Heathrow Airport expansion - proposal for third runway - ongoing discussion

[whole diary]

[Tim]

Boris Island is a deliberate red herring, the far-out option placed by Boris to make LHR expansion the obvious, sensible choice.

I'm not sure.  Boris island might well be the best option for London (especially for a London that is expanding eastwards).  It isn't the best option for the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) as a whole. 

Boris is mayor of London so all credit to him for pushing a scheme that brings London benefits. 

[Bmblbzzz]

That's what Boris wants you to think he thinks!

[Timmer]

As further evidence of this, here is a list (off the top of my head) of long-haul airlines over the last approx. 20-25 years that have started Ops at Gatwick, then moved them to Heathrow:

Cathay Pacific (they were originally a LGW operator, before moving to LHR and building their operation to what it is today)
Air New Zealand
Philippine Airlines
Korean Air
All Nippon (ANA, Japan)
American Airlines
Continental (although now as part of United)
Aeromexico
Virgin Atlantic (were originally an LGW-only operator)
Garuda Indonesia (were an LGW airline back in the 80's and 90's, then stopped operations for many years - they were banned from EU^» (European Union - about) airspace on safety grounds - then restarted at LGW - with shiny new Boeings - and will move to LHR).

Not to mention British Airways moving most of their ex British Caledonian routes from LGW to LHR...Dallas/Fort Worth and Houston are two that spring to mind.

[ellendune]

It is interesting that everyone want to brush environmental issues under the carpet.

I don't

If the country wants a single airport with 4-6 runways, then the only option is a Boris Island plan.

You mean create a hugely expensive piece of infrastructure that would cost more than HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) and put it in one of the most vulnerable parts of the UK^▸ (United Kingdom) (to flooding) near to a bird colony (that would be a risk to aircraft) and an explosion hazard (a WW2 wreck with a large cargo of explosives) in a location that is most difficult for all but the people of London and Kent to access. 

This does not sound a sensible use of money to me. 

One of the options mentioned years ago was adding a 2nd runway to Gatwick and a MagLev link Gatwick to Heathrow.

Has anyone tried this anywhere else?

Another option is to move Terminals away from airports, but have them in the centre of cities and use MagLev trains to link these to the airports. Then London can have 2/3/4 airports serviced by a single Terminal.

Strange then that the check in at Paddington failed.  The one in Vienna is little used as well.  Not sure this would work.  Nor do I see how it would solve the problem of runway capacity. 

[simonw]

If the country needs a traditional Hub airport, such as CDG, JFK or Schiphol, then adding a single runway will not be enough, it will need two more. This process will drag on for years after a 3rd runway is built, and how many times will the M4/M25 have to be moved, raised or lowered, how man more villages  will be levelled.

Heathrow is already breaching environmental controls, and no matter what improvements are made, adding another runway will not help.

[TaplowGreen]

The argument about binning all domestic flights doesn't stack up - they don't just cater for domestic flights, there are people flying in from all over the World and changing flights at Heathrow for these destinations and elsewhere (hence it's a "hub"), do you seriously expect them to hump all their luggage across London to get on a train for hours on our unreliable network?

No, which is why I said:

improving interchange to make integrated air/rail journeys easy

Fact is that Heathrow's major competitor as a hub, Schiphol, utterly trounces it for air-rail interchange. As, of course, do Gatwick and even Birmingham. It can be done (heavens, you could run trains from Heathrow to Kings Cross/St Pancras and remove the need to "hump" with just one small bit of knitting), it's just that Heathrow and its cheerleaders rarely understand anything other than unquestioningly piling on more and more capacity.

OK, lets say another rail interchange is built at Heathrow and some domestic flights are removed - taking one of your scenarios, how long via your method would it take to get from LHR to Aberdeen (for example) by train?

[ellendune]

OK, lets say another rail interchange is built at Heathrow and some domestic flights are removed - taking one of your scenarios, how long via your method would it take to get from LHR to Aberdeen (for example) by train?

Aberdeen probably a bad example because I doubt whether demand would be enough to justify the rail improvements necessary.  However this is the justification for building HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) as a high speed line rather than just as a conventional 125mph route. 

I have shown that from here to Delft (via high speed train to Rotterdam) and to Bonn (via high speed train to Cologne) takes pretty much the same time and that is even with the change at Brussels. 

[TaplowGreen]

OK, lets say another rail interchange is built at Heathrow and some domestic flights are removed - taking one of your scenarios, how long via your method would it take to get from LHR to Aberdeen (for example) by train?

Aberdeen probably a bad example because I doubt whether demand would be enough to justify the rail improvements necessary.  However this is the justification for building HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) as a high speed line rather than just as a conventional 125mph route. 

I have shown that from here to Delft (via high speed train to Rotterdam) and to Bonn (via high speed train to Cologne) takes pretty much the same time and that is even with the change at Brussels. 

BA^» (British Airways - about) operate 8 flights a day from LHR to Aberdeen so clearly there is considerable demand - you have heard of the North Sea Oil industry?

I'm just using one of the examples given by someone flagging it up as an alternative, but OK how about Glasgow (1 hr 25 by air from LHR) or Edinburgh (1 hr 20 via rail from Heathrow? How long, how many changes of trains?

[eightf48544]

Can nobody answer my question where will the people who will fill the  40.000 new jobs created in and around the expanded airport live and how will they get to work?

i know someone who works at LHR and is lucky enough to have a carpark pass near his place of work. Some of his colleauges have to park on the other side of the airport and catch the staff bus

 

[ellendune]

I am not sure that all the 40,000 jobs or even most of them would be at the airport itself.  But you are right to raise the issue.  Better public transport would have to be an essential part of this. 

For the polar opposite case - i.e. if Heathrow were totally replaced (i.e. closed) as envisaged, I think, by the Boris island proposal then I assume there would be mass unemployment in that part of west London.   

There is already a chronic housing shortage in London and the South East creating 40,000 new jobs it likely to accelerate the overheating of London's economy. When does it reach a point where jobs are created (i.e. posts) that cannot be filled because London is unaffordable for all but those in high paid jobs. 

Creating capacity does not really serve the rest of the country well.  A hub at Birmingham on HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) would create jobs in an area where there is more capacity for growth.  It's not a bad journey for me from here either. 

I fear we have a bigger problem now because politicians have ducked the issue several times over the last 50 years.  What's the betting they duck it again?

[Andrew1939 from West Oxon]

The flight times comparison shown above for journeys to Scotland as against rail are very misleading as the flight times take no account of all the other times needed to use air (getting to airport, checkin, luggage retrieval, etc.).
A few years ago I had some airmiles to use up and travelled by air to Inverness (from Oxfordshire). For a 2.00 pm approx flight departure I had to leave home around 10.00 and arrived in central Inverness around 17.00, overall time about 7 hours - not that different frrom overall rail travel time but much cheaper by air.

[Richard Fairhurst]

Given that a Heathrow third runway is unlikely to be built much before HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) is finished, then direct journey times from London to domestic and Eurostar-connected destinations will be:

• Manchester: 1hr08
  
• Newcastle: 2hr20
  
• Edinburgh: 3hr38
  
• Glasgow: 3hr38
  
• Paris: 2hr15 [E320 may reduce this to 2hr00]
  
• Brussels: 1hr51
  
• Amsterdam: c. 4hr00
  

You then need to factor in connection times from Heathrow to the train's origin. For HS2 destinations, this is likely to mean changing at Old Oak Common, so you lose a bit of time on the Heathrow Express but gain a bit because you don't need to go into Euston. For Eurostar destinations this depends on what HS2/Crossrail/HS1^▸ (High Speed line 1 - St Pancras to Channel Tunnel) interchange is eventually chosen; as I said above, the infrastructure exists (bar a short bit of knitting) for a direct Heathrow-St Pancras service - and indeed BAA was looking into it at one point - so it could potentially be a reasonably seamless journey if the political will is there.

And, as Andrew alludes, it doesn't take 1hr20 to fly from London to Edinburgh. It takes 1hr20 to fly from Heathrow to a non-rail connected bunch of sheds in Ingliston, with a 35-minute tram journey to the city centre. Add all the attendant faff of airports (and Heathrow in particular, which is only equalled by JFK for unpleasantness and inefficiency in my experience), and train and air times are less divergent.

Aberdeen? Yep. I'll throw my hands in the air for this one. It's 2hr20 beyond Edinburgh by rail, so ~6hr by train from London. So I'll happily grant that rail is never going to be competitive purely time-wise with air in this case.

But this is the crux of the matter. Expanding airport capacity has a large environmental and social cost. If you need to save three/four hours on your journey to Aberdeen, fine: but you should shoulder that cost, rather than expecting the rest of the country to subsidise your cheap ^130 fare. That means racking up the cost of short-haul flights such that demand is reduced and capacity is freed up for long-haul destinations - the sort of red-blooded supply-and-demand capitalism that the beloved CBI should in theory approve of.

And if that's true of Aberdeen, it's many times more true for closer destinations. Should Heathrow be expanded, at enormous cost, so that people can save negligible minutes on their London-Edinburgh connection for which they pay just ^115? What justification is there, at all, for Heathrow-Manchester flights when Old Oak Common to Manchester Piccadilly will actually be the same 1hr travel time as Heathrow to Ringway Airport? I find it hard to see one.

[TaplowGreen]

 

Given that a Heathrow third runway is unlikely to be built much before HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) is finished, then direct journey times from London to domestic and Eurostar-connected destinations will be:

• Manchester: 1hr08
  
• Newcastle: 2hr20
  
• Edinburgh: 3hr38
  
• Glasgow: 3hr38
  
• Paris: 2hr15 [E320 may reduce this to 2hr00]
  
• Brussels: 1hr51
  
• Amsterdam: c. 4hr00
  

You then need to factor in connection times from Heathrow to the train's origin. For HS2 destinations, this is likely to mean changing at Old Oak Common, so you lose a bit of time on the Heathrow Express but gain a bit because you don't need to go into Euston. For Eurostar destinations this depends on what HS2/Crossrail/HS1^▸ (High Speed line 1 - St Pancras to Channel Tunnel) interchange is eventually chosen; as I said above, the infrastructure exists (bar a short bit of knitting) for a direct Heathrow-St Pancras service - and indeed BAA was looking into it at one point - so it could potentially be a reasonably seamless journey if the political will is there.

And, as Andrew alludes, it doesn't take 1hr20 to fly from London to Edinburgh. It takes 1hr20 to fly from Heathrow to a non-rail connected bunch of sheds in Ingliston, with a 35-minute tram journey to the city centre. Add all the attendant faff of airports (and Heathrow in particular, which is only equalled by JFK for unpleasantness and inefficiency in my experience), and train and air times are less divergent.

Aberdeen? Yep. I'll throw my hands in the air for this one. It's 2hr20 beyond Edinburgh by rail, so ~6hr by train from London. So I'll happily grant that rail is never going to be competitive purely time-wise with air in this case.

But this is the crux of the matter. Expanding airport capacity has a large environmental and social cost. If you need to save three/four hours on your journey to Aberdeen, fine: but you should shoulder that cost, rather than expecting the rest of the country to subsidise your cheap ^130 fare. That means racking up the cost of short-haul flights such that demand is reduced and capacity is freed up for long-haul destinations - the sort of red-blooded supply-and-demand capitalism that the beloved CBI should in theory approve of.

And if that's true of Aberdeen, it's many times more true for closer destinations. Should Heathrow be expanded, at enormous cost, so that people can save negligible minutes on their London-Edinburgh connection for which they pay just ^115? What justification is there, at all, for Heathrow-Manchester flights when Old Oak Common to Manchester Piccadilly will actually be the same 1hr travel time as Heathrow to Ringway Airport? I find it hard to see one.

IF HS2 is finished! 

[simonw]

If HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) is finished, then Birmingham airport will better rail connections than any other airport, and will be quicker to get to. After all, Birmingham airport will be 38 minutes from Euston.

So why not add two runways here and make it the hub? As a bonus, M5/M6/M1/M42 are all nearby with local and national rail lines and HS2 in a few years.

[TaplowGreen]

If HS2^▸ (The next High Speed line(s)) is finished, then Birmingham airport will better rail connections than any other airport, and will be quicker to get to. After all, Birmingham airport will be 38 minutes from Euston.

So why not add two runways here and make it the hub? As a bonus, M5/M6/M1/M42 are all nearby with local and national rail lines and HS2 in a few years.

Well I guess we already have "London Luton", "London Stansted" and even "London Southend", so why not "London Birmingham"? 

Ultimately it has to be Gatwick or Heathrow, the main criteria for the decision has to be economic/business and that points firmly to the latter, someone just needs to grow a pair and make the decision one way or the other.