I’m sure that someone more well-travelled can inform me whether all airports are, in fact, alike. But in the past couple of years I’ve noticed something about a handful of airports on the east coast and one on the west coast.
Everything’s the same. The design of the restrooms, for instance, with that rounded wall at the entrance. And the signs, the gate designs, everything. All the same.
Are thse designs mandated by federal law? Did the same contractors build every single one of those restrooms? Did they win a federal contract? Is it the same outside of the US?
FWIW I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this at BOS, JFK, PHL, JAX, and SFO.
Depends on when the last renovation was done. The old OAK did not have the circular entrances in the bathrooms, for instance.
I’ve been to an awful lot of airports, and I’ve never thought of them as very similar. There are sometimes difference in seating even within an airport, depending on your carrier.
Once they find a design that works well, it is used over and over again. And they all look at each other. So if the managers of an airport notice that the signs at another airport are more readable and more understandable to visitors, they will copy that signage at their own airport. So they do tend to resemble each other.
Not necessarily (as I think the second O’Hare link shows quite well), but I do think that is what happened here. The problem with restrooms is keeping people from peeking in. Most often, this issue is resolved with door, but with the traffic of airports, this doesn’t work all that great. So they use a clever arrangement of walls to do the same thing. Same with most jet ways and the basic two-story structure.
The signs, though, I think are based on some international agreement, since at least at O’Hare, the airport I know best, since all the signs have little icons that seem universal, presumably for people who can’t read English. And the signs for the restrooms all say “toilet” which strikes me as an “international” sort of word. Although, that could be only the international terminal.
They could easily solve the “peeking in” problem by facing the doors towards each other in a vestibule. I think it has more to do with enhancing traffic flow by removing impedance (doors) as well as increasing cleaning efficiency for janitorial staff which simultaneously reduces manhours spent on cleaning and transmission of bacteria in highly trafficked areas. It goes along with automating toilets, sinks, and hand dryers. The less things people have to touch, the better.
It is an evolution of what works. Newer airports tend to be far more functional than older ones. Airports are very expensive and if they don’t work well, there is often political fallout, so known workable designs are often selected to minimize risk. I well recall the scandal that surrounded the poorly functioning luggage system at DIA when it first opened.
The current generation of airports seem to be of the rectangular terminals connected by underground tunnel model. (RTCBT) Off hand I can think of DEN, ATL, CVG (Cincinnati) and one or two others. ATL was nice in that it had pedestrian tunnels as well as the trains, so I got in a nice walk before getting on a 9 hour flight.
This works much better than the older “Octopus” model, that made for long walks down endless concourses and bottlenecks for airplanes trying to access the gates, especially if near the hub. Old DFW and Stapleton (DEN prior to DIA) were typical examples. These started out OK, but there was no clean way to expand them, and they started working poorly about a decade before a clean sheet of paper was needed. The RTCBT design can be expanded with few issues.
As for the bathrooms, they need to be accessible for people with hands filled with carry-on luggage, and sized to serve the peak when two or three airplanes at nearby gates disembark at the same time. So you get no doors, some sort of optical baffle, and then a tile lined room with the expected fixtures. The optically triggered fixtures help with passengers that may not be familiar with the peculiarities of american plumbing.
Airports in other countries can be a lot different. Americans expect to embark via enclosed tubes. In many countries, the airport gate is a bus loading point. The bus takes you the airplane parked on the ramp, and you board via a stairway. There are issues with weather, but the whole gate availability bottleneck is largely circumvented, and the terminal doesn’t need to be designed for aircraft access, only busses, which are far more maneuverable, and are cheaper in money and lives lost if they collide.
I have been in airports in Moscow, Khartoum, Hong Kong, Malé (Maldives), Seattle, Sydney, London and Vientiane… they are all vastly different from each other.
I suppose one of the supply forklifts that could hoist up one of the seriously heavy power chairs on a pallet.
I am somewhat mobile with crutches, and could manage the stairs extremely slowly maybe up once and down once, but I don’t think my knees or hip sockets would be very happy with me. I know that I would probably break several bones if I had to evacuate on one of those slides.
The few times I’ve had a “bus departure”, the bus body itself lifted on a scissor-jack arrangement, like a catering truck, to be even with the plane door.
It seems to me that airports are converging toward universal sameness. The famous TWA terminal at JFK is gone IIRC, while the distinctive satellite terminals of LAX are mostly gone.
It’s probably necessary though, considering how crowded the concourses have become these days. All that matters now is moving people through.
I guess I would just say that as someone who flies every other week, to all different locations, modern airports work much better than the old “interesting” ones. And while in general I appreciate old, interesting things, airports are miserable when they work.
That said, I really hate when an airport won’t let me walk between terminals. If I’ve the time, I much prefer a long walk to some diminutive subway system.
Not exactly. It was empty for years (decades?) but very recently opened as a hotel. But JFK was always a weird airport in that there were separate terminals for each of the major US carriers, along with one common international terminal for everyone else. I think there is a grand plan to rebuild it so that it’s more uniform.