Originally Posted by
johnden
Until UA improves their on-time performance, the moving walkways at hubs are life savers.
When every minute counts, the walkways allow a little less sweat and stress. Time is very valuable to frequent travelers. Missing one flight a month by 5 min due to crowds/lines/long walks matters. Having the express route from one end to the other, free of gate lice, window shoppers, casual wanderers, helps us get from A->B. The airport isn't a destination, it's a transport link.
At ORD it is common for the gate lines to extend into the corridor. Off topic, but when UA decided to create more gate lice (ala WN style) with the formal boarding queues, airports became more congested, not less.
holy hell.
i just went CLT-ORD-XNA today. the inbound ORD-CLT was delayed, and my original connection at ORD was only 50 minutes. so naturally i landed with only about 8 minutes to get from C8 to F26.
of course naturally i misconnected and had to be rebooked on AA. but as i walked down C, there was very little space to walk by because of the construction. and from what i've seen with EWR, the final product will be smaller than the construction box, but the people lingering around put it back to original construction box size. i thought back to all the times i had to run between B and C to catch a flight and there have been some times where the moving walkway shaved off a couple minutes and i barely made the cutoff.
trying to conceptualize just how little space is left is tough to imagine until you walk through it, and after today i just know it's going to be a pain in the ... from time to time. and with the boarding group spillover we get, and anyone who departs from C gates knows how crowded it gets during peak times in the afternoon, this will be a major pain.
tl;dr: if the plan was to just get rid of them and create a more open space, that'd be fine. but since they're replacing it with concessions and food, i'd venture to say it'll make things worse.