Comment by potato3732842 3 hours ago
You can always come up with some pretext to justify things by ignoring the other side of the equation.
How many lives do the man hours spent commuting, or toiling away to afford higher rents waste?
IDK how the math pencils out, but an attempt ought to be made before drawing conclusions.
San Jose does. You can, in theory, walk to downtown from the airport; it's about an hour and a half via pedestrian trail:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/zhZdA5tWGAKunM2e8
(This is widely considered a misfeature of San Jose - it limits the height of buildings in downtown San Jose to 10 stories because the downtown is directly under the flight path of arriving flights, it limits runway length and airport expansion, and it means that planes and their noise fly directly over key tourist attractions like the Rose Garden and Convention Center. If we ever had a major plane crash like this one in San Jose it would be a disaster, because the airport is bounded by 101 on the north, 880 on the south, the arriving flight path goes right over downtown, and the departing flight path goes right over Levi's Stadium, Great America, and several office buildings.)
There’s roughly a mile of roads, green spaces, and river between the airport and downtown San Jose which an absolutely identical accident would impact. It’s not very wide, but pilots aren’t going to aim for buildings if they can help it.
So while downtown being in the flight path is a risk there was some method to the madness which caused that alignment.
San Diego's airport, on the other hand, has the a bustling restaurant district, an interstate with bumper-to-bumper traffic, and a dense residential neighborhood all within a mile off one end of the runway -- and a popular shopping area, a middle school, and a high school all within a mile and a half off the other end.
On top of that, the terrain rises in both directions (on one side so sharply that it's too steep for landing planes to use ILS).
>None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midway_International_Airport
It's hard to project growth. Things build right up to the limit of the airport for convenient access, then the area grows and the airport needs to grow - and what do you do? Seattle-Tacoma is critically undersized for the traffic it gets and has been struggling with the fact that there's physically nowhere to expand to.
Zoning is one option to direct growth, but you can move airports. Chicago is right next to a Great Lake and there’s relatively shallow areas ready to be reclaimed etc.
Obviously you’re better off making such decisions early rather than building a huge airport only to abandon it. Thus it’s called urban planning not urban triage.
>Zoning is one option to direct growth
My magic crystal ball named "the past 50yr of history" says it is unlikely to be the success you envision.
>How many lives do the man hours spent commuting, or toiling away to afford higher rents waste?
Zero.
Not every man’s hour is equal.
None? Nobody puts airports inside city centers and metro areas don’t just have dense urban housing. The common solution in many land strapped cities is for airports to rout aircraft over water often by building airports on reclaimed land.
What generally gets areas in trouble is locations that used to be a good get worse as aircraft get larger and the surroundings get built up. The solution is to send larger airplanes to a new airport, but it’s not free and there’s no clear line when things get unacceptably dangerous.