Comment by Arainach

13 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.

6 comments

Arainach

Reply
Retric  13 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.

  • Arainach  8 hours ago

    Move them to where? Cities large enough to merit an airport generally either have development which has expanded around them or physical features not conducive to development (mountains, lakes, etc.).

    It's easy to say "just build bigger elsewhere" but unless you go dozens of miles out and add hours to every trip to/from the airport there's no options.

    And no, "just fill in every body of water" is not an option. It doesn't work at all in many cases, is hilariously expensive in all cases, and has enormous environmental impact.

    • Retric  4 hours ago

      I’m specifically suggesting using reclaimed land if they relocated the airport because the cost seems to work out for Chicago, though obviously an in depth analysis is necessary. Still just looking at the depths combined with lakes not having the downsides of open oceans makes it promising. Unfortunately we’re talking about a huge airport so moving anywhere gets incredibly expensive.

      The ultimate reason so many cities use land reclamation for airports is open water does not lose property value by being near the airport. Thus a given greater metropolitan area regains not just the physical land of the airport but the increased property value from all that land that’s no longer next to an airport.

  • potato3732842  12 hours ago

    >Zoning is one option to direct growth

    My magic crystal ball named "the past 50yr of history" says it is unlikely to be the success you envision.