I agree we should have more/better ground transportation but: > Any airplane I've ever flown had better filtering and circulation, more spacing and better hygi

I agree we should have more/better ground transportation but: > Any airplane I've ever flown had better filtering and circulation, more spacing and better hygiene, than any bus I've ever ridden in. And most modern trains I've ridden beat a plane on all of those metrics. > Every airport terminal was more spacious than every indoors bus or train terminal. Airport terminals have to accommodate planes, which are enormous, inconveniently shaped, move slowly between the runway and the terminal and spend at least ~1h exchanging passengers and cargo. This means there's a large number of very large vehicles sitting around that need space and infrastructure, which means the airport terminals have to be huge. Since they're required to be huge and large amounts of real estate are needed, airports are also usually located far from the center of the city they serve. And finally, people are forced to spend a lot of time in an airport, so there's a lot of opportunity to make a lot of money from passengers, which means incentive to spend a lot making the terminal a nice place to be. Trains and buses are much easier to accommodate and typically sit at their station for minutes at a time, which means the station can be much more compact. The stations are usually located throughout the cities they serve, which means real estate is expensive and should be kept to a minimum. Passengers usually pass through a train station in a matter of minutes and don't have a need to loiter and be captive to the shops there, so there's not as much in the way of opportunity for profit. > So why this obsession with airplanes as the vulnerable part of the equation? Is it all just... human inability to calculate risks and our focus on the "flashy"? Because airlines can go bankrupt relatively easily. It's exciting when a big, well-known company dies. > This should be throwing our entire transportation industry into disarray and restart fundamental discussions about urban planning and urban landscaping of the future... and yet I only ever see the airline industry mentioned. I think because there's not a whole lot that can be done there. Cities are already there, they've already been planned. You can't easily take a city built around roads and rebuild it around trains, trams or a subway, especially in America, which is what you'll see most of on HN. The most I've seen is a city that already has trams and trains replace roads to expand their already mature train or tram network.