I just landed in BER 20 minutes ago and I am just amazed how bad the signage is
The signs tiny and all in the same red/white color. The monitors tiny and sparse.
The placement of the tickets for the trains placed where you do not pass. And just good luck if you go down the wrong stairway and then reached the nowhere, without any visible signs.
They cared about the CI way more than about fast passenger throughput.
If you listen to the podcast they explain that it wasn't his fault.
Spoilers: he designed BER for fast passenger transit, just like Tegel, but the airport authorities wanted more shopping space. So they crammed as many shops as they could in detriment of the passenger experience. And then there's the situation with the rise of low-cost airlines who weren't allowed to use the jetway...
I definitely recommend listening to the whole series. It's really well done and a must-listen for anyone with interest in project management.
This glosses over some stuff that is definitely his fault.
The first issue that caused the issues, the fire system, was designed to suck air underground, because the architect did not want a fire system to obstruct his roof, never mind that smoke and hot air naturally rise. https://www.thegermanreview.de/p/the-real-story-behind-berli...
Maybe half-invented, but I read an architect's memoirs some years ago and he was saying how around the 1940s there were often cases when he and his chief-architect/supervisor at the time were actually chased out (like, physically) from the construction sites whenever they were coming in to add/make some changes that the constructor was considering as being too over the top/unrealistic. We need for that attitude to come back, at least in a metaphorical way, otherwise we'll continue being stuck with projects like this one.
Why would you chase the architect with his insane ideas away when you're getting paid by the hour and the project must be completed at some point because there's no alternative for the government? Unfortunately nobody appears to come off as not corrupt or idiotic in some way in this story.
Because most workers, even though they get paid by the hour, actually want to see the job done. Plenty of people want to do a good job, so when they see someone coming in and adding to the workload to make the job worse they’ll, naturally, tell them to piss off.
Even by the claims of your article, it doesn't sound really like it was his fault. The system was designed to a specification, whether or not the architect was given too much free reign is entirely on the board.
If you hire a design team to create a car with a massive hole where the engine and wheels should be, because it is more "clean", and then neglect to hire an engineer to check their work is feasible, is it on the design team or on you being incompetent?
You can say all you want "hot air naturally rises", true, but I doubt an architect has the training to be a safety engineer, and before you say "oh well that's obvious", consider that heavy objects naturally fall to the earth, and yet we have airplanes.
They had a design which would work, but nobody in charge actually did the legwork of bothering to check if it was feasible or not, and/or bungled it so badly even if it were feasible it was like attaching a helicopter to an airplane and then wondering why it didn't fly...
The whole not using the jetway thing in Germany blows my mind. I flew Lufthansa SEA-FRA in 2019, and the fully packed 747 had to walk onto the ramp, and load up into buses to get to the terminal. Outrageous. The only time I've ever done that in NA is flying at places like CAK in a micro regional jet.
LCCs generally do this because charges for the apron are cheaper than the jetway.
With Lufthansa, I'd assume that FRA is super busy and didn't actually have a gate available at the time; a 747 is a really large aircraft to load using buses.
Apron buses are very common in large airports and I always found it really efficient. From memory I’ve used them at Haneda, Narita and KL. Perhaps the ones in Germany are just altered metro buses though, which would be terrible. Apron buses are efficient due to being low to the ground, having very wide doors to accomodate quick loading and unloading, typically no seats.
They may be efficient given the layout of the airport (which can't be changed), but if you are to design a new airport, you cannot beat the efficiency of jetways. Hundreds of people just walking down the hallway.
European low-cost airlines are terrible. They do everything they can to lower the fees they pay. That often involves skipping major airports, unless they can negotiate a cheap enough deal with the airport. Those deals tend to involve things that make the passenger experience worse, because the airports don't want normal airlines to choose the same deal.
If you choose a normal airline and fly to any reasonably big airport that's not overcrowded, you'll get a jetway outside exceptional situations.
A decent new airport or significant airport reconstruction costs probably $5B+ (DEN cost $4.8B in the 90s; Beijing Daxing cost $11.5B) In austerity-minded Europe there really isn’t money for this. Even if there was, NIMBYs and green campaigners mean there is very little appetite to pursue it politically.
It's something that might trip people up, but due to West/East Germany split and Interflug going under after unification, Berlin airports are peripheral - leaves in flight graph, not hubs except for low cost airlines. Lufthansa continues to use Munich and Frankfurt as hubs.
what? Tegel was the best airport ever, you could literally be there 20min before check-in and still get your plane. Nowadays I have to arrive 3-4hrs before, tegel was a blessing a true king of all airports, all hail tegel
Unless there was a crazy line that day to that single security spot and you had to jump the line or risk getting late for your plane.
I flew through Tegel a dosen times and it was a horrible experience each time. Not sure which was worse - the old terminal, or the new barrack added on to the first one.
Also, I've seen multiple airports that allowed you to be 20 min before boarding and still get through. On Warsaw Chopin, which is 2x bigger than Tagel, I can arrive 10 min before boarding and still make it on time. With most airports the size of Tagel as well.
Having said all that - the architecture was nice indeed, and I'm sure it was very functional when it was built and there was 4x less traffic, planes were 30% smaller and the security was way lighter.
It was… not great if you were coming from outside Schengen. I was there maybe three times, coming from Dublin; twice, only one of the passport desks was staffed (they also had the machines, but I never saw them in working order). Both times, of course, someone ahead of me in the queue had some problem, and it took an hour to get through passport control. Never seen this at any other airport.
Schonefeld was better, though getting there involved taking Ryanair…
Schönefeld definitely won the award for most disgusting airport bathrooms in western EU, and most kafka-esque narrow winding hallways that may or may not be taking you where you want to go.
I loved Tegel - mostly used the parking structure-turned-into-terminal barracks thing though.
Fast in and out, even with the X10 bus connection.
The main terminal was weirdly narrow on airside, but from memory apart from having to stand to drink beer was just fine.
I liked the currywurst carriage outside by departures if I was ever more than 30 minutes early for my flight.
Schönefeld on the other hand … grr. I argue that that airport was exceptionally poor in a way I’ve never experienced outside of corporate airports used for industrial and mining facilities.
This is true many places, although I tend to show with a tighter timetable myself.
But it's so absurd, so silly. It's actually faster to drive from Ottawa to Toronto(4 to 5 hr drive) than take a plane, and cheaper.. even with current fuel costs, too.
Wait until you find out about this amazing invention called the train. You can take them at the city center, you stop at the city center, no waiting times, faster, safer and cheaper than driving...
In all seriousness though, any country serious about climate change should ban short-haul flights.
Yet before we get into that, you should realise what you've done. This whole thread was just about how sad these exessive delays are.
Now I have no problem with diverging threads, my initial comment did just that!
However, you're definitely talking about "where you think we should be" vs "right now".
And right now, you're saying all short hop flights should be banned.
Yet as many have indicated here, that is just not feasable in some cases. Even if you believe rail is always better (it isn't, not for all flights compared to all rail), you actually need rail before banning short hops.
And as others have indicated, loads of people driving, instead of short prop plane hops, is worse than that plane ride by far!
Is your goal to harm the environment? If not, then "just ban it" isn't sensible. You need to plan first.
And really, just ban it means you support just banning all cars, the concept is the same, yet this is literally impossible for many, many reasons.
For example, banning all cars would mean an end to rural livability, and a further exodus from rural Canada.
Canada, whos crops and meat feed massive parts of the world.
Are you planning to force people to farm? Make them stay, and work, if they are entirely isolated without cars?
Of not that, then is your goal to cause world wars, and death, and destruction, and likely the release of tailored plagues, and nuclear weapons?
Because in a world pf starvarion, the knives come out very fast and strong.
Yet this is what wide sweeping car bans could mean, as it is already hard to keep farms manned, and profitable, without banning things from a city centric view.
Would you also ban short hops for prop planes, from rural areas too?
It would be a disaster to put trains everywhere. Literallly bad for the environment, to run a rail line for 50 people a day. A prop plane is far, far more energy efficient, than maintaining all that rail infrastructure for so few people, through hundreds of km of forest.
Just the regular chainsaw usage alone, to prune back trees, makes it worse.
What are you thinking?? Hurting the environment like this, suggesting policies which end in plague, nuclear war, death, destruction!!
The connection is more direct for them, but some say that all we did, with environmental targets and oil, was to outsource it all to crazy Putin.
He now uses that cash to slaughter and kill. And may yet, as a result, bring about a world war.
That is a real, direct outcome of a positive environmental policy(reduce production), causing mayhem, death, destruction.
Of course, bad things often happen regardless. I admit to this, yet, I feel short sightedness got us into these environmental issues, and trying to get us out must not make the same mistake.
You're doubling down on the Chewbacca defense, please stop.
No one is saying that we should "reduce production". Of course, any ban on short-haul flight could only be enacted after there was a better/cheaper infrastructure available.
And it so happens that for a lot of cases, the infrastructure exists, it is mostly a matter of ending up with subsidizes and ensuring that government policy accounts for all externalities. For North America, even if proper rail does not exist yet, intercity buses usually are a feasible alternative, and they also have no-to-little waiting times, they can also drop passengers at the city center and are more fuel-efficient per person than flying or driving solo.
It makes no sense to have flights between Toronto/Ottawa/Montreal, much like it makes no sense to have flights between Boston/NYC, LA/SF/Las Vegas, Seattle/Vancouver. And this is just off the top of my head.
It makes sense time wise, flights are much, much faster.
So to realistically do this, you need fast and cheap rail. No one is going to take rail, which stops at 10+ stops, and takes 7 hours for the trip.
Right now, Ottawa->Toronto isn't too bad, compared to car. Schedule says 4 1/2 to 5 hours.
Yet, you have to get to the rail station, and get from the rail station at each end.
Were I to visit my uncle in Toronto, this means a 30 minute drive to the station, and a cab to my uncle's house, another 30+ minutes.
A car removes some of this, and removes the waiting at each end. And if you drive, you don't need to rent a car, it is more convenient at the other end.
So to compete realistically, to get many people who would drive, to use the train, you need incentive. Not punishment, incentive.
So high speed rail would be good here.
This means loads of infrastructure must be build, which means you must ensure success. This means it has better not be more expensive than a car, and if you and your wife, or family are travelling, this means 10 bucks, maybe 20 per person.
Otherwise a car is far, far cheaper. Current ticket costs are silly.
Now I agree, train is better than car. But is train better than car, or plane, if it costs a gazillion to build, and maintain, and it is barely used?
And yet you're also talking about Seattle/Vancouver, in comparison to SF/LA or Vegas, where the plane is much, much faster than rail or car. So much faster.
So it has better really be fast rail here.
Yet have you looked at the fuel efficiency of fast rail? It is not as good as you think.
And the bus! Let's replace a personal car, with a hot, smelly, loud, uncomfortable bus which most people hate.
You.must be joking.
If you think the only metrix is the environment, you will 100% fail at enacting change.
I will give you another counter example here.
Dams.
For the longest time, environmentalists complained about dams. Lost habitat, they said. And yes, it is true!
Yet compared to anything, anything at all, a dam is best for the environment. Better than nuclear, solar, wind, anything!
And it is is not as if the environment is destroyed, just altered. Some animals go away, to be replaced by different wildlife.
For god sakes, beavers make lakes and dams which can be seen from space!
It is another example of short sightedness. We must enact change in a way that it takes hold, and desired.
Not if takes at least 45 minutes to get to the airport, plus 1-2 hours waiting to board, plus 20-30 minutes to leave the plane and yet another 45 minutes to get to your destination. The 1-hour flight just became a 4-5 hour journey, full of stress and discomfort.
> I will give you another counter example here. Dams.
That's the third strike at Chewbacca defense. I'm really done here.
The tracks to Ottawa and Montreal are getting updated. The problem is that Via only owns a small portion of the route and is at the mercies of freight traffic. The new dedicated tracks will solve this. Still not high speed though.
Agere, the train station location in most cities is more convenient than the aurport, although not as good as my experiences in Europe. If you want a good laugh of how to do it wrong, look up 'saskatoon train station' on maps.
It's about 450km, which is between 4 and 5 hours, traffic at each city depending..
A propeller plane shines here. If boarding is quick, and there is no customs as it is in country, and you just carry on? You save time, and it's better than 20 to 50 people driving independantly.
A plane can also fly straight too, so it can take even 1/3 of the time to get there.
OP likely meant that it is a very sad thing for the environment that we (as a society) privilege air travel instead of train travel for such a short distance and where there’s no need to cross a border.
The train brings you in the middle of both city center, directly integrated with transit, you can show up about 10 min before your departure, etc. It’s just the actual rail that is the problem.
Mmm, maybe. Average occupancy of buses is usually only around 40%, which probably pushes them above the per-passenger emissions of a modern aircraft, and being typically diesels, they have other emissions than CO2 to worry about.
On a personal note, I also hate bus travel with a passion — it's mind-numbingly slow, you have limited ability to move around, it's sometimes too cramped to work, when toilets are available they're tiny and awful, etc. I love train travel and will use trains whenever available, sometimes even for multi-day journeys, but I will take significant detours or even rearrange travel plans to avoid a bus.
I agree that buses are cramped and that trains are way more comfortable, but I think we can also agree that whatever space you don't have in a bus, it will be even worse on a plane...
Also, let's not forget that the experience of traveling by bus got worse mostly because of the popularization of low-cost short-haul flights, and that has killed the market for "premium" bus traveling. If short-haul flights were out of the picture, I wouldn't be surprised if someone started offering bus travel with larger seats (in 2-1 configuration) and even more sleeper buses for night travels [0]
> I agree that buses are cramped and that trains are way more comfortable, but I think we can also agree that whatever space you don't have in a bus, it will be even worse on a plane...
Depends which class you travel, and with which airline. Even in economy, the "legacy" European carriers are generally more comfortable than a bus. The ability to pay more to make the travel bearable is an advantage of air travel.
> Also, let's not forget that the experience of traveling by bus got worse mostly because of the popularization of low-cost short-haul flights, and that has killed the market for "premium" bus traveling. If short-haul flights were out of the picture, I wouldn't be surprised if someone started offering bus travel with larger seats (in 2-1 configuration) and even more sleeper buses for night travels.
You're right that air travel has made premium buses moot, but I think that's a good thing. Spending 12+ hours on a bus is not an improvement over a 2 hour flight, even if you have a bed on the bus. You can spend the night in your own bed and then get to the destination at the same time, having slept better and with less risk of accidental injury. The emissions gap between the two modes is narrowing rapidly, too.
> Spending 12+ hours on a bus is not an improvement over a 2 hour flight
My argument is that there is no such thing as a 2-hour flight. We still need to factor the time to get to the airport, check-in/boarding, getting off the plane, waiting for luggage, and then getting from the airport to your actual destination. That easily transforms any trip into a 5- or 6-hour event.
Factor in that if you are flying to a place where you need a hotel to "sleep on your own bed", suddenly even a very luxurious night bus might come out ahead in price and practicality.
Granted, for an European context it makes a lot less sense to talk about intercity bus because we have a reasonably extensive rail network. But put your hate of buses aside for a moment and consider that buses can be better, so from a North American perspective it can make sense to consider it.
Yeah, I guess if cost is an important factor, trains are not available, and the airports are both sides are on the distant/large/inefficient side, then the bus could marginally make sense. That's not a combination of factors I've encountered in recent memory though (but I don't go to North America much), and it's so marginal that I think every time I'd go for the increased comfort of not being on a bus (no matter how "luxurious") for 12+ hours.
Usually, most small flights of that type are connections onward. It's usually good for passengers because all other things being equal the security procedures at smaller airports, the traffic etc. is a lot less bad.
Trains still should be the alternative for these cases. The only exception I can think of where short-haul flights could be accepted is from small islands that need connection to a larger city inland.
I flew through the new Berlin airport 2 times this week, and had no issues going through security and to the gates. That 3-4hrs in your case seems absurdly long - were there crazy lines at the checkin or sth?
The worst for security that I've ever experienced was Amsterdam Schiphol. Absolute chaos at land side security and Americans on American airlines get extra inspection. When I was there they did the extra screening at the gate, but they've gone back and forth a bunch on where that's supposed to happen.
Tegel OTOH was super quick albeit poorly connected to the rest of Berlin.
At airports that do this I find it’s more common when US TSA adopts a rule first that people don’t want to subject all air passengers to. It was really common to have gate lines back when the US introduced that 3 oz bottle max.
The situation at AMS is that they kowtowed to the American government. The extra security doesn't apply to anyone flying a non-American airline (e.g. KLM) just Americans on American airlines flying to America. Used to be you'd have to go wander to a secondary screening station but when I flew through in 2019 they just pulled you out of line at the gate. I've not seen another airport that does this (in Europe or elsewhere).
Interestingly, Tegel (old terminal) is my favourite airport of all times due to the unmatched efficiency. It wasn't beautiful but it required a fraction of time compared to anything else.
The signs tiny and all in the same red/white color. The monitors tiny and sparse.
The placement of the tickets for the trains placed where you do not pass. And just good luck if you go down the wrong stairway and then reached the nowhere, without any visible signs.
They cared about the CI way more than about fast passenger throughput.