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Maybe they should leave it shut. This airport means that a good share of the east londonders have to live their lives under noise so the 1% can get to their me

Maybe they should leave it shut. This airport means that a good share of the east londonders have to live their lives under noise so the 1% can get to their meeting a little bit more easily. To me it's an example of social oppression.

SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
The Green party had a fairly good plan for London City Airport: Close it down, replace with "thousands of new homes within easy reach of central London" http://www.sianberry.london/news/pollution/our-plan-to-redevelop-the-london-city-airport-site/ http://www.sianberry.london/news/pollution/our-plan-to-redev... Which seems fair to me - surely a better site for an airport would be larger, further out and well-connected by rail? This applies to Heathrow as well.
- jackweirdy 9y ago
  Given LCY can only handle short haul routes (the longest flight, to JFK, has to land and refuel in Ireland before the medium haul leg), Expanding the Eurostar seems a better fit to me. It recently expanded with direct service to Rotterdam & Amsterdam, future expansions are under discussion. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/direct-eurostar-london-to-amsterdam.htm https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/direct-eurostar-lon...
  - SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
    I was under the impression that you could already take a train from London St Pancras to Amsterdam, or was I forgetting about a change in Paris Gare Du Nord?
    - lmm 9y ago
      Currently you change in Brussels. Going via Paris would be rather a long way out of your way.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Sort of. It starts direct service in April but it will initially only be direct on the London to Amsterdam leg. You'll still need to change in Brussels going the other way until the Netherlands and the UK setup passport controls for Amsterdam departures.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Don't bother expanding the Eurostar. The longest routes are already three times as expensive as the plane and take much longer.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
      > take much longer ... as the plane If you live within half an hour's travel from King's Cross, eurostar does not take longer for door-to-door time. More pleasant and less weight restrictions too
      - user5994461 9y ago
        The eurostar London to South France is 6 hours and 100-300 GBP. It's about a thousand kilometers. Plane can do faster and cheaper door to door.
        ghaff 9y ago
        And Eurostar is 1.) Far more pleasant than (in particular) budget European airlines and 2.) Not much longer downtown to downtown (and less for some routes like London to Brussels). Similarly in the US, I basically never fly from Boston to NYC or NYC to Washington. I admittedly am not optimizing for price--intra-Europe flights can be pretty inexpensive--but I'd much rather take the train than fly even if it costs a bit more and takes a bit longer.
        user5994461 9y ago
        The main portion is 6h of train against 1h30 of flight. Door to door is a few more hours in both cases. I understand the feeling. I hate flying too, in particular cheap European airlines. Gotta admit that there is an inflection point though, maybe around a thousand kilometers, where trains are struggling to keep up.
        ghaff 9y ago
        I agree south of France is probably borderline by train from London. Germany probably is as well. Likewise, I won't usually take the train from Boston to Washington DC. Just too long a trip under most circumstances even if the prices were comparable. It depends on the speed of the service of course but, even with relatively high speed rail, a thousand kilometers is probably at the outside edge of where a train makes utilitarian sense.
- gaius 9y ago
  Not very Green, tho’, is it? If it is closed it should be replaced with something, well, green, like a public park or a nature reserve.
  - switch007 9y ago
    They're not a single-issue party. https://www.greenparty.org.uk/green-guarantee/ https://www.greenparty.org.uk/green-guarantee/ Plus it looks like there is a fair bit of greenery in the photo.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
    > Not very Green, tho’ ... green, like a public park I refer you to the same site for actual green party policies http://www.sianberry.london/the-power-of-good-ideas/manifesto-for-london/ http://www.sianberry.london/the-power-of-good-ideas/manifest... https://london.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/londonfiles/London_Green_Party_Manifesto_2016_Final_Web_Single_Pages.pdf https://london.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/londonfiles/Lo... I think their conception of what is "green" for the inhabitants of London is a little wider than just "public parks", though that is mentioned. But not specifically for that site.
  - jannes 9y ago
    Not every policy of a green party has to involve the color green
- thriftwy 9y ago
  So basically, replace an airport for the 1% with thousands of homes for the 1% (plus foreign thugs wanting to park capital)?
- paulmd 9y ago
  Airports usually suffer heavy contamination from fuel dumping and exhaust, so it's not really somewhere you'd want to build a home. Normally these get turned into garbage dumps or similar usage, to reclaim it you'd need to scrape off a good chunk of topsoil for miles around.
  - Symbiote 9y ago
    Land in London would be reclaimed, some fresh soil is a tiny cost compared to the value.
  - syncsynchalt 9y ago
    In Denver we have two successful neighborhoods built on old airports: Stapleton and Lowry. This is a place where land is cheap and sprawl is common, so the cost can't have been prohibitive.
codeduck 9y ago
> This airport means that a good share of the east londonders have to live their lives under noise so the 1% can get to their meeting a little bit more easily. Try living under the Heathrow flightpath before you complain about City airport.
- konschubert 9y ago
  You can always find a worse situation, but that does not invalidate the concerns regarding the original situation.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    The Heathrow flight paths cover most of London. http://your.heathrow.com/under-the-flight-path-reducing-noise/ http://your.heathrow.com/under-the-flight-path-reducing-nois...
  - fauigerzigerk 9y ago
    Do you actually live near London City Airport? I live a mile away from there and the noise level over here in Woolwich is negligible. Perhaps we're not under the flight path. I used to live in the flight path of another airport but even there the noise from road traffic was orders of magnitude worse than any noise from air traffic. That said, I don't doubt that some people are badly affected.
toyg 9y ago
I agree they should leave it shut but for different reasons: maybe people would then move elsewhere and we'd stop worrying about London property prices and London trains and London airstrips...
user5994461 9y ago
It's not at all for the 1%. The flights can be cheaper than Gatwick or Heathrow when you factor in the transportation to go to the airport.
- dx034 9y ago
  Rarely. Some weekend flights are cheap but otherwise it tends to be at least £50 more for a city flight. One-way journeys to heathrow and Gatwick both cost less than £10 (compared with £1.5-£2.6 for city) so that this doesn't really make a difference.
detritus 9y ago
I did a small contract in the home of a member of one of the richest and most renowned families in the world last year, a beautiful pad in West London somewhere... right under the flightpath of flights descending into Heathrow and helicopters regularly buzzing a nearby heliport. I found it odd that on the one hand I was in one of the poshest homes I'll likely ever find myself, and how miserable I figured I'd feel not being able to enjoy any outside aspect of it, were it mine. This is my direct personal experience, and how it affects the 0.001%. May I ask how personal your experience of City of London airport is and the horrors it impacts upon its neighbours, or are you simply regurgitating the widely-publicised leftist whinging that was surrounding the topic a year or so ago?
- Symbiote 9y ago
  There are thousands of cheap / normal homes under the Heathrow flightpath. It's one of the smaller reasons I left London. (My workplace was under it, so I looked for a new job that wasn't.)
- 20180201 9y ago
  i live in a city with a similar airport situation (santa monica, ca) most of these public fights about land use are just rich people fighting other rich people, because they're the only ones interested/wealthy enough to publicize their 'plight'. poor and middle class folks either just deal with it or are pushed out.

SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago

The Green party had a fairly good plan for London City Airport: Close it down, replace with "thousands of new homes within easy reach of central London" http://www.sianberry.london/news/pollution/our-plan-to-redevelop-the-london-city-airport-site/ http://www.sianberry.london/news/pollution/our-plan-to-redev... Which seems fair to me - surely a better site for an airport would be larger, further out and well-connected by rail? This applies to Heathrow as well.

jackweirdy 9y ago
Given LCY can only handle short haul routes (the longest flight, to JFK, has to land and refuel in Ireland before the medium haul leg), Expanding the Eurostar seems a better fit to me. It recently expanded with direct service to Rotterdam & Amsterdam, future expansions are under discussion. https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/direct-eurostar-london-to-amsterdam.htm https://www.seat61.com/trains-and-routes/direct-eurostar-lon...
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
  I was under the impression that you could already take a train from London St Pancras to Amsterdam, or was I forgetting about a change in Paris Gare Du Nord?
  - lmm 9y ago
    Currently you change in Brussels. Going via Paris would be rather a long way out of your way.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Sort of. It starts direct service in April but it will initially only be direct on the London to Amsterdam leg. You'll still need to change in Brussels going the other way until the Netherlands and the UK setup passport controls for Amsterdam departures.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Don't bother expanding the Eurostar. The longest routes are already three times as expensive as the plane and take much longer.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
    > take much longer ... as the plane If you live within half an hour's travel from King's Cross, eurostar does not take longer for door-to-door time. More pleasant and less weight restrictions too
    - user5994461 9y ago
      The eurostar London to South France is 6 hours and 100-300 GBP. It's about a thousand kilometers. Plane can do faster and cheaper door to door.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        And Eurostar is 1.) Far more pleasant than (in particular) budget European airlines and 2.) Not much longer downtown to downtown (and less for some routes like London to Brussels). Similarly in the US, I basically never fly from Boston to NYC or NYC to Washington. I admittedly am not optimizing for price--intra-Europe flights can be pretty inexpensive--but I'd much rather take the train than fly even if it costs a bit more and takes a bit longer.
        user5994461 9y ago
        The main portion is 6h of train against 1h30 of flight. Door to door is a few more hours in both cases. I understand the feeling. I hate flying too, in particular cheap European airlines. Gotta admit that there is an inflection point though, maybe around a thousand kilometers, where trains are struggling to keep up.
        ghaff 9y ago
        I agree south of France is probably borderline by train from London. Germany probably is as well. Likewise, I won't usually take the train from Boston to Washington DC. Just too long a trip under most circumstances even if the prices were comparable. It depends on the speed of the service of course but, even with relatively high speed rail, a thousand kilometers is probably at the outside edge of where a train makes utilitarian sense.
gaius 9y ago
Not very Green, tho’, is it? If it is closed it should be replaced with something, well, green, like a public park or a nature reserve.
- switch007 9y ago
  They're not a single-issue party. https://www.greenparty.org.uk/green-guarantee/ https://www.greenparty.org.uk/green-guarantee/ Plus it looks like there is a fair bit of greenery in the photo.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
  > Not very Green, tho’ ... green, like a public park I refer you to the same site for actual green party policies http://www.sianberry.london/the-power-of-good-ideas/manifesto-for-london/ http://www.sianberry.london/the-power-of-good-ideas/manifest... https://london.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/londonfiles/London_Green_Party_Manifesto_2016_Final_Web_Single_Pages.pdf https://london.greenparty.org.uk/assets/files/londonfiles/Lo... I think their conception of what is "green" for the inhabitants of London is a little wider than just "public parks", though that is mentioned. But not specifically for that site.
- jannes 9y ago
  Not every policy of a green party has to involve the color green
thriftwy 9y ago
So basically, replace an airport for the 1% with thousands of homes for the 1% (plus foreign thugs wanting to park capital)?
paulmd 9y ago
Airports usually suffer heavy contamination from fuel dumping and exhaust, so it's not really somewhere you'd want to build a home. Normally these get turned into garbage dumps or similar usage, to reclaim it you'd need to scrape off a good chunk of topsoil for miles around.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  Land in London would be reclaimed, some fresh soil is a tiny cost compared to the value.
- syncsynchalt 9y ago
  In Denver we have two successful neighborhoods built on old airports: Stapleton and Lowry. This is a place where land is cheap and sprawl is common, so the cost can't have been prohibitive.

codeduck 9y ago

> This airport means that a good share of the east londonders have to live their lives under noise so the 1% can get to their meeting a little bit more easily. Try living under the Heathrow flightpath before you complain about City airport.

konschubert 9y ago
You can always find a worse situation, but that does not invalidate the concerns regarding the original situation.
- pjc50 9y ago
  The Heathrow flight paths cover most of London. http://your.heathrow.com/under-the-flight-path-reducing-noise/ http://your.heathrow.com/under-the-flight-path-reducing-nois...
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago
  Do you actually live near London City Airport? I live a mile away from there and the noise level over here in Woolwich is negligible. Perhaps we're not under the flight path. I used to live in the flight path of another airport but even there the noise from road traffic was orders of magnitude worse than any noise from air traffic. That said, I don't doubt that some people are badly affected.

toyg 9y ago

I agree they should leave it shut but for different reasons: maybe people would then move elsewhere and we'd stop worrying about London property prices and London trains and London airstrips...

user5994461 9y ago

It's not at all for the 1%. The flights can be cheaper than Gatwick or Heathrow when you factor in the transportation to go to the airport.

dx034 9y ago
Rarely. Some weekend flights are cheap but otherwise it tends to be at least £50 more for a city flight. One-way journeys to heathrow and Gatwick both cost less than £10 (compared with £1.5-£2.6 for city) so that this doesn't really make a difference.

detritus 9y ago

I did a small contract in the home of a member of one of the richest and most renowned families in the world last year, a beautiful pad in West London somewhere... right under the flightpath of flights descending into Heathrow and helicopters regularly buzzing a nearby heliport. I found it odd that on the one hand I was in one of the poshest homes I'll likely ever find myself, and how miserable I figured I'd feel not being able to enjoy any outside aspect of it, were it mine. This is my direct personal experience, and how it affects the 0.001%. May I ask how personal your experience of City of London airport is and the horrors it impacts upon its neighbours, or are you simply regurgitating the widely-publicised leftist whinging that was surrounding the topic a year or so ago?

Symbiote 9y ago
There are thousands of cheap / normal homes under the Heathrow flightpath. It's one of the smaller reasons I left London. (My workplace was under it, so I looked for a new job that wasn't.)
20180201 9y ago
i live in a city with a similar airport situation (santa monica, ca) most of these public fights about land use are just rich people fighting other rich people, because they're the only ones interested/wealthy enough to publicize their 'plight'. poor and middle class folks either just deal with it or are pushed out.