Quote:
Originally Posted by Rail Claimore
DTW is the "newest" airport in the US: having all its terminals totally rebuilt in the past 10 years. McNamara Terminal (Delta's second largest hub) is the only terminal that is, in terms of looks, size, scale, and quality, straight out of Asia. The new TBIT will be in that same category once it's fully opened and operational, but the rest of the terminals and airfield work will be a gradual process.
LAX could improve in a lot of areas right now, but for an airport with an airfield that was smaller than ATL pre-runway 10/28 (ATL's 4-parallel runway layout was based off LAX) sering a metro area of 18 million, it makes remarkably high and efficient use of what it has. There are no large empty areas of the airport at any given time, something I can only say about it and ATL. And there are no large areas of open land to build a new DFW or DEN-sized airport anywhere in Greater Los Angeles that would be convenient to a majority of residents in the region and that are located on the E-W flight paths into the area. Anyone who flies into LAX sees the necessity of this by looking out the right windows of the aircraft. At 10,000 ft over the Inland Empire, you're basically just 10 miles south of the San Gabriel Mountains and are level with them in elevation.
The ONLY thing besides the current improvements and master plan for LAX that would provide significant congestion relief and additional capacity for air travel in Southern California would be to move San Diego International Airport to Miramar. There's room there for an airport at least the size of O'Hare to serve not only San Diego, but OC and the southern half of the Inland Empire as well. But that won't happen until another BRAC round decides on closing the facility and/or moving its operations elsewhere. San Diego will do this eventually, but it will be at least another generation before it happens.
JFK is the only New York area airport that is making any significant improvements in any area, and most of it is thanks to Delta. United couldn't give two sh*ts bout EWR, they'll just milk it for all its worth until it's absolutely necessary to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. United is giving more attention to IAH (a hub they threatened to cut a huge amount of service from if Houston opened up HOU to international flights for WN) right now, of all its hubs: that says a lot more about EWR than anything else.
|
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.