Using Rail to connect Airports

[tufsu1]

Here's an interesting viewpoint...written by Donald Missey, PMP - CEO DenTech Inc

Cross Airports with High Speed Rail â€" Why Not?
Air travel is the fastest form of transit available to us, now and in the foreseeable future. By starting with airports as the hub of transit systems instead of trying to shoehorn transit into existing urban centers, many more effective and efficient transit solutions become available. The current crop of urban planners and transit officials who are trying to use only high speed rail to urban core areas are failing to realize that urban centers are no longer one center, but many interconnected nodes, and that the strengths of each are different, but complementary â€" if we let them interact efficiently.

To begin with, airports already have substantial highway access built to accommodate them, and adding high speed rail to reach them only adds to their efficiency as a multi-faceted transit tool. As the options for reaching destinations multiply, competitive factors start to drive costs down, and drive up satisfaction with travel.

Linking airports as transit hubs makes sense especially from the perspective of current land use. Airports generally have substantial open land available to them, and provided that it is used intelligently, it will result in enormous efficiencies in transit use in coming years. Linking aircraft that travel at five hundred miles an hour, with trains that travel at two hundred miles an hour, begins to put an extraordinary level of efficiency into trips by the general public. You could virtually walk to a station in Boulder or Ft Collins and take a train to the plane that would shave hours off of trips from both cities and the destinations in between.

Finally, airports that are subject to severe weather are able to redirect flights to weather frees airports and use the rail system to complete travel for their users with minimum inconvenience.

Does Using Airports as Hubs Detract from Urban Vitality?

The commonly held idea that city centers need to also be transit centers is misguided. Our cities are becoming just as multi-polar as the rest of the world, and urban core areas are already so congested that adding modern intermodal bus, high speed rail, light rail and automobile travel to them just doesn’t make much sense.

We do not locate modern big box retail in city centers, major department stores don’t go there, and anyone feeding a family of six with groceries certainly doesn’t want to live or shop in an area where they cannot park for free and bring a grocery cart straight to their car. There are limitations to how much successful land use can be wrung out or urban core areas, and we have reached that saturation point with the urban mission in many ways; it is time for the urban core areas to relinquish some tasks to other areas.

I write primarily for Denver issues in economics and transportation, and in the Denver area it makes enormous sense for Denver International Airport to become the hub of a Front Range High Speed Rail system. During the era of the Poundstone Amendment and after, antipathy between communities in the Denver Metro area and to some extent along the Front Range ensued. The hangover from this era of competing city governments is no longer useful or economically sensible.

The limited transit solutions first expressed in DRCOG’s development of RTD (think of it as transit 1.0) needs to mature into a more comprehensive set of long term solutions that include all modes of transit along the entire Front Range Corridor - Transit 2.0. High speed rail will be considerably more successful if we build to serve us with an open mind regarding utility, and efficiency in actual trip requirements.

[JeffreyS]

He seems to think that adding any transit to urban areas adds to congestion instead of relieving it. HSR could work that way as the less desirable sub for air but we shouldn't work the problem as what is best(easiest) for HSR but what is best for each community it serves. In areas complimented by good transit now it may offer more.

[thelakelander]

I don't have a problem with using rail to connect airports.  It just needs to actually connect with cities and areas where people live and work, as well.  At times it seems we forget or overlook this important element.

[CS Foltz]

Rail to connect airports makes sense.....reduced parking issue's for sure plus a reduction in congestion guaranteed! As long as city centers or hubs for transfer to other parts of a city is included!  Don't forget the funding issue that would go along with any system no matter what it is!

[Ocklawaha]

I completely disagree with his concepts and vision. With fuel likely to spiral out of control, unless we invent an airplane that can run off of a 9volt battery, it's as over for the airlines as it was for the railroads in 1960. Every one of MJ's readers may live to see a not too distant day when massive airports serve 2-3 flights a day. The amount of jet fuel to passenger mile is astronomical. The only break in this for the airlines might be the use of alcohol fuel, refined to the purity of top shelf Vodka (and drinkable according to the action reports in the Russian Air Force).

Nobody wants to live near an airport, they are not "centers" in any stretch of the word and shifting our transit resources from density to cow pastures doesn't make sense. As for Denver? He's kidding right? Ask anyone in Denver where the airport is and you'll get the same answer, "the new airport is in Wyoming." Access to downtown's means more density, less sprawl, better conservation of the environmental resources, regrowing our cities. Just look at our own Amtrak station, did you know when Amtrak pulled out of Jacksonville Terminal the ridership went through the floor? Jacksonville Terminal in it's lifetime as an active station averaged 15,000,000 passengers per year. JIA and JTA combined barely hit that mark today. Amtrak struggles with a mere 56,000 boardings in Jacksonville today, and the city or the metro is far bigger today then it was in 1966.

This guy must be on the payroll of Central Florida's High Speed Rail, "Just build it, even if it's completely wrong..." I think these guys might even be in bed with the highway or air industry, why else would normally sane planners and consultants sell out to such reckless plans? Just for the sake of argument, what if the fuel really does start to spin out of our lives. How does he propose we get to the "Railport?" Hitching won't be an option, and those trains will run empty. This is interstate highway think, avoid every downtown core, and bypass every intermediate stop. The results of which has been a disaster in rural America.

OCKLAWAHA

[Lunican]

This guy has a very 1950's view of the future.

The Future of Highways in 1958

[Dog Walker]

It may be that he has in his mind the model of the connection that used to exist here and stills exists in European countries;  all local transit converges on the RAILROAD stations.  He might have in mind that the airports are the railroad stations of today, the inter-modal connection point.

Europe has discovered that airplanes are not good forms of medium distance travel, high speed railroads and even regular fast rail lines can carry orders of magnitude more people at a much lower cost in fuel and time.

[Lunican]

Except he is forgetting one thing; the railroad stations are located within the city, not in a remote location.

[Dog Walker]

Yes, there is that!  The silly fellow.

[CS Foltz]

We can't afford to pay for what is proposed Orlando way! Rail connecting Airports, I got no problem with! But there are other parts of the world to connnect to first............like City centers and all of the infrastructure we don't have! Rail to Airports no problem.......paying for it, I do have problems and issue's!

[mtraininjax]

Rail to Airports no problem.......paying for it, I do have problems and issue's!

Ditto!