“integrating LHR and LGW as michael.r.james proposes”

MRJ: Minor point: it is not my proposition but was a serious examination by serious airport & urban experts looking at all options to solving LHR’s congestion issues. I probably have embellished it with my own notions …

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“airlines would not need to run duplicative flights to both airports” and “Subsidising people who think they’re too good to fly certain airlines … ”

MRJ: Only a very few airlines do that. Emirates & BA. The two airports were originally set up to serve the same markets but over the years they have come to serve largely different markets, and most of the full-service airlines have migrated to LHR and Eurocentric, Med + North Africa etc (hence it is Europe’s biggest for point-to-point flights) and LCCs serve Gatwick–it doesn’t have a single US airline. Doesn’t that kind of prove the problem?

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“extending the JFK Airtrain to Manhattan would be wilfully wasting money”

MRJ: I don’t know all the factors but they must be the same as drove the decision to build it to Jamaica in the first place. The Subway A-Line is inadequate to the job, and of course very slow. It may never reduce the traffic on Van Wyck but that is no proof of anything other than the law of road usage: they will always fill up to some threshold because congestion is one of the few things that stops people driving. The high cost of building infrastructure in the US (Anglophone countries in general) is well known (NYC’s Second Ave subway?) but even if nothing can be done about it, does it mean you just stop building it? (alas, in the US with its decrepit road, bridges, railways and transit stations the answer seems be ‘yes’). Big infrastructure always costs a lot with howls by all the usual suspects. But it almost all pays for its big price tag over the decades. I also can’t see what is wrong with a airport surcharge that funds airport-specific infrastructure and your arguments on this are just unworkable.

I’d also point out the similar situation with Paris-CDG which has been served by RER line-B for almost 40 years. It is vastly better than the London U Piccadilly line, but it still serves the commuters of NE Paris, and it thus became very congested and increasingly less than ideal for both sets of users. So they are essentially duplicating/separating the airport line from the commuter line (only 50% of the route) so that it will now be express into Gare du Nord. It too will cost a lot of money but that whinge is exactly what happened when the first RER lines were opened those 4 decade back; only a conservative road lobbyist would argue they should not have been built.

Also you need to try to get a grip on numbers in an appropriate manner. Taking even modest numbers of travellers off the roads can make a difference to the efficiency of those roads. Do a thought experiment: what would happen to JFK, or LHR or CDG if their public transport links shut down. Paralysis for everyone.

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“The vast majority of people using London’s airports are travelling to or from the city centre, not the western or southern suburbs.” and “that suburb-to-airport trips are a significant fraction of the traffic on the M25 seems absurd”.

MRJ: This is deeply puzzling. The vast majority of Londoners do NOT live in Central London–by simple geography-demography. Then there are several millions who live in the south, and of course more millions west, north-west etc. LHR services all of SE England which is something like 30m people. The fact that for a lot of these people, it is currently “easiest” for them to travel into central London and back out again, rather is the issue. (including people on the south coast ICE train that stops at Gatwick but they stay on to London to go back out to LHR). I believe CrossRail will partly address that problem and so would the HSR link LHR-LGW (and my idea, to run it on seamlessly into the Heathrow Express route to Paddington).

Although a much higher number of Parisians do live in central Paris (2.3m), another 10 million live extramuros in the Ile de France (and probably another 10m or more live in the airport’s catchment). This is why they eventually built a TGV line to CDG so some pax can avoid travelling into Paris altogether (it serves additional functions: trains from London, Brussels etc can travel express thru to the south without clogging central Paris TGV track and stations; in summer you can catch a TGV in London express all the way to Avignon). The ambitious Grand Paris plan aims to have several more TGV stations on the periphery of Paris for the same reasons.

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“LHR and LGW don’t bother having landside people movers between their own terminals currently … for a $10B+ maglev”

MRJ: Weird circular (non) logic. See all my replies above. Of course not, because they operate as two airports and the vast majority of airlines (except BA and Emirates) don’t want to split their operations. Those (most) at LHR don’t want to move to LGW for obvious reasons but it would no longer matter if Heathwick existed (and the HSR link worked as advertised, ie. like the Shanghai maglev, flawlessly). The guaranteed ridership would ensure success; and I think they could allow non-pax travel on it at reasonable charge to help finances.

On the cost, you’re making a pure guess. I admit we can’t use the purported cost of Shanghai as a guide but neither can we use the proposed Tokyo-Nagoya maglev cost (of $100bn, $90bn or $52bn take your pick) because it has an outrageous length of tunnel thru mountains. Both China and Japan claim to have cut the cost of building a maglev train by 30 to 50% (excludes tunneling). On top of that, a LHR-LGW maglev really could be built above the M25 & M/A23 all the way so would not involve any private land redemptions (a political as much as cost issue), nor involve any noise or disturbance issues. So, IMO, it would be cheaper than any of these OTT estimates. OTOH there is that ridiculous Anglophone premium put on building any infrastructure.

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“So how about doing nothing? No third runway at LHR, no second runway at LGW, no Boris Island. Airfares rise, people find ways to avoid the London airports or avoid flying altogether, transit investment remains focused where it will do the most good. Would that be so bad?”

MRJ: I almost agree. I never fly if there is a halfway reasonable (rail) alternative. It is why I love France because once in the country I can get around in great comfort and speed and convenience without flying (or driving). A HSR network is developing across Europe, even the UK is joining the club. I hope the Chinese build their fantasy HSR to Europe! (I’ve done the Moscow-Beijing Trans-Siberian rail trip.) But do you know that Eurostar is already essentially saturated and there is talk of building a new one to cope with increased trans-manche travel due to 1) completion of HS2 opening the market to another 30m people and 2) Eurostar’s increasing reach (Amsterdam, proposed to Germany, more specials to south of France (Barcelona, Madrid, Seville?), Milan via the Swiss new Gotthard Base tunnel HSR, etc.)

Flying used to be fun but it’s mostly all gone now. I’ll probably always have to do the occasional long-haul flight but I try to avoid it.

But you know perfectly well the pressures on these mega-hub airports is not going away. It is not just the politicians (who would rather it was NIMTOO) but business and ultimately even many of those Nimby-ists objecting to the third runway. Airports are a very big contributor to the economic dominance of world cities.

Besides, I look at it as much as a glass half-full challenge. Boris Island would not only make a far superior aviation solution for London forever, but it would improve London by creating a newtown on the old LHR site and remove the current disturbance to millions of London residents. But they need to do it now, not after both LHR and LGW start building their new runways etc. A second best solution is Heathwick linked by maglev.

And that brings me to another cost issue that all you nay-sayers are just ignoring: the estimated £14-18bn to build LHR’s third runway, and all the disturbance it will cause. Not only is it an awful lot cheaper to build an extra runway at LGW but you’d be building one instead of two; seriously that alone would save the cost of the maglev.