[Rail Claimore]

Originally Posted by jg6544

So, you fly in on, say, Delta and have to change planes to, say, United to continue your trip. How do you get from terminal to terminal? You walk or take a cab. Moving the terminals across the whole damned airport from each other only makes that problem worse.

The first complaint I remember reading about JFK, then called Idlewild, was that it was too damned difficult getting from one terminal to another, so this is not rocket science. They should have dealt with this problem back when they rebuilt LAX in the '80s, but they didn't. Even more surprising, they should have dealt with it before building this snazzy new international terminal (what % of passengers who use LAX fly international, anyway?), but they didn't. The idea of a central structure connected to the terminals by some kind of shuttle is interesting, but if you build it in the middle of the airport, where do people park? And if you increase the capacity of the airport without doing something about getting people from all over L. A. to and from the airport, you've just made getting to and from the airport worse than it already is.

I go back to the point I made in my earlier post, L. A. should have begun planning for a new approach thirty years ago.

If LAWA or whatever authority was in charge back then, could have foreseen what I mentioned in my previous post, they probably would have built LAX to look like IAH today, an airport oriented for both a large amount of O&D traffic and connecting traffic. LAX is the third busiest international gateway into the US behind JFK and MIA, with about 16 million int'l ppa, most of which are O&D. And a disproportionate amount of international traffic at LAX is high-yield flights to Asia and Australia. TBIT was horribly outdated compared to the new terminal at SFO. Complaints from Transpax carriers are what spurred the powers that be into action on TBIT. International passengers will get better treatment first for these reasons.