Or how about this, from the introduction to Ursula K. Le Guin's collection Changing Planes:
> If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
> In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.
Try taking the train, if you can spare the time! If it goes from near where you are to near where you want to go, it can be great. If it's a trip of less than a day, then you'll wind up where you want to go feeling much more rested and much less stressed. (If it's more than a day, then you'll have to face the question of whether you want to sleep awkwardly in coach or pony up big bucks for a sleeper; but you can get used to sleeping awkwardly in coach—for me, it's much more comfortable than sleeping on a plane.)
In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.
> In the USA, long distance passenger trains are very expensive …
This is mostly true, but:
1. "Frequent traveller" programs can take some of the pain out of the price, just as they can for flying; and, as msandford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241) points out, it's not entirely unreasonable, if you're optimising for comfort (since it's not for speed!), to compare the price of a coach seat on a train with the price of a business-class seat on a plane.
2. Short-haul trains will usually beat any possible flight; and even relatively long-haul trains can be competitive—an upcoming trip from Michigan to Maryland for my brother's wedding is $81 one way.
> … and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.
This is also true, but, I think, misleading; it's not as if planes always run on time. At least, when the train is stuck, you're on the train, which is nice and comfy, rather than in the airport, which is miserable!
I have also never been bumped from a train due to overbooking, and once had a lovely train ride that simply plowed through snow falling thickly enough that most flights were grounded.
As a point of fact, Amtrak passenger trains have priority over freight trains if they are on schedule. The problem is that if they are so much as a minute late, and have to yield once, they are no longer on schedule for the entire remainder of the route, and just get further and further behind. Amtrak doesn't own much of its own track, and private rail owners tend to prioritize high-value traffic, so the freight generally gets to go first. After all, everybody knows that if you wanted to get there on time, you would have flown, right?
I was once delayed on an Amtrak train for 24 hours. Twenty-four hours, sitting motionless on a siding in the middle of nowhere. A professional cyclist could have beaten me to my destination, even with one 8-hour stop to sleep. Never again. Even a coach bus would be preferable.
Yup, PDX is by far my favorite airport on the west coast.
I've yet to see another parking lot as neat as PDX. There's an ultrasonic sensor above each spot with a red/green LED that shows if the spot is open(green for clear).
Makes it incredibly easy to find out if there's an open spot down a parking lane.
The thing that's interesting about airports is how diverse the criteria is for people critiquing them.
Take the parking you highlighted for example, unless someone is ranking it as a home airport AND they don't take uber/lyft to get there, it's completely irrelevant. I tend to enjoy layovers in LAX because I like their sky club, which is completely irrelevant to anyone not flying sky team.
I really like JFK's roof-top lounge that you can go up onto if you're flying JetBlue. It has grass, umbrellas, and shade outside (INSIDE the airport terminal/gates -- surprised they have it given security concerns).
Jesus, that's depressing. For me, the airport is a place that's always buzzing with human activity. The atmosphere is electric. Here, you find people from all walks of live, traveling for all sorts of reasons. Work. Family. Love. War. Weddings. Funerals. It's a goal-oriented sort of place, everyone has somewhere to be and a task to perform. There's common interest, we want to get to our destination safely. There are delights for the weary traveler - coffee, shops to browse in - Take the time to treat yourself! You're travelling.
And taste of nothing more then exactly as much salt as it is topped with, without even the benefit of a crunch of the slice of toast which is unable to hold its own under the onslaught of up-bulking water released during the cooking^Wboiling process (and wouldn't be able to even without the water because modern bread is so laughably unbreadlike).
I'm happy to pay for food. I like paying for food. I like it to be food.
But the coffee's bad, the shops, wifi, food, and drinks are overpriced and lack variety, the piano is off-limits, and nobody's rooted here long enough to invest energy in it as a place for community. What you describe would be great if it was good, but it's bad.
I'm with you. People are so blasé about flying but I love every minute of the experience. Having said that, I do take my home-made sandwiches to the airport. Airport food is a ripoff.
I really like MSP. I haven't been through there in a long time, but I remember it being pleasantly decorated, none of the gates were too terribly far away (looking at you, DFW), and it was overall relatively quiet compared to DEN.
Airports are actually pretty nice, when looking at them from above. The way their geometries are embedded into different landscapes is sometimes quite intriguing.
See https://airports.flopp.net/ for some random examples.
There's so much I like about the atmosphere. There's this sleepy peacefulness mixed with hurrying productivity that I love to watch. Stretches of quietness give way to an abundance of people, some happy, some professional, some weary, or a mix of all three in the families jostling about.
Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds.
Your phone doesn't work so you read your book non-stop. You get an accidental chance to remember what bad coffee is like. Dim expectations of plans (or longings for home) percolate all the while.
Maybe not perfectly pretty, conventionally, but if I had to pick a term "Airport Aesthetic" rings pretty true to me.
Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds.
Is there any transportation hub that can be categorized as pretty? Bus stations, train stations, whatever else has too much hustle-and-bustle to be categorized as pretty.
Old enough to have real character, and nobody seems terribly inclined to gut it and fill it up with soulless blondwood veneer. I've never seen it much more active than in the photo, either. Really, a significant part of the reason why I prefer train travel to flying is because when I choose the former, I have the privilege of leaving from and returning to Penn, rather than the modernist Skinner-box nightmare that is BWI.
Indeed! I wasn't intending to limit good train stations to Britain when I spoke of Victorian times -- and, indeed, "Victorian" is too limiting. Early-20thC is Edwardian or thereabouts -- and US train-station design was at its zenith at that time, as throwanem observes.
Depending where in the world you are, there are bars open at 10am (at least in the US). Beer at 10am, in a family situation, for me while in Germany (inlaws house) took me aback. But I don't have a problem doing so at an airport.
Right. It's not that beer is available at 10am -- obviously you can walk into any corner liquor store in the US at 10am, buy a beer, and drink it from a can hidden in a paper bag like your fellow sidewalk winos -- it's the fact that drinking at 10am in an airport is apparently perfectly respectable behavior, even for the most professional of travelers. Another facet of "airportness".
Elsewhere in the thread someone was complaining about LaGuardia airport because there's no direct rail connection. There's also parts of it that have absolutely no bars, making it officially the worst airport in America.
I was hoping this was about how airports /should/ work. The current system can't possibly be ideal.
Airports seem to be built with no concept of door to door travel time. For sample, SF to LA by plane. Use muni to get to BART, wait for BART, take it to the little airport train thing, then a line at checkin, security, and all the long walks in between.
Overnight self-driving sleeper Uber will be a vastly superior experience. It's a sign of how we're moving backwards despite all the technology.
European airports can be extraordinarily well connected.
(Most of the German ones, for example, are connected directly to local rail lines, which are another thing entirely.)
London as well: Heathrow is directly connected to the tube (subway) and Gatwick is directly connected to local rail. With only hand luggage and a scannable passport, it takes about 50 min. from getting of the plane at Gatwick until you're in the middle of the city.
Should you ever be delayed at Gatwick, with pleasant weather, there's a public footpath that leads away from the airport along the river. It's amazing how quickly the airport disappears from view.
Yup, we should have a luggage drop wagon on board of the BART, and the BART should drop us at our gate. Obviously that implies the BART is also a giant TSA irradiation oven (Want to opt out? Well, there's the taxi).
Yep, I'm aware of the Michigan study, and I don't find its conclusions compelling.
I don't think it's fair to say that it's "certainly" not true, as this study has not been reviewed and plenty of reasonable people believe that the evidence suggests a different conclusion. Here's a fairly straightforward critique of its methodology:
The article you linked makes the claim "not all trips are equal" and points out that some trips (e.g. local commutes) give driving a distinct edge. The trip between LA and SF falls on the opposite end of the spectrum, pulling the average trip toward being more flying friendly, especially if you can avoid driving to and from the airport, than your driving solo.
I agree the original article isn't great, but the one you offered is equally insubstantial. It shouldn't be shocking to find the trip type impacts the energy use.
One of us is misreading the critique (and it may be me?).
I think that what it's saying is this:
* The most wasteful car trips are solo local commutes. Carbon-per-inch, flying is more efficient than driving when the driving is a solo local commutes.
* For longer trips, in a light duty vehicle like a sedan or SUV, driving usually smashes flying. If you have 4 people in the car, even in an inefficient car, you are using less than half the fuel of those same people flying.
The Michigan study simply averaged these together, which is obviously senseless because there is no flight equivalent of a 3-mile commute. It only makes sense to compare flights against highway mileage, and it's not unfair to assume >= 2.2 people in the car.
As annoying as SFO can be with for the reasons you've mentioned, it's miles better than going to Laguardia where there is no rail connection, and specific public transit buses go to specific terminals. When going to Laguardia from Manhattan, 89% of people commute by taxi/private car service!
I'm under the impression that in modern airport design, the door-to-door travel time from landing to baggage carousel is purposely lengthened so that you feel like you spend less time waiting for baggage handlers to get your bags off the plane (because you spend more time walking than standing).
1. "Christopher Schaberg is an associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans, and the author of The Textual Life of Airports (2011) and The End of Airports (2015). His next book, Airportness, will be published by Bloomsbury in fall 2017." -- Airport fetish much?
2. This drivel reads like an essay by a struggling humanities undergraduate. The whole piece could be replaced by two words, "airports suck", with no loss of information.
It struck me when I was traveling a lot for work that airports were not entirely unlike the debtors' prisons in Dickens: you couldn't wholly disclaim responsibility for being there, but the discomfort seemed out of proportion to the fault; and you could get some of the comforts of life, but at exorbitant prices.
Am I the only one that likes airports? (Well, besides the annoying security theater.) Once you're in, you've got no other responsibilities besides showing up at a door at a specific time. You can't feel bad for not doing those other things you know you probably should be eventually doing, because you're busy in an airport! It's the one place I won't have any doubts at all about the way I'm spending my time when I sit around and read.
... Reading my post and considering my apparently-unique love for airports makes me wonder if I have some kind of anxiety issue.
> ... Reading my post and considering my apparently-unique love for airports makes me wonder if I have some kind of anxiety issue.
Yeah. This seems more like a reason for you to reflect and relax.
I've got anxiety issues of my own, but they tend to surface at the airport. Waiting at the gate is a perfect time to go through my mental checklist of what I packed, and await the realization that I've forgotten something critical (deodorant? socks? laptop adapter? to book a hotel?) or to look forward to everything that can go wrong during the trip (that airplane looks pretty old. Will I have time to visit with everyone I want to? Will I have to visit people I don't want to see? Will I get downtime to myself? What if I get sick while I'm there? What if I get sick right before I'm leaving?)
I like them too for the same reasons (after I passed all the controls). And as a frequent flyer, I like to congratulate myself over my well-optimized routine!
Sitting on the plane sucks though if you're not first class.
I'm 6 feet tall and the lack of legroom and claustrophobia is tough to deal with, especially if the person in front of me inconsiderably leans their seat back.
The last three flights I was on had us sitting on the tarmac 40 minutes each time before take-off due to various maintenance/ATC issues. Of course, you couldn't open your laptop either (but I did anyway).
The flight attendants also have a habit of asking me to close my laptop when it isn't anywhere near time to land yet.
My parents home is in Houston, Texas and I flew to college at Hobby Airport. The waiting and gate area was large and big, it had free wifi and a ton of places where I can eat (breakfast, lunch, or dinner food) or sit down.
When I was going back home from college, I had to wait at LaGuardia. LaGuardia's terminal for my airplane company of choice is depressing and always packed to the point where there was nowhere to sit. It also only had two places to buy food and both were breakfast places (Dunkin' Donuts). I eventually timed the train/taxi to the airport such that I spent as little time as possible waiting there.
Anyway, that's a rant I've been meaning to make for a while if you'll excuse me. A bad airport is anxiety-inducing.
Hi all,
Agreed - from our vantage perspective, a majority of US airports still have a long way to go before they match best-in-class industry standards. We’ve been privileged to see (and contribute to) improvements across planning, traveler engagement, terminal design (cool stuff happening here) and much more. US airport leaders like PDX and CVG (recognized by travelers and Skytrax awards) are contributing to best practices that are slowly but widely being adopted.
From a personal perspective (as the founder of flightSpeak), I’m more optimistic about airports b/c of the human element that is largely untapped. The noise of wait times and lack of information has drowned out the fascination of discovery at airports, which we’re working on changing.
If you’d like to find out more of what your local airport is doing, do a search for “<IATA> master plan” You’ll be surprised there’s a ton you can also contribute to as a traveler and resident (if you’re in the area of the airport).
85 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] thread― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
> If both you and your plane are on time, the airport is merely a diffuse, short, miserable prelude to the intense, long, miserable plane trip. But what if there's five hours between your arrival and your connecting flight, or your plane is late arriving and you've missed your connection, or the connecting flight is late, or the staff of another airline are striking for a wage-benefit package and the government has not yet ordered out the National Guard to control this threat to international capitalism so your airline staff is trying to handle twice as many people as usual, or there are tornadoes or thunderstorms or blizzards or little important bits of the plane missing or any of the thousand other reasons (never under any circumstances the fault of the airlines, and rarely explained at the time) why those who go places on airplanes sit and sit and sit and sit in airports, not going anywhere?
> In this, probably its true aspect, the airport is not a prelude to travel, not a place of transition: it is a stop. A blockage. A constipation. The airport is where you can't go anywhere else. A nonplace in which time does not pass and there is no hope of meaningful existence. A terminus: the end. The airport offers nothing to any human being except access to the interval between planes.
This is mostly true, but:
1. "Frequent traveller" programs can take some of the pain out of the price, just as they can for flying; and, as msandford (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663241) points out, it's not entirely unreasonable, if you're optimising for comfort (since it's not for speed!), to compare the price of a coach seat on a train with the price of a business-class seat on a plane.
2. Short-haul trains will usually beat any possible flight; and even relatively long-haul trains can be competitive—an upcoming trip from Michigan to Maryland for my brother's wedding is $81 one way.
> … and can have their schedules totally screwed up because they must give way to freight trains.
This is also true, but, I think, misleading; it's not as if planes always run on time. At least, when the train is stuck, you're on the train, which is nice and comfy, rather than in the airport, which is miserable!
I have also never been bumped from a train due to overbooking, and once had a lovely train ride that simply plowed through snow falling thickly enough that most flights were grounded.
I was once delayed on an Amtrak train for 24 hours. Twenty-four hours, sitting motionless on a siding in the middle of nowhere. A professional cyclist could have beaten me to my destination, even with one 8-hour stop to sleep. Never again. Even a coach bus would be preferable.
I've yet to see another parking lot as neat as PDX. There's an ultrasonic sensor above each spot with a red/green LED that shows if the spot is open(green for clear).
Makes it incredibly easy to find out if there's an open spot down a parking lane.
Take the parking you highlighted for example, unless someone is ranking it as a home airport AND they don't take uber/lyft to get there, it's completely irrelevant. I tend to enjoy layovers in LAX because I like their sky club, which is completely irrelevant to anyone not flying sky team.
I'm happy to pay for food. I like paying for food. I like it to be food.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGYx6zUMmFj/
There's so much I like about the atmosphere. There's this sleepy peacefulness mixed with hurrying productivity that I love to watch. Stretches of quietness give way to an abundance of people, some happy, some professional, some weary, or a mix of all three in the families jostling about.
Heels clicking the ground and baggage wheels rumbling, some announcement of flights changing gates. People mumbling in foreign languages. I wish I could bottle the sounds.
Your phone doesn't work so you read your book non-stop. You get an accidental chance to remember what bad coffee is like. Dim expectations of plans (or longings for home) percolate all the while.
Maybe not perfectly pretty, conventionally, but if I had to pick a term "Airport Aesthetic" rings pretty true to me.
This is the closest I've found: http://tabletopaudio.com/ track "Dome City Center"; give it a try. (Direct link: http://tabletopaudio.com/download.php?downld_file=43_Dome_Ci...)
Old enough to have real character, and nobody seems terribly inclined to gut it and fill it up with soulless blondwood veneer. I've never seen it much more active than in the photo, either. Really, a significant part of the reason why I prefer train travel to flying is because when I choose the former, I have the privilege of leaving from and returning to Penn, rather than the modernist Skinner-box nightmare that is BWI.
I'm sure things were much slower paced back then however. Perhaps it was an entirely different experience!
Airports seem to be built with no concept of door to door travel time. For sample, SF to LA by plane. Use muni to get to BART, wait for BART, take it to the little airport train thing, then a line at checkin, security, and all the long walks in between.
Overnight self-driving sleeper Uber will be a vastly superior experience. It's a sign of how we're moving backwards despite all the technology.
I spent some of a 4 hour delay walking this path.
The blue dotted line, go north then along the river: http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/51.1581/-0.1632
Yup, we should have a luggage drop wagon on board of the BART, and the BART should drop us at our gate. Obviously that implies the BART is also a giant TSA irradiation oven (Want to opt out? Well, there's the taxi).
It's an environmental catastrophe if the best travel experience is also the least efficient.
It's the same for busses, boats, etc.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/04/debate-settled-flying-way-effi...
I don't think it's fair to say that it's "certainly" not true, as this study has not been reviewed and plenty of reasonable people believe that the evidence suggests a different conclusion. Here's a fairly straightforward critique of its methodology:
https://thinkprogress.org/no-flying-is-not-greener-than-driv...
In fact, can you name any other study which comes to the same conclusion as this one?
I agree the original article isn't great, but the one you offered is equally insubstantial. It shouldn't be shocking to find the trip type impacts the energy use.
I think that what it's saying is this:
* The most wasteful car trips are solo local commutes. Carbon-per-inch, flying is more efficient than driving when the driving is a solo local commutes.
* For longer trips, in a light duty vehicle like a sedan or SUV, driving usually smashes flying. If you have 4 people in the car, even in an inefficient car, you are using less than half the fuel of those same people flying.
The Michigan study simply averaged these together, which is obviously senseless because there is no flight equivalent of a 3-mile commute. It only makes sense to compare flights against highway mileage, and it's not unfair to assume >= 2.2 people in the car.
That's the way I read the critique.
One bus followed by one train. It certainly took less time (and way less money) than Uber was estimating.
2. This drivel reads like an essay by a struggling humanities undergraduate. The whole piece could be replaced by two words, "airports suck", with no loss of information.
There has to be a word for that sort of ponderous pretension.
[1]https://fraenkelgallery.com/portfolios/airport
... Reading my post and considering my apparently-unique love for airports makes me wonder if I have some kind of anxiety issue.
Yeah. This seems more like a reason for you to reflect and relax.
I've got anxiety issues of my own, but they tend to surface at the airport. Waiting at the gate is a perfect time to go through my mental checklist of what I packed, and await the realization that I've forgotten something critical (deodorant? socks? laptop adapter? to book a hotel?) or to look forward to everything that can go wrong during the trip (that airplane looks pretty old. Will I have time to visit with everyone I want to? Will I have to visit people I don't want to see? Will I get downtime to myself? What if I get sick while I'm there? What if I get sick right before I'm leaving?)
I'm 6 feet tall and the lack of legroom and claustrophobia is tough to deal with, especially if the person in front of me inconsiderably leans their seat back.
The last three flights I was on had us sitting on the tarmac 40 minutes each time before take-off due to various maintenance/ATC issues. Of course, you couldn't open your laptop either (but I did anyway).
The flight attendants also have a habit of asking me to close my laptop when it isn't anywhere near time to land yet.
My parents home is in Houston, Texas and I flew to college at Hobby Airport. The waiting and gate area was large and big, it had free wifi and a ton of places where I can eat (breakfast, lunch, or dinner food) or sit down.
When I was going back home from college, I had to wait at LaGuardia. LaGuardia's terminal for my airplane company of choice is depressing and always packed to the point where there was nowhere to sit. It also only had two places to buy food and both were breakfast places (Dunkin' Donuts). I eventually timed the train/taxi to the airport such that I spent as little time as possible waiting there.
Anyway, that's a rant I've been meaning to make for a while if you'll excuse me. A bad airport is anxiety-inducing.
It is nice to have a meal, watch people, observe the infrastructure, see where you could go from there, and so on.
Why, in short, do I need to wait at all?
Hi all, Agreed - from our vantage perspective, a majority of US airports still have a long way to go before they match best-in-class industry standards. We’ve been privileged to see (and contribute to) improvements across planning, traveler engagement, terminal design (cool stuff happening here) and much more. US airport leaders like PDX and CVG (recognized by travelers and Skytrax awards) are contributing to best practices that are slowly but widely being adopted.
From a personal perspective (as the founder of flightSpeak), I’m more optimistic about airports b/c of the human element that is largely untapped. The noise of wait times and lack of information has drowned out the fascination of discovery at airports, which we’re working on changing.
If you’d like to find out more of what your local airport is doing, do a search for “<IATA> master plan” You’ll be surprised there’s a ton you can also contribute to as a traveler and resident (if you’re in the area of the airport).