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Comment by potato3732842

13 hours ago

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.

29 comments

potato3732842

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Retric  11 hours ago

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.

  • nostrademons  11 hours ago

    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.)

    • Johnny555  7 hours ago

      The Las Vegas Airport is very close to the strip, surrounded by residential neighborhoods and hotels about 1/4 - 1/2 mile from the airport, and UNLV university is about 1000 feet in a straight line from one of the runways.

    • Retric  10 hours ago

      There’s roughly a mile of roads, green spaces, and river between the airport and downtown San Jose which an absolutely identical accident would impact. It’s not very wide, but pilots aren’t going to aim for buildings if they can help it.

      So while downtown being in the flight path is a risk there was some method to the madness which caused that alignment.

      3 replies →

    • bdamm  8 hours ago

      San Jose Airport's walkability and bikability is actually wonderful and I always take the opportunity to walk or bike there when flying into SJC.

  • Arainach  11 hours ago

    >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.

    • Retric  11 hours ago

      Zoning is one option to direct growth, but you can move airports. Chicago is right next to a Great Lake and there’s relatively shallow areas ready to be reclaimed etc.

      Obviously you’re better off making such decisions early rather than building a huge airport only to abandon it. Thus it’s called urban planning not urban triage.

      4 replies →

  • matt-p  5 hours ago

    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.

  • ilamont  5 hours ago

    > Nobody puts airports inside city centers

    Taipei Songshan, Boston Logan and the old Hong Kong Kai Tak to name a few.

    • Retric  5 hours ago

      Boston Logan is surrounded by water to the point only one end of a single runway isn’t aimed directly at water soon crosses water. The city center requires crossing a bridge. Taipei is a little worse but its only runway is going next to a river here and aimed at a park on each side.

      Hong Kong Kai Take would be a solid example except it closed in 1998 because of how the city grew. Look at maps from 1950 and it doesn’t look like a bad location for a small airport.

      1 reply →

  • gwbas1c  11 hours ago

    > 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.