Tag Archives: aerotropolis

TOD at IAD: a concept for developing Saarinen Circle at Dulles International Airport

As the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority continues work on Phase 2 of the Metrorail extension to Dulles International Airport and beyond, it’s worth considering some of the transit oriented development opportunities at the airport beyond just the obvious connection for passengers at the terminal.

Airports around the world take advantage of their connectivity in developing an airport city: office space, warehouses, hotels all diversify an airport’s business income. It’s a virtuous cycle:

real estate connected to the airport has value;
rents from those spaces diversifies airport revenues and drives down their operating costs;
lower costs encourage more airline service which increase connectivity around the world;
increased connectivity adds value to the airport location.

Amsterdam Schiphol is one of the best examples, with nearly 6 million sf of commercial space on the airport grounds alone. They don’t just brand themselves as an airport city, but as the ‘Schiphol CBD,’ complete with new public spaces.

Munich Airport Center. Image from Wikipedia.

While that may be an ultimate goal, perhaps something closer to the Munich Airport Center (MAC) is a better match – particularly for any development in the Dulles parking bowl within Saarinen Circle. MAC is a pedestrian oriented retail and commercial complex connecting the airport’s two terminals and S-Bahn station, flanked by airport parking, buses, and a hotel. All of the key airport destinations feed pedestrians into the space: parking, taxi, drop-off, etc, increasing foot traffic to the retail spaces.

Schematic map of Munich Airport Center; note retail (red) and restaurants (yellow), Terminal 1 (top), Terminal 2 and the Forum (bottom), S-Bahn station (below), buses (left side) and taxis (right side).

The most iconic element is the MAC Forum, a large covered outdoor plaza surrounded by shops and offices. The airport operator extensively programs the Forum with a variety of sponsored events to draw in non-airport patrons (for whom parking fees are waived) in addition to workers and travelers.

Entrance to the S-Bahn at the MAC Forum; CC image from Jeromyu on Flickr.

Munich Airport Forum; showing roof over the open air public space. Creative Commons image from Nir on Flickr.

The key elements of the Munich Airport Center include retail, restaurants, public space, and public transit. For adjacent development, the airport offers flexible office and conference space for rent (and is working on additional office development – they do not yet have planning permission for office space on the magnitude of Schiphol) as well as a connected hotel.

MWAA is actively looking to diversify their revenues at Dulles. For development, MWAA is shopping the Western Lands on the far side of the airport, searching for interest in a second on-airport hotel, as well as other various sites on airport property that might generate some kind of revenue for the Authority. Among other development opportunities, they list ‘Saarinen Circle’ as something to watch.

Saarinen Circle surrounds the surface parking lot directly in front of the Eero Saarinen terminal building. The Metro station (under construction) and parking garage are currently connected to the main terminal via a tunnel beneath the parking lot.

The Saarinen Circle site has several advantages. Space is plentiful (there was plenty of complaining about the decision to move the Metro station to the opposite side of the parking lot from the terminal), but the distances aren’t overwhelming: The distance between the garage and the terminal is similar to the distance between Terminals 1 and 2 at Munich. Development in the circle has the potential to make that walk a pleasant stroll among shops and public space, rather than through the drab-but-functional existing tunnel.

Because of the iconic Saarinen Terminal and the views of it for drivers approaching via Saarinen Circle, any development within the parking bowl couldn’t be very tall. Several historic preservationists objected to the Metro aerial guideway’s potential to block views. While this may foreclose on a large structure such as the one covering Munich’s Forum (after all, the canopy over the forum is the signature architecture for Munich’s airport – Dulles already has an icon), it shouldn’t stop all development. Using the existing tunnel level as the ‘ground’ floor would offer some room for development above. MAC is similarly surrounded by roadways and airport infrastructure at different levels.

Munich Airport Center makes good use of changes in grade to connect pedestrians between the terminals at multiple levels. Relocating existing taxi, bus, and valet parking to flank a new multi-level development between the terminal building and the parking garage/Metro station. The development not only has the chance to aid the finances of IAD by generating non-aviation revenue, but also in attracting more use to the Metro station via old-fashioned transit oriented development.

There’s plenty of developable land at Dulles, but only Saarinen Circle has the key location between the Metro station and the terminal. Airports around the world provide models for better uses of the space than surface parking.

Dispatch from the battle lines over Globalization: US Airlines take on the Middle East Carriers

Dubai International Airport. CC image from Raihan S.R. Bakhsh

There’s a fight brewing amongst big international airlines. The old guys are complaining that the new kids aren’t playing by the same rules; the new kids argue that the old guys need to step up their game. The dispute represents a fascinating window into a very public battle over globalization. What are the rules, and who gets to make them?

A coalition of the three major American airlines (American/US Airways, United, and Delta) combined with many of the unions that represent their employees are putting on a full-court press (complete with ads in DC’s Metro), arguing that the Big Three carriers in the Middle East (Emirates, Qatar, and Etihad – often abbreviated as the ME3) are undermining the principles of free and fair competition with subsidies that distort the market. The Gulf air carriers are pushing back against the accusations, arguing they provide a superior product at a lower cost. Vox has a brief article that summarizes the arguments for both sides.

The US carriers outline billions in subsidies to these carriers. They include everything from subsidized development of the region’s massive airports to interest-free loans and infusions of capital from the ruling families – who also own the airlines themselves. The alleged subsidies support Qatar and Etihad to a greater degree than Emirates (the paper alleges that Qatar and Etihad would not be viable commercial businesses without their subsidies; not so for Emirates). You can find the white paper and presentation here.

Summary of the subsidies alleged by the US carriers. Image from the Americans for Fair Skies presentation.

Central to the debate are the United States’ Open Skies treaties with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Open Skies treaties deregulate the routes and destinations for international air travel between the two signatories. The US State Department prioritized signing Open Skies agreements since signing the first such agreement between the US and the Netherlands in 1992 (see the full list of agreements here, as well as the text of a sample agreement).

There is an inherent asymmetry in any Open Skies agreement between the United States and Qatar or the UAE; due to the small size of those countries, the agreements only add two or three destinations worth serving for US airlines (indeed, there are only two scheduled flights to Qatar or the UAE from US-based carriers – Delta flies ATL-DXB and United flies IAD-DXB). Gulf airlines, however, earn rights to fly to a wide array of American cities.

Part of the success of the Gulf carriers is due to the geographic advantage of the Middle East hubs. Dubai has long served as a stopover point for refueling along the Kangaroo Route. Now, carriers like Emirates use Dubai as centrally located hub to efficiently connect air traffic between Europe, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.

However, there’s more to the rise of the Gulf carriers than advantageous geography. For these Gulf states (often, effectively, city-states), focusing on aviation is a deliberate economic development strategy. When you’re talking about state-owned businesses, how do you differentiate between the viability of the various airlines as businesses from the state’s explicit policy of aviation-focused economic development? In their white paper, the US carriers make the case that Open Skies agreements assumed that an open market would provide a superior business model to state-owned airlines (and there is a long history around the world of poorly run state-owned airlines) and that competition would bring this truth to light. However, with the rise of State Capitalism, the US carriers argue, it’s not clear that assumption can be trusted.

It’s the next step in the idea of developing around the aerotropolis. Instead of building your economy around an airport, why not build it around an airline? Dubai’s success in developing their middle-eastern metropolis around a global aviation hub inspired Qatar and Abu Dhabi to do the same – a strategy that not only required the airport, but the airline to feed it.

The Gulf carriers aren’t just looking to their Middle East hub airports, either. Emirates took advantage of struggling Alitalia to earn a fifth-freedom route from Milan to JFK. Emirates makes no secret of their ambitions to offer service around the globe via some key fifth-freedom routes:

President Tim Clark has revealed the first details of what looks like the next step in Emirates’ march to become a truly global powerhouse. On the sidelines of last week’s International Air Transport Association (IATA) annual general meeting in Cape Town, the airline outlined plans to set up a major transpacific operation. Its aircraft would be flying through intermediate points in Asia to destinations in North America. What is making the threat even more serious for Asian and U.S. airlines is that Emirates has another 67 Airbus A380s on firm order, which—like its large incoming fleet of Boeing 777-300ERs—has the range capability to fly from many points in Asia to cities far beyond the U.S. West Coast.

Emirates can choose from several geographic points that offer the necessary aeropolitical framework. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has an open skies agreement with the U.S. “It allows us to take passengers on a fifth-freedom basis from the West Coast and central points in the U.S. to points in Asia,” Clark says. In Asia, there are open skies agreements with Thailand and Singapore. Emirates also has similar rights for some destinations in Japan.

Bold added. This is the root of the entire debate: a battle over the details of a global aeropolitical framework. A battle over the rules.

When it comes to Emirates, their Dubai hub isn’t the concern from the US carriers. The real concern is these aspirations to cover the globe with fifth-freedom traffic. Delta claims that the ME3’s cheap connections in Dubai make it difficult to serve India directly from the US (and presents strong competition for the European joint venture partners if connecting to India in Europe). Flying to US cities from Europe or Asia directly (e.g. the current New York-Milan service, if expanded to other airports) threatens to undermine direct service to Europe; additional fifth-freedom routes across the Pacific could do the same. Brett Snyder notes the concern about hurting the overall network:

If the Middle East carriers skim the international markets with the most traffic, then the US carriers will have to cut back service. When international flights get cut, the whole network becomes vulnerable. The end result is probably less service for smaller and mid-tier cities. It’s just the way the network effect works.

While the American carriers are asking the US Government to revisit these agreements, the Feds must balance other US interests in the region beyond air travel. Qatar and the UAE host a number of US military facilities. The US has a large trade surplus with both nations, partly due to companies like Boeing selling lots of widebody airliners to the Gulf Carriers. American cargo airlines like FedEx take advantage of Open Skies in a similar fashion to the Gulf carriers, facilitating global cargo movement. In other words, it’s not clear the US carriers have a sympathetic ear from the Federal government.

The PR campaign from the US carriers is an attempt to change policy by influencing public opinion, but it will be an uphill climb with the general public. Counter-arguments from the Gulf carriers ask why the American carriers are afraid of competition. US airlines aren’t exactly earning lots of sympathy from the public.

The PR battle is also getting nasty: Qatar Airways’ CEO accuses Delta of flying “crap” planes without a hint of irony: it’s not hard to buy nice, new aircraft when you can fall back on massive capital infusions (as alleged in the white paper) to buy those expensive aircraft. Lufthansa’s CEO, facing a strike from his unionized pilots, joked that he should hire Qatar’s CEO as his union advisor (unions being illegal in Qatar and the UAE). And while customers might like the product and the price point offered by the Gulf carriers, it’s not clear than anyone in the US would be willing to accept the trade-offs that make that product possible.

The white paper notes that the subsidies documented meet the World Trade Organization definition. However, even though both Qatar and the UAE are part of the WTO, aviation isn’t a core part of the WTO’s agreements.

If aviation were a part of the WTO, there would be a specific process to raise and resolve disputes. In other trade areas, the WTO can authorize the use of ‘counterveiling measures’ against subsidies and dumping, such as tariffs or restrictions on trade volume. But here, there aren’t any specific rules governing aviation – hence the PR campaign.

In essence, this is a battle over the rules. If the story of the aerotropolis is the story of globalization, is this a tide that lifts all boats? Or is it a race to the bottom? Competition is good, but what if the basis for that competition is based on the rules governing labor markets in Qatar or the UAE? Will the fight over the rules of the game lead to improvements in working conditions for migrant labor in the middle east? While the US airlines are certainly acting in their own self-interest, is this battle similar to the public scrutiny over Qatar’s labor practices in advance of hosting the 2022 World Cup? Could this battle over the rules not only find room for fair competition, but also leverage an improved quality of life elsewhere in the world?

Or is all of that wishful thinking?

Miscellaneous information and visuals about Dulles International Airport

In the process of scouring the internet for sources for my previous post on growing air cargo traffic at Dulles International Airport, I came across a whole host of interesting documents and information that I couldn’t find a way to fit into the narrative. So, here’s a smorgasboard of some tangentially related items I found interesting.

The image above is one example, showing spacing for wayfinding signage at IAD. Some signage uses the ‘Saarinen’ typeface, designed by Eero Saarinen specifically for the airport. The graphic is from IAD’s extensive Airport Design Standards and Signing Guidelines document, a document that not only establishes standards for the aesthetics of the airport, but also reveals the future plans for expansion at IAD.

The challenge of costs: The cost per enplanement at Dulles has risen above the median for peer airports as MWAA engaged on IAD’s capital construction program. DCA’s constraints don’t provide room for growth, but don’t require large capital expenses, either:

Growth potential: Dulles has room to grow and handle 3x as many passengers as it does today, and with a significant increase in airfield capacity as well.

Future layout: While the planning consistently shows four tiers of midfield concourses, the schematic from the Design Guidelines re-names the terminals to follow the sequence of an Aerotrain trip, rather than the current nomenclature:

Regional competition among Washington-area airports: Dulles handled the most passengers in 2012, but all three airports are very similar in overall traffic levels. Dulles has the most connecting traffic (42% of passengers connect) and the fewest number of origins/destinations in the DC area. Dulles also has (by far) the international traffic:

At the same time, the FAA forecasts for growth show Dulles taking the majority of the incremental air traffic for the region:

Development opportunities: An illustrative example from MWAA’s strategic planning documents showing the land available for development at the airport:

The northern-most of those orange blobs is a potential transit-oriented development project at the Route 606 Metro Station.

Parking symbols: From the Design Guidelines, examples of sky-related symbols for parking wayfinding:

Growing cargo traffic at Dulles – the challenges of realizing the value of an aerotropolis

Dulles International Airport – from Google Maps

In DC’s western suburbs, two related battles concerning growth are at the forefront. One is a plan for a new highway, the other is the desire to expand air cargo operations at Dulles International Airport. Both concepts seem to be hitched to one another, but they ought to be considered separately on their own merits.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority has expressed a desire to grow cargo traffic at Dulles. At the same time, sprawl interests are pushing the bi-county parkway, pitching the road as a benefit to Dulles. Jonathan O’Connell’s profile of several road advocates in the Washington Post shows how much of the advocacy is another verse of the same song.

Looking to untie the road interests and airport interests David Alpert asks why MWAA is pushing all things Dulles in a Washington Post op-ed, when passengers seem more interested in DCA:

Virginia and airport officials seem to behave as though their mission is to make more stuff happen at Dulles, whether that stuff wants to happen there or not.

A quick glance through an MWAA powerpoint from their strategic planning exercises explains the logic of focusing growth on Dulles. DCA is constrained (physically, legally) with room to grow only on the margins. DCA can never be the full-service International airport that IAD can; and MWAA fears maximizing value at DCA would hurt IAD’s currently fragile position – the FAA’s recently approved slot-swap gave JetBlue a foothold at DCA, with a corresponding reduction in flights at IAD (slide 16).

Dulles relies on air traffic for approximately 75% of its revenues. While Dulles has tremendous capacity to grow, realizing that potential requires additional capital investment, such as Dulles’ Aerotrain and other elements of the recent D2 program. Now, Dulles finds itself trapped with a higher cost per enplanement than other airports due to the capital program, and a revenue stream overly reliant on aviation revenues.

Increased air cargo has the potential to help on both counts. More freight means more flights, boosting aviation revenues without requiring new airport facility investments. More freight also means increased demand for revenue-generating uses of airport land that currently lie fallow.

The catch is this: it’s not easy creating a freight business out of nothing. Dulles does not have the central location like Memphis or Louisville, the central US hubs for FedEx and UPS, respectively. The area does not have a huge manufacturing base, either – air cargo shipments originating or terminating in IAD would need to focus on consumer goods. Likewise, the airport does not currently have a major cargo presence that would lure the manufacturing that does exist in the area to cluster around the airport. Chickens and eggs are both missing.

There are opportunities, however. Dulles does have huge tracts of land, the ability for 24 hour operations, and lots of airfield capacity. Both FedEx and UPS operate regional hubs in the US to avoid the need to route all cargo through their core hubs in Memphis and Louisville. On the east coast, FedEx operates out of Newark while UPS operates their east coast hub in Philadelphia. Linda Loyd profiled the UPS operation in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Starting at 7 a.m. each day, UPS planes arrive in Philadelphia from Cologne, which is UPS’s European hub, and from England and Paris. International flights from Louisville, Ky., stop in Philadelphia heading to Europe, and planes leave Europe, stopping in Philadelphia, bound for Louisville, which is UPS’s air headquarters. Each afternoon, flights arrive here loaded with packages from Dallas and Southern California.

UPS is the world’s largest transportation company, and the Philadelphia facility – second in size only to Louisville – handles 70,000 parcels and documents per hour. That number reaches 95,000 at peak times like Christmas, with parcels headed to and from 18 states, as far west as California.

…

Just before midnight, as passenger terminals and commercial flights are winding down, operations are heating up at UPS. Package sorting largely happens at night. More than 1,000 UPS workers report at 11 p.m. for the “night sort,” which continues until about 3 a.m., or until all packages are unloaded and sorted and put back into trucks, trailers, and planes to leave again.

Cargo moves around the world in multiple stops, not one long journey.

At each stop, planes and trucks are emptied, and packages are sorted and scanned, and reloaded on other flights. The network tracks packages on each leg of the trip, in order to maximize the weight and loads, through constant sorting and resorting. While a lot of the work is automated, it requires an army of people, along with bar-code scanners and a city of conveyor belts that crisscross like freeways.

Philadelphia’s UPS facility might be ripe for poaching: As Loyd’s article notes, the 212 acre site lies in the way of a proposed runway expansion at PHL. The airport’s proffered alternative location is smaller, closer to residential neighbors, and without room for expansion. Unsurprisingly, UPS does not favor the expansion (nor does PHL’s anchor tenant, US Air – fearing the increased fees that currently hurt an airport like Dulles).

In the case that UPS is looking for alternative airports, MWAA Board Minutes show the courtship in progress. Dulles can offer an east-coast location with room to grow and unconstrained flight operations, and hooking an anchor cargo integrator like UPS would be attractive to other air cargo operators, as well as businesses with lots of air cargo shipments.

While increased cargo is one option to grow non-aviation revenues through land development, it is not the only option. Increasing non-aviation revenues is important to provide a counter-cyclical revenue source for airport operations. It also represents a change in MWAA’s practices – while most airports have been increasing their share of non-aeronautical revenues, MWAA has been going in the opposite direction (page 28).

The options under immediate consideration, however, sound awfully uninspiring (if functional): more parking, another gas station, and an additional hotel (page 29). On the western side of the airport, near the proposed highway expansion, MWAA envisions industrial development that can benefit from direct access to the airport’s ramp.

MWAA supports road expansion near the airport because MWAA is not in a position to argue against improvements to airport access. However, that doesn’t mean the shape of development on and around the airport can’t move in a more sustainable direction. There are a great deal of opportunities to green the airport, but perhaps the most promising would be re-thinking the shape of airport development with the arrival of Metro into something akin to other ‘airport city’ concepts around the world – capitalizing on the real estate value Metro will bring, the on-airport location, and the virtuous cycle of improving IAD’s airport experience – certainly more ambitious than a second convenience store.

Part of the challenge is in counting on growth – the accuracy record of forecast traffic doesn’t exactly build confidence, but the future for more urban development, walkable places, and transit-oriented development in the region is promising. The challenge will be in taking the city approach to the airport; thinking beyond just infrastructure, cargo, and agglomeration economies. Airport terminals are already, by necessity, pedestrian-oriented environments between drop-off and the gate. Extending that mindset beyond the terminal is the next step.

HSR and the Aerotropolis

Frankfurt Airport long-distance rail station - CC image from Heidas on Wiki

Alon Levy has a post up about the potential for high speed rail to fulfill the goals of ‘decongesting’ US airports. Alon looks at origin/destination pairs and compares the flight time to comparable HSR ranges where the technology has a chance to offer a superior travel time.

The takeaway is that the benefits for airport relief are likely bigger in California than they would be in the Northeast Corridor. Assuming a fully built out rail system, this makes some intuitive sense: California’s big cities are arranged somewhat linearly along the coast/central valley, just as the NEC cities do along the fall line. The big difference would appear to be the proximity of other cities – much of the California air traffic is intra-California travel:

Anonymouse in comments brings a good point about the distribution of short-haul travel within airport systems: there is often proportionately more of it at the secondary airports…

The five LA-area airports between them have 27.5% of their domestic traffic within 3-hour radius, but this splits as 21% at LAX, 35% at Long Beach, 37% at Santa Ana, 40% at Ontario, and 63% at Burbank. The three Bay Area airports between them have 19% of their domestic traffic going to LA and a total of 35% within 5-hour train radius, but this splits as 14% and 29% at SFO, 27% and 48% at San Jose, and 35% and 57% at Oakland.

In California, this isn’t a surprise, as SFO and LAX are the big international hubs. In the Bay Area, SFO is next to the proposed line, but LAX is not. Translating that to the NEC is different, however. One element is adjacency – the NEC (or a short extension thereof) runs directly next to DCA, BWI, PHL, and EWR – of which only EWR is a major international hub.

This raises a few issues for HSR trips substituting for flights: will HSR replace an entire trip, or just one leg of a trip? If HSR is going to replace one leg of a trip, how easy does the HSR-Airport transfer have to be? What kinds of trips would make sense for this kind of transfer, and are the best airports positioned along the line to handle them?

On the domestic/short haul flights, commenter Anonymouse writes:

In the Bay Area at least, there’s been a slow tendency for flights to get more concentrated at SFO, with OAK and SJC having mostly domestic flights, and most of those short hauls operated by Southwest. With an HSR line to LA, each of OAK and SJC can easily lose a quarter of its passengers overnight, and with good connections to San Diego, Las Vegas, and Reno, that could become half of all their traffic. SFO and LAX would lose some of their existing passengers, obviously, but not as many, thanks to the fact that they’re hubs. And that means that airlines are more likely to cut flights at the secondary airports, rather than SFO, thus filling the SFO capacity right back up with the passengers displaced from the secondary airports.

On the NEC, a similar retrenchment to the big airports would mean more traffic at IAD, EWR, and JFK. These three are the busiest international airports along the NEC. Dulles in particular is one of the few with room to grow, and grow substantially. The one problem: Dulles (like JFK) isn’t adjacent to the NEC.

Maybe the more interesting case is DCA. With no international facilities (save for border pre-clearance cities), DCA’s traffic is virtually all domestic. DCA’s old noise-related perimeter rule also limits most of the destinations to a 1,250 mile radius. The wiki summary of domestic destinations shows several ripe for rail substitutions (in bold):

Busiest Domestic Routes from DCA (May 2011 – April 2012)^[26]
Rank	Airport	Passengers	Carriers
1	Atlanta, Georgia	828,000	AirTran, Delta
2	Chicago (O’Hare), Illinois	697,000	American, United
3	Boston, Massachusetts	685,000	Delta, JetBlue, US Airways
4	Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas	489,000	American, US Airways
5	Miami, Florida	449,000	American
6	New York (LaGuardia), New York	362,000	Delta, US Airways
7	Orlando, Florida	350,000	AirTran, Delta, JetBlue, US Airways
8	Fort Lauderdale, Florida	315,000	JetBlue, Spirit, US Airways
9	Charlotte, North Carolina	294,000	US Airways
10	Houston, Texas	264,000	United

The same data for BWI:

Busiest domestic routes from BWI (May 2011 – April 2012)^[33]
Rank	City	Passengers	Airline(s)
1	Atlanta, Georgia	720,000	AirTran, Delta, Southwest
2	Boston, Massachusetts	549,000	AirTran, JetBlue, Southwest
3	Charlotte, North Carolina	483,000	AirTran, US Airways
4	Orlando, Florida	463,000	AirTran, Southwest
5	Detroit, Michigan	342,000	Delta, Southwest
6	Tampa, Florida	301,000	AirTran, Southwest
7	Denver, Colorado	294,000	Southwest, United
8	Providence, Rhode Island	293,000	Southwest
9	Fort Lauderdale, Florida	283,000	AirTran, Southwest
10	Manchester, NH	273,000	Southwest

These two airports would seem to be the candidates to see a lot of rail trip substitution, with Dulles remaining the region’s predominant international hub.

Again, the problem is that Dulles is not along the NEC, preventing the kind of air/rail connection you see in Frankfurt or in Paris. Or, look at the top destination for both DCA and BWI – Atlanta. Given Atlanta’s massive hub status, what kind of air-rail connection would be required to get passengers to use the train for the first leg of that journey? Making the connection to get an international flight at Frankfurt is one thing, but doing so in Atlanta is another – particularly if the rail and air terminals are not co-located.

Having a great HSR-Airport station at DCA or BWI is relatively easy (compared to, say, IAD). Alon makes this observation about California:

Note, by the way, how California is planning the Oakland Airport Connector and considering an HSR station at Burbank Airport instead of downtown Burbank. Because if there’s one place Californians would really need to use HSR to get to, it’s an airport 63% of whose traffic competes with HSR.

Now, a DCA rail station has far more potential that just serving the airport (it would essentially replace the current Crystal City VRE station and could easily offer pedestrian connections to both Crystal City and to National Airport), and it would be far more than just the massive parking garage that is the BWI rail station. Burbank (~2.5 million passengers a year) also isn’t anywhere near National Airport (~18 million passengers a year). So, what might the future look like for DCA and BWI in an age of ubiquitous HSR? Alon offers one possibility:

For New York, the best things that can be done then are to use larger planes on domestic flights, and find relief airports. In Japan, the domestic flights use widebodies, sometimes even 747s, and this has enabled Tokyo-Sapporo to grow to become the world’s highest-capacity air city pair. In the US there are more airlines and the city pairs are less thick, but there is still room for larger planes than 737s and 757s.

Changing DCA’s perimeter restriction could plausibly open the door to such a change, though security and airfield restrictions limit that to some degree. (Boeing did recently bring a 787 into DCA for display, and Delta did operate 767s into DCA to add passenger capacity prior to the Obama inauguration – would’ve been fun to be at Gravelly Point for that.) Larger planes, and potentially different destinations – if HSR changes the distribution of the airline hub model.

Commenter Jonathan English offers a competing hypothesis:

Unfortunately, major American airlines (compared with European and Asian airlines) are obsessed with frequency. They believe that they will only attract business travellers if they offer many flights per day, in many cases hourly or even more. This means that even if high-speed rail really eats into the number of people flying, airlines may just compensate by down-gauging from 737s and 320s to regional jets. They’ll still operate just as many flights and put the same pressure on runways.

Given the importance of frequency to transit, complaining about frequent air service might seem a bit ungrateful, but air travel isn’t really like transit. Due to limited capacity and security, you must schedule in advance. Security, logistics, and airport location demands an early arrival.

Predicting what the air travel marketplace will look like in this hypothetical scenario is somewhat pointless – what if oil prices spike? What if there is political action on global warming resulting in a carbon tax or something like it? Air travel will most certainly still have a major (and a high value) role in linking these places, but exactly which places are linked could easily be disrupted.

Links: iPhones and airports

CC image from Yutaka Tsutano

Rail to Dulles: MWAA Board member Robert Brown suggests eliminating the Dulles Airport rail station and replacing it with a people mover to connect to the Route 28 station as a means to save costs. Yonah Freemark finds the concept intriguing, offering some operational considerations that could make it work.

However, the notion that building an entirely new landside people mover system will save money is ludicrous (IAD’s AeroTrain just clocked in at $1.4 billion). Likewise, while the concept would be an interesting solution to connecting an existing airport to an existing rail link (such as between BWI and the BWI rail station), the fact that the rail line has not yet built is a perfect opportunity to ensure that the airport itself is ‘on the way,’ to borrow Jarrett Walker’s terminology.

Freemark notes that one benefit of this concept would be to reduce travel time to the core and/or Tysons, but several other concepts considered by Metro would probably provide more utility to larger areas of service.

Meanwhile, Dulles offers a connection to the world via it’s ‘accidental aerotropolis.’

iPhones and agglomerations: When I last touched on the Aerotropolis, I noted Aaron Renn’s observation that the book isn’t so much about airports and cities as it is about globalization. One such element is the extensive description of the extraordinary agglomeration of manufacturing infrastructure and firms in Shenzhen.

This weekend’s New York Times contains a lengthy article on why the iPhone and other similar devices are not manufactured in the United States. In his blog, Paul Krugman sums up that article in one word: agglomeration. Some key snippets from the article:

But by 2004, Apple had largely turned to foreign manufacturing. Guiding that decision was Apple’s operations expert, Timothy D. Cook, who replaced Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, six weeks before Mr. Jobs’s death. Most other American electronics companies had already gone abroad, and Apple, which at the time was struggling, felt it had to grasp every advantage.

In part, Asia was attractive because the semiskilled workers there were cheaper. But that wasn’t driving Apple. For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.

For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.

Since we’re talking about iPhones and not cheap Christmas ornaments, the availability of materials and the skill of the labor is more important than the cost of that labor – all benefits of the large agglomeration of technology firms in Shenzhen.

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

More thoughts on iPhones, agglomerations, and jobs from Matt Yglesias and Tyler Cowen.

Likewise, an interesting set of charts looking at market share for various computing platforms – starting from more traditional personal computers, but eventually adding in smartphones and tablets. While smartphones and tablets aren’t yet substitutes for a personal computer, they’re getting closer.

Station Domination: via Tyler Cowen, an interesting post from Matt Glassman on the cost of Metro station advertising and the linkages between national politics and the local transit system.

In need of a good decongestant: Housing Complex takes a look at slight optimism from COG staffers on de-congestion pricing, and makes note of a lengthy Washingtonian piece on the subject.

The Aerotropolis, continued

In the comments from yesterday’s post on Norman Foster’s aerotropolis (and the idea of the aerotropolis in general), author Greg Lindsay dropped a note in the comments asking for me to expand my own thoughts on the idea and the book. So, here goes.

Lindsay did note one specific comment from Aaron Renn’s review: “this is one of the best overviews of globalization I’ve read.” I can’t disagree, and would certainly recommend the book to anyone interested in cities, infrastructure, globalization, economics, or any number of related fields. The challenge is to separate the various threads that weave through the book. There’s the descriptive element, providing the overview of today’s airborne flows of commerce; there’s the proscriptive element, taking Kasarda’s ideas and baking them into tangible proposals; and there’s the analytical element that assesses the implications of these trends and ideas. Most of the negative reactions to the book I’ve read seem to conflate these elements together instead of teasing them apart – and for whatever flaws the aerotropolis-as-business-plan might have, the descriptive and analytic elements of the book are invaluable.

The book’s descriptive elements are fantastic. BLDGBLOG’s interview with Lindsay highlights one example of the book’s explanatory power, showing how these systems work in our day to day lives: “One of the things I tried to touch on in the book is that even actions we think of as primarily virtual lead to the creation of gigantic physical systems and superstructures without us even knowing it.” The descriptions of the logistics operations in Memphis and Louisville for FedEx and UPS are fascinating.

UPS WorldPort, from Bing maps

The accompanying narrative of aggolmerations of air freight reliant businesses near those hubs is equally fascinating. I write this having just placed an order from Amazon that I need delivered tomorrow, knowing the intricate dance that order will trigger. Knowing the physical processes behind a shoe order with Zappos is revealing, particularly given the level of automation and coordination required for fast delivery. The ‘cool chain’ explanation is equally intriguing. Simply from a standpoint of understanding how things work, the book does an excellent job of pulling back the curtain.

Beyond just the work behind the consumer’s experience, Lindsay and Kasarda do a great job of explaining the clustering and agglomeration of various industries around these nodes of connectivity – the physical mark they leave on a place. The explanation of what an ‘organic’ aerotropolis looks like is fascinating, offering a tantalizing description of something we’ve all seen many times with our own eyes.

The proscriptive elements of the aerotropolis are less convincing. There’s an element of the worst parts of civic boosterism built in. Others have hinted at the tendencies towards authoritarianism. Perhaps the more concerning aspect is the seeming simplicity of the application of the idea. The book’s own cover art evokes the simplicty of SimCity, even after the preceding detailed explanation of the various exceedingly complex networks and agglomerations of the aviation system. To be fair, neither Kasarda nor Lindsay advocate for a ‘build it and they will come’ approach, yet it’s hard to not come away with that mindset from some of the Chinese ‘instant city’ anecdotes.

The formulaic nature of Kasarda’s concept almost seems to be a deliberate misunderstanding of the powers of agglomeration and networks. It’s clearly not a matter of just building it and they will come, no matter how much transportation might be able to shape development and growth. As critical as trade may be, there’s more to it than just that. Likewise, as mammoth notes, airborne trade is but a small fraction of the overall flows. Even if the flows of capital, knowledge, and skills matter a great deal, there is still a physical component to all of this – and the dominant mode of that flow is still the intermodal container.

Problems with the aerotropolis aside, Lindays’s analytic discussions of the shortcomings of air travel are robust. The discussion of peak oil and climate change is particularly compelling, given the frequency of this critique. Assertions that the aerotropolis is irrelevant because of peak oil and/or climate change is just as absurd as the denigrations of high speed rail in the US based on some notion that any American system must also be a transcontinental one – neither critique expresses an understanding of the comparative advantages of the technology.

I hope that people don’t dismiss the book off-hand because of some notion of globalization or of climate change. The explanatory value alone is well worth the read, both in documenting today’s conditions as well as in discussing the implications of global networks more and more reliant on air travel and just-on-time logistics.

Norman Foster’s aerotropolis

Image via Foster+Partners

Norman Foster is working on a concept for a massive new airport complex for London along the Thames Estuary. I first saw this (via ArchDaily) thanks to a shared Google Reader item (alas, no more) from Neil Flanagan. Yesterday, Planetizen points to an Atlantic piece on the subject, featuring new renderings from Foster + Partners posted on DesignBoom:

understanding the transportation challenges facing britain, london-based practice foster + partners, have collaborated with consulting firms halcrow (international) and volterra (UK) for a self-funded study producing the ‘thames hub vision’, a detailed report that uses scale and strategic cross-sector thinking to design an integrated infrastructure network. the masterplan proposes to replace the existing thames barrier with a new crossing that will extend london’s protection from floods into the 22nd century. it will mitigate the capital from rising storm levels, free up vital land for development and harness tidal power to generate carbon-free energy.

building on existing transportation lines to the north, east and west of london ‘the hub’ will avoid future congestion into the city. an orbital rail system with a four-track, high-speed passenger and freight route will link london’s current radial lines, with a future high-speed rail line to the midlands and the north, the thames estuary ports, high speed 1, and european networks. by minimizing the developmental impact the environmental strategy aims to provides new wildlife habitats landscaped within the spine.

This is more or less the Aerotropolis in a tangible proposal. John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay’s book spends a great deal of time on Heathrow; the inability of various cities (Chicago, Los Angeles) to build new and needed airports for various reasons; and cities that have done so through planning or via accident (Dulles, Dallas, Denver). Heathrow’s capacity constraints serve as a drag on not just London’s economy, but as a drag on key link in the global transport network.

Having read the book but never gotten around to a review, I thought I’d take this moment to highlight some of the more interesting thoughts I’ve come across regarding the importance of aviation as well as the aerotropolis concept.

Recently, Aaron Renn penned a somewhat pessimistic review of the somewhat totalitarian implications of planned aerotropoli:

A few things jumped at me out of the book. One of them is the close linkage between the aerotropolis and its boosters with authoritarianism (and by extension, similarly for globalization and its boosters). The second is that, despite vast sums of money and authoritarian rule, I didn’t come away with a sense of anyplace in the world that had fully pulled off Kasarda’s vision. Indeed, there are as many or more failures than successes. And even those successes are far from perfect ones.

Renn does highlight the fundamental issue, regardless of Kasarda’s plans and predictions: that aviation is a tremendous force in globalization and the flows of commerce. (For more on the tension between singular vision and democracy, see Alon Levy’s post on consensus and vision) Back in March, mammoth made the case that the aerotropolis is merely the symbol of globalization. Air travel might be the sexy mode, but the real work of global trade should probably be symbolized by the intermodal cargo container and all of its associated infrastructure.

It seems to me that the “aerotropolis” (particularly on the more restricted Kasarda definition) is more a symbol of globalization than it is the ultimate instantiation of globalization. Sea shipping is (and was for centuries before the invention of flight) the dominant mode of global transport. To get an indication of the difference in magnitude between sea and air shipping, just look at Shanghai, the world’s busiest cargo port by tonnage, and Memphis, the world’s busiest airport by tonnage: Memphis sees about three million tons a year; Shanghai sees around five hundred million tons a year. This is not a statistical aberration.

(As an aside, Matt Yglesias makes the point that even in the age of global trade, geography and proximity still matter.) Renn also points out that theaerotropolis is ultimately a measure of connections and networks – and the idea of the aerotropolis as a proscription isn’t nearly as strong as it is in description:

The lesson I draw is that while good air connectivity is critical for a city in the global economy – indeed, I almost draw my threshold population for what constitutes a minimum viable city in the globalized world in terms of whether or not it is big enough to support a major airport – the airport is only one ingredient needed for success, not the entire recipe. Cities that pin their hopes too heavily on airport led transformation are bound to be disappointed. And even if you go in with the best of intentions trying to do airport development right, you are far from guaranteed to have success.

Renn’s critique is well put, though I feel it ends up talking past some of the broader themes that Lindsay and Kasarda highlight in favor of deconstructing Kasarada’s specific, proscriptive vision for the future of air travel. In many ways, their main thesis isn’t anything new, just another example of transportation infrastructure shaping human development.

Also disputing the tone of telling is what we want, Kazys Varnelis disputes the book’s tag line, “the way you’ll live next.”

The answer is that the Aerotropolis is already here and it’s really not all that exciting. I went on two international flights in the last two weeks. Newark International Airport is about a half hour drive from the apartment I rent while La Guardia is about a half hour cab ride from Columbia. Do I really need to be closer? Could I really be closer, like the inhabitants of Kowloon Walled City who had jets pass by a hundred meters overhead?

No. I am far enough away that I don’t hear the noise from the planes too often, don’t viscerally experience the pollution, and don’t feel something is going to crash on my head.

Today, the City Paper linked to some great photos from the National Archives from the 1970s, including one of the District as a parking lot during a 1974 transit strike. Varnelis’ words echo the last image in the set of a DC-10 on approach into Logan Airport in Boston in 1973:

For more on Aerotropolis (the book), see this excellent interview with co-author Greg Lindsey at BLDGBLOG.

City Block

a work in progress…