDG even has high speed rail to other cities.
Montreal isn't even close in terms of traffic patterns... and even if it was, the connectivity to Montreal (and ideally Ottawa) really wasn't there.
"exceptionally poor planning" is common in big projects like this.
As soon as the design/planning teams gets big enough that there are many people who barely know eachother, they start competing to the detriment of the whole...
Nobody wants their part late/over budget, so they do things to screw other parts of the project just so their part isn't late or over budget.
Exactly - it has to be holistic and actually planned out. If you want to run two airports in the same city, there really should be some form of quick connection between them, or each has to be so big as to be self-sufficient.
Moving an airport is even harder than just building one, because the airport often doesn't own all the businesses and land around said airport, and so is negotiation making those less valuable. And at some point, it's stuck - LAX is so enclosed in Los Angeles and LA is so big that you'd be quite far from it to add a new airport. You're more likely to repurpose Ontario or even a military base instead.
> You're more likely to repurpose Ontario or even a military base instead.
Ontario was repurposed, at least expanded greatly in scope. It used to be basically a UPS and FedEx airstrip with very limited passenger flights. But LAX was so overloaded and out of the way (for a lot of the IE and LA county) Ontario's passenger terminals were significantly expanded. Unless your destination is in the LA metro area Ontario (or John Wayne) is way more convenient than LAX.
> 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 part because of its long distance from the city, this never happened, and Mirabel stopped serving passenger traffic in 2004.
Another relatively new airport built far from the city it serves is Munich airport, located around 33 km (20 miles) from the city center, opened in 1992. The two major candidates for "relatively sparsely populated area" when the airport was planned (back in the 1960s) were a swampy area north of Munich (Erdinger Moos) and a forest to the south (Hofoldinger Forst). They picked the swamp, which leads to frequent fog problems. And they solved the problem of the old airport competing against the new one by simply closing the old airport (the company operating the new one is the same as for the old one, so no protests there). Some equipment was even moved from the old airport to the new one in an overnight relocation. But, as the 30 years from planning to opening show, even this remote location was not without conflicts. And, more than 30 years after the opening, there is still no fast train to the airport. The Munich-Nuremberg high speed railway line could have been routed by the airport, but (according to rumors) this wasn't done to protect the Nuremberg airport. Then there were plans for a maglev train (Transrapid) which were cancelled in the early 2000s. Currently the plan is for an Express S-Bahn line, but since the S-Bahn tunnel in the city center can't accommodate any more trains, this will only be possible when the second S-Bahn tunnel is completed (the date for that keeps getting pushed back, currently it's 2035).
As 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 edge will be the railroad right of way that carries one of the Chicago commuter rail lines and the Amtrak route that serves the Chicago-UIUC-Memphis-New Orleans line. Plus an existing Interstate with existing interchanges a mile west of that. Very little infrastructure is needed outside of the airport boundaries. Still a lot of opposition though, and years behind schedule.
Airport expansion is almost as difficult as building new. In my neck of the woods, some have suggested that the (primarily general aviation) Livermore airport would make a great “reliever” airport for the Bay Area jets, but this is constantly being fought by residents, mostly people in posh Pleasanton, which is on the flight path. It’s understandable that people don’t want more jets flying above their homes, yet, East Bay travelers would benefit the most from such development.
"...yet, East Bay travelers would benefit the most from such development."
True, but who do you personally know who would trade a small benefit every time they fly for a moderate nuisance at their house? I'm not sure even pilots would ask for the flight benefit.
Good point. The Livermore airport is pretty hemmed in already; it looks like it would be pretty difficult to do much expansion and you have all those houses that are already under the runway approaches. I'm guessing that when you say "Bay Area jets", you are talking private jets, not 737s, right?
In the case of the South Suburban Chicago Airport, noise is less of an issue. People don't want traffic and they don't want farms turned into warehouses and light industrial. And then the housing built for the thousands of jobs created.
It's essentially opposition to sprawl, which I think is a pretty legitimate concern. I think the state could try to do things to help prevent it from being as bad as it could be (forest preserves, open space, minimum zoning, etc). Though I don't think they want to, because the alternative to this airport is that the one just across the border in Indiana would get enlarged, leading to all that economic development going to a different state.
The property line would end at the railroad right of way. A passenger station would be built to provide service to the airport.
The current talk is to build it as a cargo airport, but the original concept was a passenger airport to serve the growing population in Illinois and Indiana that find access to the existing airports inconvenient. There is every reason to believe that if it is built it will start serving passengers just as soon as they can get airlines to agree to use it for passenger flights. As you can see from the recent law, they are adding cargo to the list of reasons for building the airport; they are not replacing passenger service ;)
There's this classic French movie from the 70s, "Nous irons tous au paradis", where a group of friends buy a house really cheap. They can't believe their luck until they realize the house is next to an international airport (they visited the house when the air traffic controllers were on strike).
I live about 5 miles from an airport. It never occurred to me when I bought the house that there'd be airplane noise, but we happen to be right in the flight path. They're infrequent enough that I didn't hear any while touring the house. The house is well-insulated, so the noise isn't bad while inside. But while outside, it's loud enough that you have to pause a conversation when a plane goes by.
My father-in-law used to live in Federal Way, Washington, directly south of SeaTac. He swore you got used to it. The noise was amazing -- two parallel runways, his house just about smack in the middle between the two approach paths. Airliners would go over the house every minute (or less!) alternating between the runways. Flaps down all the way, gear down, making incredible amounts of noise. Inside the house you could tolerate it, but it was still noisy. Outside, you had to pause your conversation constantly as a plane went overhead.
SeaTac is well known, and the air traffic never really stops, so there is no way he did not know about it when he bought. I assume it made the house a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be. I guess it is the ultimate demonstration of a free market. For the right price, people will put up with anything.
I lived under the London Heathrow flight path. There are so many flights that the conversation would be paused for 25% or more of the total time.
Somehow, expanding this airport is politically desirable. 3 million people live under the flight path, and they are dismissed as rich or poor people who should have known better. They are rich and poor, there is plenty of range, and there certainly aren't a million spare houses they could choose to move to.
I assume you're in the US? If so, a noise disclosure was one of the required seller disclosures when transacting a house. We received this in both NC & CA when purchasing (and took it seriously).
It was the same for me in my previous apartment. I remember we were even amazed on how closely a plane was flying above the highway shortly before we took the exit towards the apartment when initially visiting, but didn't make the connection to how that would affect the apartment.
In the end, it wasn't a big problem, we got used to it quickly.
Readit News
Opposition forces killed several police officers, rioted on several occasions and constructed a giant 200 ft tower to interfere with test flights. Hundreds of acts of vandalism have occurred over the years, even into recent times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanrizuka_Struggle
Kansai International: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansai_International_Airport
Kobe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobe_Airport
Kitakyushu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitakyushu_Airport
Chubu International: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chubu_Centrair_International_A...
That was the first time I appreciated how hard it is to navigate the modern world if you're illiterate.
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.
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?
Given how far NRT is from Tokyo, $200 doesn't seem too bad...
You'd be an idiot to use a taxi.
Or it's some exceptional situation (flight super delayed?)
Dead Comment
One of the interesting ideas (that was proposed even back when SEA was adding it's third runway) is to run high-speed rail to Moses Lake Airport in Central Washington and just expand there. I'm doubtful it happens, since that means building a major airport _and_ a new train.
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 by other means, only allow cargo delivery there through the road network. This disincentives people from e.g. building hotels close to the airport, which would then attract further settlement, which would ultimately lead to noise complaints again.
Or go one step further and just put on barriers to block the trains too. Don't let anyone near the airport unless they walk/bike the few miles. That will drive up servicing costs but will dramatically lower congestion. If don't correctly, virtually nobody will ever get to the airport. It can then be closed altogether, thereby eliminating any and all future noise complaints.
See: Haneda (HND) vs. Narita (NRT) in Tokyo, Itami (ITM) vs. Kansai (KIX) in Osaka, etc.
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.
Haneda is vastly more convenient.
mdk (Shadowcat's resident responsible adult / business person) however has three kids, and two adults trying to wrangle three children as well as luggage makes trains much, much less attractive as an option.
So I think "fantastic to imagine, DOA as an idea in practice" applies, I'm afraid.
I think hubs are often setup to serve airlines running lots of connecting flight rather than the regional population. They would be happier flying out of a small local airport on a narrowbody and flying direct or connecting elsewhere.
Absolutely not! High-speed train have many advantages, but serving stations with large, long-term parking lots is not one of them.
After all, you don't need to disincentivize the approach: you just need to make it clear that the airport is there to stay, and maybe to grow three-fold, and that noise complaints will never be receivable.
They wanted to do that in Munich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7TboWvVERU
Woah, that's a good ways out there
The commission was hampered by rules that stated they couldn't look into increasing the existing airports capacity.
"Survey responses also conveyed members’ views on what kind of options the Legislature permitted them to consider — the 2019 legislation prohibited considering sites in King County, or those near military bases. Some members noted that those constraints hindered their search efforts, with some doubting whether it’s possible to have a new airport operational by 2040." https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/state...
The "next" airport is basically just expanding SeaTac. There's plans to add a second terminal in SAMP https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-06/1805... And then even WSDOT's project for the new 509 extension is to allow freight traffic to reach the seatac airport.
Outside of that the other regional airport to be used is king county international airport -- even back in 2005 southwest looked into using it.
Paine field, while it has the capacity is not where the demand is for passengers. Secondly, I don't think many people realize the bottleneck for SeaTac airport is not just passenger traffic but freight traffic. It's why the airport commission keeps choosing sites south of Seattle aka Pierce County or Thurston County because it's close to the port of tacoma. They aren't going to choose Paine field.
I love that airport. It should be bigger and is north enough that it has its own population.
Also US needs to build more high speed rail. We are over-reliant on airports.
That would have been an interesting idea before the railroad right-of-way was turned into a multi-use trail. There's another rail corridor that goes through Stampede Pass, but I don't know that it would be usable for "high-speed rail" (nor do I know that it even goes anywhere useful).
The state has created a new commission to start the new airport site selection process over again, but this time it will just be a recommendation.
The previous project that had been going on for many years was site selection and not just recommendation, but their selection(s) pissed off the people and so the whole thing got just got killed recently.
In theory there was a good place for an airport if those restrictions were removed
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 just bigger, both in population and in the amount of surface they claim (lower population density)
I did not believe this and googled it. It is true.
1 Million would be tiny in China. Province.
Dallas population about 1 million. Dallas metro - 7.7 million. This is an important distinction missed out.
Deleted Comment
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.
What a silly statement. "Europe doesn't have one in the top 10 if you remove its one entry in the top 10."
The US in general is very densely built up. The distinct lack of green space in US cities is very noticeable to the non-US observer.
So I think its more of a case that US airports are surrounded by "less" densely populated areas.
> And secondly Us airports always seem to take huge plots of land compared to Euro airports.
With the exception of the limited number of buildings of historical interest, In general the US doesn't do history in its buildings. They'll happily tear stuff down and build a shiny new thing in its place.
As I understand it the whole concept of green belt / urban conservation is also fairly minimal in the US mentality, so large land grabs for building and expansion of airports are easier in the US.
Meanwhile, in Europe, most airports have history and grew organically. And the whole green belt / urban conservation thing is much stronger in Europe. For example, London Heathrow started off life as a single grass runway with a few simple buildings and grew organically over time. Its growth ultimately limited by the city that grew around it, and so you end up with for example the present controversial discussion over the possibility of a third runway. I would hazard a guess that if Heathrow were in the US, the third runway would have been built and operational by now !
This is the opposite of reality. The US is sprawly and low density.
Of course, that's exactly the problem: sprawling over more space means that it's harder to get to open space for an airport.
Sprawl might be the word you are looking for. US is only #186 in population density by country. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
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 doesn't clean up, the shit is going to be where you're much more likely to step on it.
In Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, and the UK taking a train is faster and more convenient (even if more expensive often)
I live in Dallas. Door to door, a train would be faster and more convenient than a plane for me to go to Houston or Austin. A direct flight will always be faster and more convenient for me to go to Denver, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Orlando, Seattle, etc.
Dallas to New York is ~1,400mi. That's like Madrid to Warsaw. It'll take me ~6 hours everything included to go that distance by plane. What's the travel itinerary for Madrid to Warsaw? Is it direct (same level of convenience)? Is it faster?
The US would definitely be better served with better rail infrastructure, but there's no getting around the fact that Seattle to Boston is 200 miles longer than Lisbon to Moscow, and slightly longer than Edinburgh to Aleppo.
Deleted Comment
London Heathrow is entirely hemmed in by surrounding urban areas. Flights landing at Heathrow fly directly over central London (with great views of iconic buildings).
It is technically possible to extend the runways somewhat but actually doing so is a planning / political nightmare. Heathrow is located just inside the M25 (the main London orbital motorway) immediately adjacent to the junction of the M25 and the M4 (the busy motorway that goes West from London). So not only is Heathrow virtually impossible to expand, it's in an area known for its horrendous rush-hour traffic. It does have a railway connection to central London, but this is a partially underground line with multiple stops (every few minutes in practice). Journeys to Heathrow from most places in the UK can be horrendous.
Gatwick, London's second airport, is ~30 miles South of the city, and does have reasonably fast rail connections. Gatwick does have space for a new runway, but lots of factors have prevented this.
To really expand an airport, you need to add parallel runways, and that is a ton of land.
And if you have too many parallel runways, you end up with too much time spent taxiing around.
Obviously the people in the Erdinger Moos didn't like the decision to build the airport there and many lawsuits ensued that lead to a stop of the construction for three years. In the end and the last lawsuit I think there was no option of another appeal so that was that.
In the end I think it just came down to a question of national interest where you can't have some individuals stop a project like this because an airport is needed in the area and it has to be built somewhere.
Environmentalist opponents of airport construction will often disagree with that premise - for example, pointing to the rise of videoconferencing and remote working.
It was because of very stupid mismanagement and lack of connections, not the distance.
The old airport remained opened and continued serving domestic flights, while international ones were moved to Mirabel... which was extremely dumb because Montreal was the major interchange point between international arrivals and smaller locations not served directly by international flights in Canada. So most of the utility of Montreal airport was killed, and airlines started serving other airports in Canada to do the same thing.
Also, there was no good link to the airport - it shouldn't have opened without a direct at least somewhat fast rail link, but it had no good road nor rail connection.
Also, it was put in the wrong place - one of the potential locations was midway between Ottawa and Montreal and could have served both cities, but politicians decided they don't want that.
Meanwhile, in the 2010s they expanded Haneda and started accepting international flights, and you can get to Tokyo via a variety of normal trains (and buses if your destination is on the Shinjuku side of things) in 15 minutes.
The whole thing is landfill, so no residents to be mad either.
Last time I flew to Haneda they made all the flights from the US arrive and depart at times when public transportation wasn't running, to discourage those flights, but it seems like they stopped doing that. So now it's more convenient for everyone, and Narita is largely pointless for everyone that isn't an extreme budget traveler (but I think Haneda built Terminal 3 for that use case... so... is there any reason for Narita to exist if you aren't visiting Chiba?)
Most large cities have more than one airport anyways. London has like six, New York has three, Beijing has two, etc.
Vienna did this with their airport.
Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
All this rushing and purpose-building led to suboptimal decision making that ultimately made it a completely wasted investment.
A similar story can be told about Olympic stadium in Montreal.
It was a pretty common urban planning concept for a large city to have one airport devoted mostly or entirely to domestic flights, and one mostly or entirely for international flights.
Notice how some airports (IAD, IAH) specifically have "International Airport" in their codes.It worked fine for a very long time until the airlines optimized into the hub-and-spoke system we have today, where connecting flights has become normalized.
Because people think now it's normal to have connecting flights all the time, the domestic airports have added international flights, and vice-versa.
What was once orderly and predictable has become very messy, and had a number of other side-effects.
Yes, they decided they'll try to do it like Paris with CDG and Orly, but fundamentally misunderstood the differences the traffic - Orly mostly serves tourist destinations or places where lots of people living and working in France have origins in such as Portugal and the Maghreb from where there will be limited amounts of changes to international flights; and Air France is abandoning Orly and focusing entirely on CDG because even the small opportunity misses aren't worth the extra costs. And both are well connected to the city they're serving, including to each other with the RER B (okay it takes 1h30m, but at least it's a mostly direct connection). And CDG even has high speed rail to other cities.
Montreal isn't even close in terms of traffic patterns... and even if it was, the connectivity to Montreal (and ideally Ottawa) really wasn't there.
As soon as the design/planning teams gets big enough that there are many people who barely know eachother, they start competing to the detriment of the whole...
Nobody wants their part late/over budget, so they do things to screw other parts of the project just so their part isn't late or over budget.
Moving an airport is even harder than just building one, because the airport often doesn't own all the businesses and land around said airport, and so is negotiation making those less valuable. And at some point, it's stuck - LAX is so enclosed in Los Angeles and LA is so big that you'd be quite far from it to add a new airport. You're more likely to repurpose Ontario or even a military base instead.
Ontario was repurposed, at least expanded greatly in scope. It used to be basically a UPS and FedEx airstrip with very limited passenger flights. But LAX was so overloaded and out of the way (for a lot of the IE and LA county) Ontario's passenger terminals were significantly expanded. Unless your destination is in the LA metro area Ontario (or John Wayne) is way more convenient than LAX.
They split the traffic between domestic and international making Montreal no longer useful as an interchange hub.
They failed to implement any proper connections to the city itself, which is related to but not due to the distance.
They also failed to place the airport in between two cities to have a bigger market for it.
Deleted Comment
Another relatively new airport built far from the city it serves is Munich airport, located around 33 km (20 miles) from the city center, opened in 1992. The two major candidates for "relatively sparsely populated area" when the airport was planned (back in the 1960s) were a swampy area north of Munich (Erdinger Moos) and a forest to the south (Hofoldinger Forst). They picked the swamp, which leads to frequent fog problems. And they solved the problem of the old airport competing against the new one by simply closing the old airport (the company operating the new one is the same as for the old one, so no protests there). Some equipment was even moved from the old airport to the new one in an overnight relocation. But, as the 30 years from planning to opening show, even this remote location was not without conflicts. And, more than 30 years after the opening, there is still no fast train to the airport. The Munich-Nuremberg high speed railway line could have been routed by the airport, but (according to rumors) this wasn't done to protect the Nuremberg airport. Then there were plans for a maglev train (Transrapid) which were cancelled in the early 2000s. Currently the plan is for an Express S-Bahn line, but since the S-Bahn tunnel in the city center can't accommodate any more trains, this will only be possible when the second S-Bahn tunnel is completed (the date for that keeps getting pushed back, currently it's 2035).
Edmund Stoiber explained these plans in a legendary speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7TboWvVERU
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 edge will be the railroad right of way that carries one of the Chicago commuter rail lines and the Amtrak route that serves the Chicago-UIUC-Memphis-New Orleans line. Plus an existing Interstate with existing interchanges a mile west of that. Very little infrastructure is needed outside of the airport boundaries. Still a lot of opposition though, and years behind schedule.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3774859,-87.676198,14.2z?ent...
[2] https://www.bultfield.com
True, but who do you personally know who would trade a small benefit every time they fly for a moderate nuisance at their house? I'm not sure even pilots would ask for the flight benefit.
In the case of the South Suburban Chicago Airport, noise is less of an issue. People don't want traffic and they don't want farms turned into warehouses and light industrial. And then the housing built for the thousands of jobs created.
It's essentially opposition to sprawl, which I think is a pretty legitimate concern. I think the state could try to do things to help prevent it from being as bad as it could be (forest preserves, open space, minimum zoning, etc). Though I don't think they want to, because the alternative to this airport is that the one just across the border in Indiana would get enlarged, leading to all that economic development going to a different state.
If it covers it, then from the satellite pictures it would be trivial to bury the line in a cut-n-cover tunnel for little expense.
The fact that a rail line runs there already seems ideal for a modern airport.
The current talk is to build it as a cargo airport, but the original concept was a passenger airport to serve the growing population in Illinois and Indiana that find access to the existing airports inconvenient. There is every reason to believe that if it is built it will start serving passengers just as soon as they can get airlines to agree to use it for passenger flights. As you can see from the recent law, they are adding cargo to the list of reasons for building the airport; they are not replacing passenger service ;)
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=2531&...
Here's the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2aFksnIghQ
It's a little bit absurd of course that they didn't bother to check first, but it kind of works.
SeaTac is well known, and the air traffic never really stops, so there is no way he did not know about it when he bought. I assume it made the house a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be. I guess it is the ultimate demonstration of a free market. For the right price, people will put up with anything.
Somehow, expanding this airport is politically desirable. 3 million people live under the flight path, and they are dismissed as rich or poor people who should have known better. They are rich and poor, there is plenty of range, and there certainly aren't a million spare houses they could choose to move to.
In the end, it wasn't a big problem, we got used to it quickly.
Or is it more of an airstrip where only ultra light aircraft depart?