Originally Posted by
orbitmic
Very many passengers don’t start at cdg but connect there.
in terms of numbers and letters for gates which many of you seem to prefer, I’d be curious to know how frequent are multi terminal airports that use a mix of numbers and letters for all their gates.
in my experience, it is frequent for single terminal airports to use letters (eg DOH, IST, AMS, BRU, etc) to distinguish gates in various areas of the single terminal, but by contrast most multi terminal airports seem to use numbers only (most US airports, most British airports etc) except within a specific terminal which is sub divided (so for instance LHR uses numbers only, but if you use T5 you will get letters there only as T5 has three concourses).
happy to hear if my observation is mistaken but if not, are people so certain that everyone else is abysmally wrong and the new cdg plan is the only logical one?
Your observations are clearly not mistaken, but there are two things to keep in mind imo:
First, a lot of these airports have existed for a
very long time and perhaps a choice was made in the past that they would not make today, but making a change is hard. ADP deciding to change the mess that is CDG T2 took
literal decades.
Second, I think most of the time airports that have separate terminals (without lettered gates) don't see a lot of passenger flow
between terminals. Or at least, not if they aren't doing things like self-connecting. If you arrive at JFK T4 on a connection you're
probably also leaving from T4. So it becomes less important to distinguish between "gate 4" at one terminal vs another. On the other hand, T2E at CDG has a huge interconnection area: 2E, 2F and 2G. It is so important that they highlighted it in the map.
Again the primary purpose of an airport is to get people onto planes. And wayfinding is a very big part of that, so having clear gate numbers that uniquely identify
one place to be and to make it as simple as possible for a passenger to be told how to get there is of vital importance. I believe letter-number gates are the most elegant solution.