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Originally Posted by TakeFive
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What I kind of honed in on when I read this is the train issue between terminals. It's not the first time something like this has happened, the trains have completely gone down several times before so I'm not sure where Phil Washington is getting the first time in 26 years and 100 year flood analogy from. Maybe it's the first time for that specific reduced capacity issue?
It's always been a vulnerability that there's 2 terminals at that airport completely dependent on access from trains that could fail at any time (especially with age) and a pretty bad backup plan of running buses between (they struggle to scramble together enough capacity from cdl drivers doing other things and they take forever to mobilize).
Bridges that go that far between a/b and b/c while giving sufficient plane clearance would be expensive.
We all know how expensive tunneling is and the cheaper cut and cover would be tough to make work at a busy airport without impacting operations.
Does anyone know if they've looked at gondolas between a/b and b/c? Generally I think gondolas are a small transportation niche and have been proposed in some massively stupid ways (ie dodger stadium), but where they work they're pretty good at transporting a steady amount of people to hard to reach places. I just don't know if gondolas would have the throughput needed or if they might have some aviation/regulatory drawback at an airport.