[Rail Claimore]

Originally Posted by jg6544

Interesting points. With regard to the new Bradley terminal, fat lot of good that's going to do people who aren't flying overseas.

I think L. A. should have recognized the limitations of LAX about thirty years ago and started doing something about an international airport that wasn't bound in by those limitations (footprint too small; too close to residential areas; impossible ground access; terminals too spread out with no practical ways of getting from one to another other than walking or taking a cab). DIA didn't spring into being overnight. It was, what, twenty years in planning and it still took them a few years after it opened to get all the kinks out. It's miles from downtown Denver (although they are building some kind of rail connection that goes into downtown and plugs into Denver's light rail system), but the trade-off is that there's room to enlarge it and there's a built-in buffer around the field to keep after-the-fact NIMBYs from moving next door and then griping because there's an airport just down the street. L. A. should have engaged in that kind of planning. Instead, they kept trying to patch up LAX and all the decades of partial "fixes" are taking their toll.

I scrolled back through this entire thread today and was struck by many things. First, the initial timetable for the new Bradley terminal was wildly optimistic. This is California. Nothing gets built in 2-3 years. Part of the damned thing is going to open this summer, it looks like.

Second, the Bradley terminal, whenever it's finally completed, will do nothing about the shabby, run-down, unpleasant domestic terminals; the problems all travelers face with a huge airport that has NO internal transportation system (next time I have to fly out of or into LAX, I'm going to use my arthritic knee as an excuse to have them drive me around in one of those little carts), and the fact that the street access was clogged to capacity years ago and the airport still has no connection of any kind to mass transit (assuming anyone could use it). The "plan" looks to me like nibbling around the edges of the real problems with LAX while doing nothing whatsoever about building an alternative.

And then there's the problem of excess capacity at Long Beach, Burbank, and Ontario because either the neighborhoods around those airports whine about routing more flights through those airports or because the airlines insist on routing everything into LAX. As you said, it's all about hubs and LAX, for better or worse (I think worse) is the hub we're stuck with.

Finally, I am not carrying a brief for DIA. SFO is a hell of a lot better than LAX too, but I don't live in San Francisco. Maybe if we ever get real high-speed rail build, they'll build a stop at SFO and I can take the train up there whenever I have to fly.

I'm not sure how long you've been flying, but I flew frequently across the Pacific to Japan and South Korea in the 1980's and early 1990's before Russian Air Space was opened up. LAX had just done a major expansion in the early 80's with the current Bradley Terminal and T2, plus separating arrival and departure roadways for cars. No one back then foresaw the types of planes we'd have that could fly to East Asia nonstop from the Eastern US and the increase in transpacific traffic from those hubs making daily flights to Tokyo and Seoul viable from airports like ORD and ATL. Everyone and everything in those days was routed through LAX if you didn't want to stop in ANC or fork over obscene amounts of money to fly on limited one-stops from back East.

On your point about SFO, from a passenger perspective, it's only marginally better than LAX because it has more terminal space per passenger. But it suffers from the same problems for connecting passengers as LAX does if you're flying any airline but United: you have to re-clear security.