> This airport means that a good share of the east londonders have to live their lives under noise so the 1% can get to their meeting a little bit more easily.

Try living under the Heathrow flightpath before you complain about City airport.

You can always find a worse situation, but that does not invalidate the concerns regarding the original situation.

The Heathrow flight paths cover most of London. http://your.heathrow.com/under-the-flight-path-reducing-nois...

Do you actually live near London City Airport? I live a mile away from there and the noise level over here in Woolwich is negligible. Perhaps we're not under the flight path.

I used to live in the flight path of another airport but even there the noise from road traffic was orders of magnitude worse than any noise from air traffic.

That said, I don't doubt that some people are badly affected.

I did a small contract in the home of a member of one of the richest and most renowned families in the world last year, a beautiful pad in West London somewhere... right under the flightpath of flights descending into Heathrow and helicopters regularly buzzing a nearby heliport.

I found it odd that on the one hand I was in one of the poshest homes I'll likely ever find myself, and how miserable I figured I'd feel not being able to enjoy any outside aspect of it, were it mine.

This is my direct personal experience, and how it affects the 0.001%. May I ask how personal your experience of City of London airport is and the horrors it impacts upon its neighbours, or are you simply regurgitating the widely-publicised leftist whinging that was surrounding the topic a year or so ago?

i live in a city with a similar airport situation (santa monica, ca) most of these public fights about land use are just rich people fighting other rich people, because they're the only ones interested/wealthy enough to publicize their 'plight'.

poor and middle class folks either just deal with it or are pushed out.

There are thousands of cheap / normal homes under the Heathrow flightpath.

It's one of the smaller reasons I left London. (My workplace was under it, so I looked for a new job that wasn't.)

The Green party had a fairly good plan for London City Airport:

Close it down, replace with "thousands of new homes within easy reach of central London"

http://www.sianberry.london/news/pollution/our-plan-to-redev...

Which seems fair to me - surely a better site for an airport would be larger, further out and well-connected by rail? This applies to Heathrow as well.

Given LCY can only handle short haul routes (the longest flight, to JFK, has to land and refuel in Ireland before the medium haul leg), Expanding the Eurostar seems a better fit to me.

It recently expanded with direct service to Rotterdam & Amsterdam, future expansions are under discussion.

https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/direct-eurostar-lon...

I was under the impression that you could already take a train from London St Pancras to Amsterdam, or was I forgetting about a change in Paris Gare Du Nord?

Currently you change in Brussels. Going via Paris would be rather a long way out of your way.

Sort of. It starts direct service in April but it will initially only be direct on the London to Amsterdam leg. You'll still need to change in Brussels going the other way until the Netherlands and the UK setup passport controls for Amsterdam departures.

Don't bother expanding the Eurostar. The longest routes are already three times as expensive as the plane and take much longer.

> take much longer ... as the plane

If you live within half an hour's travel from King's Cross, eurostar does not take longer for door-to-door time. More pleasant and less weight restrictions too

The eurostar London to South France is 6 hours and 100-300 GBP. It's about a thousand kilometers.

Plane can do faster and cheaper door to door.

And Eurostar is 1.) Far more pleasant than (in particular) budget European airlines and 2.) Not much longer downtown to downtown (and less for some routes like London to Brussels). Similarly in the US, I basically never fly from Boston to NYC or NYC to Washington.

I admittedly am not optimizing for price--intra-Europe flights can be pretty inexpensive--but I'd much rather take the train than fly even if it costs a bit more and takes a bit longer.

The main portion is 6h of train against 1h30 of flight. Door to door is a few more hours in both cases.

I understand the feeling. I hate flying too, in particular cheap European airlines. Gotta admit that there is an inflection point though, maybe around a thousand kilometers, where trains are struggling to keep up.

The main portion of flying isnt the 1h30 of the flight, it's the 2 hours getting to the shitty suburban airport then 1.5h going through security if it is busy, then 1.5h flying, then another hour getting from a shitty suburban airport to the destination city. Compare with just getting to Kings Cross and walking through passport control in ~20 mins, then disembarking in central Paris.

I commuted monday-friday from London to Paris for a couple months, and if I were to fly I don't think I could take it.

The London-Paris eurostar is short and quite cheap. It's really good. I couldn't agree more with you.

The London-Lyon is disappointing. Better take a plane.

If you were flying daily then you'd have to be doing something terribly wrong to spend 1.5h getting through security - with airline status it should take minutes at worst, and even without status LCY has pretty minimal waiting times.

I agree south of France is probably borderline by train from London. Germany probably is as well. Likewise, I won't usually take the train from Boston to Washington DC. Just too long a trip under most circumstances even if the prices were comparable.

It depends on the speed of the service of course but, even with relatively high speed rail, a thousand kilometers is probably at the outside edge of where a train makes utilitarian sense.

European rail companies have claimed rail can be competitive for up to 4 hours, which matches my impressions of these journeys. London-Amsterdam and London-Frankfurt (which DB were talking about running at one stage before the problems with the new ICE models - don't know if that's still planned at some point or not) make sense, but that's about the limit tbh.

That feels about right and would seem to be consistent with both my own preferences and my observations on the Acela in the US Northeast Corridor. The two halves of the corridor (north and south from New York City) are heavily traveled by train and a lot of people prefer the ~3.5 hour trip to flying.

However, my impression is that relatively few take it all the way from Boston to Washington DC. It's still about the same 1 hour flight that the shorter legs would be by air but now it's basically a full day of train travel. I've done it when I've just been happy to work on the train but it doesn't really make a lot of sense most of the time.

It's the highest speed trains. There is a speed meter on one side of the carriage. The cruise speed is beyond 300 km/h.

Yes. But that's not the average given stops etc.

Even with a train service like the Shinkansen, getting from Tokyo to, say, Hiroshima is over a 5 hour train ride for a distance of a bit under 1,000 km.

I like taking trains in Europe and Japan but there's an upper distance limit for when they make utilitarian sense. (For London to Brussels or Paris though, it's hard to imagine why I'd want to fly even if it were a little cheaper.)

Admittedly my experience has been "door to door" where door 1 is within half an hour's travel of Kings Cross, and door 2 is a hotel in downtown Paris / Brussels. So the differences between "downtown to downtown" and "door to door" times are minor.

Yeah but you can get Eurostar tickets for £59 too.

Whereas going to Marseille's airport is a right pain.

So basically, replace an airport for the 1% with thousands of homes for the 1% (plus foreign thugs wanting to park capital)?

Airports usually suffer heavy contamination from fuel dumping and exhaust, so it's not really somewhere you'd want to build a home. Normally these get turned into garbage dumps or similar usage, to reclaim it you'd need to scrape off a good chunk of topsoil for miles around.

Land in London would be reclaimed, some fresh soil is a tiny cost compared to the value.

In Denver we have two successful neighborhoods built on old airports: Stapleton and Lowry.

This is a place where land is cheap and sprawl is common, so the cost can't have been prohibitive.

Not very Green, tho’, is it? If it is closed it should be replaced with something, well, green, like a public park or a nature reserve.

> Not very Green, tho’ ... green, like a public park

I refer you to the same site for actual green party policies

http://www.sianberry.london/the-power-of-good-ideas/manifest... https://london.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/londonfiles/Lo...

I think their conception of what is "green" for the inhabitants of London is a little wider than just "public parks", though that is mentioned. But not specifically for that site.

They're not a single-issue party. https://www.greenparty.org.uk/green-guarantee/

Plus it looks like there is a fair bit of greenery in the photo.

Not every policy of a green party has to involve the color green

It's not at all for the 1%. The flights can be cheaper than Gatwick or Heathrow when you factor in the transportation to go to the airport.

Rarely. Some weekend flights are cheap but otherwise it tends to be at least £50 more for a city flight. One-way journeys to heathrow and Gatwick both cost less than £10 (compared with £1.5-£2.6 for city) so that this doesn't really make a difference.

I agree they should leave it shut but for different reasons: maybe people would then move elsewhere and we'd stop worrying about London property prices and London trains and London airstrips...