Originally Posted by
sbm12
You mean like much of Western Europe? Or cities in China and SE Asia?
If you want to read more about the idea of mega-airports and building them "right"
check out this book (pre-release) from a FTer and pretty smart guy. I've read the first chapter of the galleys and it is pretty smart stuff.
In the USA we're screwed because the infrastructure is already there and the NIMBYs won't accept change.
Yep, more like China and SE Asia than Western Europe (which is a bit of column A and a bit of column B if for no other reason than that historically each country wanted its own major airport even when that lead to two major airports being fairly close together).
There are a lot of reasons we don't do something better here including our political aversion to "planning", the fact that existing infrastructure has constituents who would lobby against changes, NIMBY factors, and our reliance on "dedicated" revenue streams for much of our infrastructure which by definition cannot be redirected to new/different development or different modes of transportation.