Meanwhile, in the 2010s they expanded Haneda and started accepting international flights, and you can get to Tokyo via a variety of normal trains (and buses if your destination is on the Shinjuku side of things) in 15 minutes.
The whole thing is landfill, so no residents to be mad either.
Last time I flew to Haneda they made all the flights from the US arrive and depart at times when public transportation wasn't running, to discourage those flights, but it seems like they stopped doing that. So now it's more convenient for everyone, and Narita is largely pointless for everyone that isn't an extreme budget traveler (but I think Haneda built Terminal 3 for that use case... so... is there any reason for Narita to exist if you aren't visiting Chiba?)
It really blew my mind when I first visited, I never thought getting to a major international airport could be that convenient. Swiss transit is so well designed.
Metro and commuter trains run all day and all night (the trains also go to Malmø in Sweden).
Long distance trains go all the way across Denmark and as far as Gothenburg in Sweden, although there are very few been midnight at 4am.
Most large cities have more than one airport anyways. London has like six, New York has three, Beijing has two, etc.
Putting more restrictions on Haneda allows Narita to not be a totally useless airport.
Vienna did this with their airport.
The railway line should go underneath the airport terminal building. If that's not possible, a covered walkway is OK. Many significant European airports are like this.
If a connection on medium/long distance trains isn't realistic, at least there should be a metro (or whatever the 'best' transport the city has, e.g. light rail).
Compare:
Mirabelle: https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=45.679722&mlon=-74.03861...
Vienna: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/48.1155/16.5329
Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
All this rushing and purpose-building led to suboptimal decision making that ultimately made it a completely wasted investment.
A similar story can be told about Olympic stadium in Montreal.
> Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
That's just poor and short sighted planning, nothing specific for the Olympics. Paris for instance isn't making any such short term infrastructure decisions, only rushing to finish some stuff before the Olympics (e.g. line 14 to Orly, while failing others like line 15 South which was supposed to be ready but won't).
From what I've heard, the Olympics have failed to benefit every city that's hosted them except LA, and the reason they were good for LA was specifically that no new infrastructure was built to accommodate them.
Same reason, all infrastructure was either already there or usable after (the Olympic stadium was sold to a football team).
Generally the larger a city is, the better able it is to host an event like this for obvious reasons.
It was a pretty common urban planning concept for a large city to have one airport devoted mostly or entirely to domestic flights, and one mostly or entirely for international flights.
New York domestic: EWR
New York international: JFK
New York freight: LGA
Chicago domestic: MDW
Chicago international: ORD
Houston domestic: HOU
Houston international: IAH
Dallas domestic: LUV
Dallas international: DFW
Paris international: CGD
Paris international: ORY
Washington domestic: DCA
Washington international: IAD
It worked fine for a very long time until the airlines optimized into the hub-and-spoke system we have today, where connecting flights has become normalized.
Because people think now it's normal to have connecting flights all the time, the domestic airports have added international flights, and vice-versa.
What was once orderly and predictable has become very messy, and had a number of other side-effects.
And sure, IAH is the bigger international airport in Houston, but it also carries an absolutely massive amount of domestic travel as well. My comment was about having an airport be almost exclusively international travel with few domestic connections.
That's more than a little revisionist: following the CAB's demand for a joint international-class airport (Dallas refused to use GSW, and DAL had gotten way too small for the traffic, and its runways too small for international jets), Dallas, Fort Worth, and the existing airlines signed an agreement to phase out cross-state operations at local airports and move them all to DFW. When DFW opened, all the airlines moved their non-local operations there per the agreement.
Except Southwest, who'd been created after the agreement, decided they were not bound by it, and enjoyed a now empty and easily accessible airport. And since Southwest's operations were initially intrastate, they didn't fall under CAB jurisdiction, which was the reason for DFW existing in the first place.
The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 then meant Southwest was able to expand to interstate traffic without being restrictible by a dying CAB.
Wright was passed to protect an airport which CAB had all but forced on the area (though to be fair CAB was paying for airports, which was why they wanted them regrouped). Plus bankrupting DFW would have completely broken DAL and aviation to the region.
FWIW I do agree this was ultimately a good thing in the end though. It would not have been good for DFW airport to fail, and the region definitely did need a larger airport.
It seems like we do agree with this line though:
> nobody would have bothered going out there if they weren't forced to by federal law.
I'm pointing out the use of "International" in airport codes, not names.
Since this is HN, we'll get ultra-pedantic...
IAH is technically "Intercontinental Airport of Houston", not "international" for some reason (full name is "George Bush Intercontinental Airport").
Which, like urban highways, really doesn't make a sense in most cases if one spends a few minutes thinking about it. And especially doesn't make sense for an airport whose main traffic is connecting international and domestic flights.
Urban planners in many places in the 1950-1990 time were... special. Blindly copying bullshit that didn't make sense originally and definitely didn't make sense in their city.
Yes, they decided they'll try to do it like Paris with CDG and Orly, but fundamentally misunderstood the differences the traffic - Orly mostly serves tourist destinations or places where lots of people living and working in France have origins in such as Portugal and the Maghreb from where there will be limited amounts of changes to international flights; and Air France is abandoning Orly and focusing entirely on CDG because even the small opportunity misses aren't worth the extra costs. And both are well connected to the city they're serving, including to each other with the RER B (okay it takes 1h30m, but at least it's a mostly direct connection). And CDG even has high speed rail to other cities.
Montreal isn't even close in terms of traffic patterns... and even if it was, the connectivity to Montreal (and ideally Ottawa) really wasn't there.
As soon as the design/planning teams gets big enough that there are many people who barely know eachother, they start competing to the detriment of the whole...
Nobody wants their part late/over budget, so they do things to screw other parts of the project just so their part isn't late or over budget.
Moving an airport is even harder than just building one, because the airport often doesn't own all the businesses and land around said airport, and so is negotiation making those less valuable. And at some point, it's stuck - LAX is so enclosed in Los Angeles and LA is so big that you'd be quite far from it to add a new airport. You're more likely to repurpose Ontario or even a military base instead.
Ontario was repurposed, at least expanded greatly in scope. It used to be basically a UPS and FedEx airstrip with very limited passenger flights. But LAX was so overloaded and out of the way (for a lot of the IE and LA county) Ontario's passenger terminals were significantly expanded. Unless your destination is in the LA metro area Ontario (or John Wayne) is way more convenient than LAX.
They split the traffic between domestic and international making Montreal no longer useful as an interchange hub.
They failed to implement any proper connections to the city itself, which is related to but not due to the distance.
They also failed to place the airport in between two cities to have a bigger market for it.
It was because of very stupid mismanagement and lack of connections, not the distance.
The old airport remained opened and continued serving domestic flights, while international ones were moved to Mirabel... which was extremely dumb because Montreal was the major interchange point between international arrivals and smaller locations not served directly by international flights in Canada. So most of the utility of Montreal airport was killed, and airlines started serving other airports in Canada to do the same thing.
Also, there was no good link to the airport - it shouldn't have opened without a direct at least somewhat fast rail link, but it had no good road nor rail connection.
Also, it was put in the wrong place - one of the potential locations was midway between Ottawa and Montreal and could have served both cities, but politicians decided they don't want that.