> And an airport can’t be too far from a city and remain useful, since travelers need to access the city, workers need to be within commuting distance, and so o

> And an airport can’t be too far from a city and remain useful, since travelers need to access the city, workers need to be within commuting distance, and so on. In Canada, Mirabel airport was built 35 miles from Montreal, surrounded by a 79,000 acre buffer zone to prevent any issues of incompatible land use. Mirabel was expected to replace Dorval (today Montreal-Trudeau) as Canada’s main eastern airport, but, in part because of its long distance from the city, this never happened, and Mirabel stopped serving passenger traffic in 2004. Another relatively new airport built far from the city it serves is Munich airport, located around 33 km (20 miles) from the city center, opened in 1992. The two major candidates for "relatively sparsely populated area" when the airport was planned (back in the 1960s) were a swampy area north of Munich (Erdinger Moos) and a forest to the south (Hofoldinger Forst). They picked the swamp, which leads to frequent fog problems. And they solved the problem of the old airport competing against the new one by simply closing the old airport (the company operating the new one is the same as for the old one, so no protests there). Some equipment was even moved from the old airport to the new one in an overnight relocation. But, as the 30 years from planning to opening show, even this remote location was not without conflicts. And, more than 30 years after the opening, there is still no fast train to the airport. The Munich-Nuremberg high speed railway line could have been routed by the airport, but (according to rumors) this wasn't done to protect the Nuremberg airport. Then there were plans for a maglev train (Transrapid) which were cancelled in the early 2000s. Currently the plan is for an Express S-Bahn line, but since the S-Bahn tunnel in the city center can't accommodate any more trains, this will only be possible when the second S-Bahn tunnel is completed (the date for that keeps getting pushed back, currently it's 2035).