Comment by JCM9
3 months ago
Zoning guidance generally prohibits land use near an airport that has a high density of people, precisely to limit casualties during an event like this. Industrial would be permitted while residential and commercial use is not.
Scarily there are communities that have ignored such logic and permitted dense residential development right next to an airport.
UPS actually bought and destroyed thousands of homes near their end of the airport about 20 years ago, under the guise of 'noise', but realistically for expansion of warehousing. Now, I guess I feel slightly less upset by that (my childhood home was one of them).
Same thing happened to a friend who lived near the Albany airport. They gave him some song and dance about how it wasn't safe for people. But then after the deal was all done, they ended up selling the land to one of those hotel companies that wanted to have 100+ people sleep there each night. But they weren't permanent residents so it was different.
Both can be true at the same time (or all three if you include safety in addition to noise).
True, but rather doubtful. UPS has owned that part of the airport for longer than I've been alive. As a kid, yeah sometimes a plane comes over but nobody really seemed to care.
Fast fwd 15 years and now the city is telling us how unsafe it is to live there, passing out studies about how airplane noise will ruin your life, etc. And they made the buyout 'optional', knowing they'd railroad the holdouts, which they did. They'd tear down every house and the road leading to your house as they went, until the holdouts gave in.
All of a sudden my neighborhood is gone. And that awful, noisy, unsafe to live in place...is full of workers in cheap steel warehouses. I guess it's more safe for them.
Many people may not realize, but UPS and Ford absolutely own Louisville. If either says jump, the city government will ask how high?
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Jets are also simply too loud for homes under the takeoff path in standard use. There’s what amounts to a ghost town next to LAX due to this and the history of the airport.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palisades_del_Rey,_California
Burbank Airport has quiet hours and has left a bunch of commercially zoned area under that takeoff path.
I’m in Atlanta now and they bought up a lot of land around the airport when redeveloping it and do similar zoning tricks for the buffer. One of the buffer zones is the Porsche Experience. It’s loud as heck when you’re on the part of the track closest but not bad where the corporate HQ and paddock is
I grew up 3 miles (as the crow flies) from JFK Runway 31 R / 13 L in Cedarhurst, New York
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Cedarhurst,+NY+11516/John+F....
I recently toured SEA. The third (western-most) runway there is too close to homes to use regularly for takeoffs due to noise. Though the FAA has made the Port of Seattle no promises, they apparently do tend to use the third runway as much as possible for landings only, and not late at night as much as possible.
I just looked that up (Atlanta) on https://noise-map.com/ and man, that's way not enough zoning tricking in my book. Not that it's much different in other cities (or countries).
There's no need to zone for airport noise in Atlanta because the highway passing through the city center and hotrodded cars already are much louder and more disruptive in practice. I wish I was joking.
Also, the map you're looking at there is relatively low resolution. I would suggest looking at it in https://maps.dot.gov/BTS/NationalTransportationNoiseMap/; make sure to switch the "Modes:" to "All Modes"
That's wild, I was in LA recently for work and drove by that area and wondered what was up with the street grid. I figured it must be something like this given the airport.
Meanwhile, ORD is surrounded by residential areas and they're building a new tollway perpendicular to the runways
MDW immediately came to mind as an airport closely surrounded by neighborhoods. I've always wondered what it's like to live in one of those neighborhoods. Is it a perpetual nuisance or do you get used to it?
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It's amazing that towns don't see this sort of thing and think "huh maybe it's not a good idea to put apartments right on top of an airport", but I guess they don't. Longmont is in trouble with the FAA because they OKed a bunch of apartments right at the end of Vance Brand that would be right in the path of aircraft struggling to gain altitude out of the airport. Naturally there's a vocal contingent of people around here that think this is the airport's problem and not the town or greedy developers, and that all the airports (except DIA) should be shut down.
You can always come up with some pretext to justify things by ignoring the other side of the equation.
How many lives do the man hours spent commuting, or toiling away to afford higher rents waste?
IDK how the math pencils out, but an attempt ought to be made before drawing conclusions.
None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing. The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water often by building airports on reclaimed land.
What generally gets areas in trouble is locations that used to be a good get worse as aircraft get larger and the surroundings get built up. The solution is to send larger airplanes to a new airport, but it’s not free and there’s no clear line when things get unacceptably dangerous.
San Jose does. You can, in theory, walk to downtown from the airport; it's about an hour and a half via pedestrian trail:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/zhZdA5tWGAKunM2e8
(This is widely considered a misfeature of San Jose - it limits the height of buildings in downtown San Jose to 10 stories because the downtown is directly under the flight path of arriving flights, it limits runway length and airport expansion, and it means that planes and their noise fly directly over key tourist attractions like the Rose Garden and Convention Center. If we ever had a major plane crash like this one in San Jose it would be a disaster, because the airport is bounded by 101 on the north, 880 on the south, the arriving flight path goes right over downtown, and the departing flight path goes right over Levi's Stadium, Great America, and several office buildings.)
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>None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_International_Airport
It's hard to project growth. Things build right up to the limit of the airport for convenient access, then the area grows and the airport needs to grow - and what do you do? Seattle-Tacoma is critically undersized for the traffic it gets and has been struggling with the fact that there's physically nowhere to expand to.
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In all honesty most countries in europe have at least one airport in a city centre. I mean look at lisbon, RKV, BHD/LCY (even glasgow,LHR to some extent), BMA, NCE.
I live in San Diego and can watch planes come and go from my apartment rooftop. I've also walked to and from the airport to stretch my legs before and after flights.
Somewhere I have a GoPro video of me on my motorcycle waiting for a freight train at a crossing in traffic while a 747 flies overhead ("Planes, Trains, and Automobiles"). It's a pretty transportation-dense area.
> Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing
Ever see Dallas Love Field?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/A94EdexYwfpyeMxa7
Lots of airports are pretty much immediately adjacent to their city centers.
> The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water.
That works in costal areas, but not inland.
There's no large body of water near the Louisville airport.
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> Nobody puts airports inside city centers
Taipei Songshan, Boston Logan and the old Hong Kong Kai Tak to name a few.
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Probably also due to noise.
Yeah I was going to say, that sounds like a much more salient reason not to live near an airport than the possibility of that rare crash.
Fresno here. If this had happened at FAT (FYI now? We have dumb names) the casualties would've easily hit three digits from initial impact, and then whatever else burned afterwards because CA==tinderbox.
Same with SJC, no matter which direction they were taking off.
Midway comes to mind: https://maps.app.goo.gl/GRUXJVdUPQMWkZNU6
The pollution and noise probably has health effects many times more significant than the sum of extremely rare crashes like these.
> Zoning guidance generally prohibits land use near an airport that has a high density of people
Queens, NY has entered the chat…
>Queens, NY has entered the chat…
You’re correct, but at least LaGuardia airport generally has takeoffs over water.
LaGuardia aircraft landings may happen over dense apartment buildings, but less likely for catastrophic damage (glide path, less fuel, engines are <10% throttle, etc)
It also has JFK, on the South side.
Some of the larger townships in Cape Town are right in the flight path too. Not many white people there either.