Region of Waterloo International Airport - YKF

[danbrotherston]

"Very little like parking and roads":

"bigger aircrafts on average" = (higher capacity) transit
"improvements in air traffic / ground control technology," = intersection improvements/optimizations
"moving some traffic earlier / later in the day" = congestion pricing to shift traffic away from peak hour.

Economically it's very similar to roads, with the same constraints, and solutions.

And yes, runways and gates are priced, I'm not sure if they're priced more at peak times however.  And you're right, it's much less of a populist issue, which is why the solutions proposed by SammyOES are much more feasible for airports than for roads.

I mean, sure, if you boil it down to that level they're very similar.  But so is sewage treatment.  And internet bandwidth.  And everything else even remotely related to capacity.

But they're clearly not at all the same.  The social need is very different.  Our ambulances / fire trucks / police cars / school buses don't need airports or runways.  Every single job and business in this country depends on a local transportation network and only a subset of jobs also depend on airports.  Airports/planes are by their very nature point-to-point, something that isn't true for local transportation that needs to connect everywhere people live to everywhere they work.  We can control the capacity of airports to a very fine grained degree at the gate and flight level - something thats not at all possible for roads.  And we could go on and on.

Even the idea that the "solutions" I mentioned are feasible because airports are less of a populist issue is backwards.  It's not a populist issue because airports don't play the same role that local transportation networks play.  

Anyway, this feels like it boils down to the same old issue I have with you and your road views.  It seems clear to me you have a very simplistic/naive view of the benefits of roads and how they impact society.  So I'll leave it at this and try to focus just on the airport itself in this thread.

First, I don't think it's fair to make your points, and then declare the conversation over.

Because you do make some very good points.  It is also similar to other issues of capacity, like hydro for example, which has, congestion pricing.

I'm not sure what you mean we can control airport capacity, but not vehicle capacity.  Airports function as terminals in the air transportation system, and we have near 100% control over the amount of parking built in cities, and parking serves as the terminal for car transportation.  So, we have equal control.

I'm not sure what you mean for airports, they don't serve the same use case, which is exactly the point, it's not a populist issue.  However, just because it affects and is core to everyone's lives doesn't mean that we can't implement these solutions, for example, see the hydro example.

I disagree with your characterisation of my view of roads. I am well aware of how they benefit and impact society. Transportation is one of the most important things in our world...for example, whether a small depressed town has good access to transportation is the biggest predictor of social mobility for the people in that town.  You are also conflating cars with roads...roads doesn't have to mean something designed for the exclusive use of cars, which is what I am (and traffic engineers are) generally referring to.  I do support roads.

But I think you downplay airports too, for example, yes Pearson is used by upper class folks who want to travel to destinations abroad.  But the airports which provide access to the North bring food and supplies that keep those settlements running.  But just like airports differ, so do roads, the social benefit brought by having roads, isn't necessarily enhanced by having enormous roads.