Heathrow doesn’t need another runway
Posted by robbiebow on 31 August, 2007 under politics | 
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It doesn’t. It needs less passengers, not more. The location of Britain’s busiest airport is ridiculous: carved into the side of West London it brings mass congestion to the area of an unsustainable level. It also means myriad planes end up taxiing over London and making their landing descent over South London. If you were to design the way to ensure maximum casualties and deaths when a plane falls out of the sky that would be it.
Business complains that delays at Heathrow are damaging our economy; our ability to host meetings of international partners. Aside from the fact that most of these meetings are nothing more than junkets and could easily be replaced by tele- or video-conferencing, the conclusion that another runway is the answer is dumb: what’s needed is a more punctual, reliable transport hub. Reducing the number of passengers to the level it was designed to handle would achieve that.
And for the excess passenger load that would be displaced, and the extra load predicted for the future, why not build a new airport in the large, open, flat area of Essex close to the M25 and Thames estuary and give it a bullet train to central London? In fact, Heathrow could be closed altogether and replaced with such an airport. Planes would then taxi and descend over the North Sea, not London, and that large piece of prime real estate in West London would be freed up for better uses, such as housing, business, shops and such like, whilst an underused (often disused) part of London’s surrounds would replace it.