Originally Posted by
Antarius
It isn't close, but it wasn't super far away from the current MEX. I believe it was 3-4 miles further, which didn't seem like that much of a concession to have a proper, modern airport. (it's overflown almost immediately after departure from the current MEX). Agree on Felipe Angeles, it's only saving grace is that they gave up on trying to make Toluca work as a viable primary airport for CDMX.
The worst part of the cancelation of the Texcoco airport is that they spent a fortune on it, only to get nothing in return. The blown cost on Texcoco was almost what it took to completely redo LGA. Instead, 6+ billion USD later, taxpayers there have NLU in one hand, and their schlongs in the other.
Yeah when I think of it Texcoco is not too far from most central and popular neighborhoods in CDMX, and would’ve been connected to the metro system with a spur off of línea B. But chilangos are very spoiled with how close their current (and unfortunately unsustainable) airport is to most neighborhoods (without traffic it literally takes 15 mins to get from the airport to condesa in a $10 Uber), hence the handwringing lol.
The Texcoco airport is genuinely such a sad story. The site is ecologically important swampy bog land (similar to Xochimilco) and also had quite a few indigenous communities, which led to pretty lound mass protests. Yet it was still chosen and construction moved along full steam, with, like you said, billions spent. And then the govt had a change of heart and decided to “listen” to the protesters and pull the rug under the project. However, billions were spent, and to make it worse, the area was still destroyed and the communities were still displaced. So you pretry much get all the negatives that come with building a massive new airport but not the actual airport itself. You can see the site from google maps, or flying out of MEX, and you can see the environmental destruction that led to nothing clearly. Genuinely heartbreaking but also a very good lesson on how not to do infrastructure projects and that sometimes it’s ok to reject the sunk cost fallacy.
