11-21-2018, 01:27 PM
(11-20-2018, 10:56 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: "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.