Friday, January 6, 2012
Shenanigans / Guv'ment New airport construction video opts for indie-esque soundtrack rather than smooth jazz
Posted by Thomas Wheatley @thomaswheatley on Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 12:29 PM
Yes, gone are the days when fair-use jazz music would accompany footage of construction at the Atlanta airport's international terminal. The maestros behind Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport's quite awesome YouTube account have uploaded yet another video of the new $1.5 billion concourse's progress. This time we're treated to a tune that sounds ripped from a 1993 skateboarding video which features acoustic guitar and distorted bass — a little ditty which my colleague Besha Rodell described as "the elevator jazz version of indie rock."
Anyways, here's another peek at the new international terminal, which is scheduled to open this spring so long as the imminent flood of lawsuits filed by disgruntled airport vendors doesn't cause a delay.
UPDATED, 1:02 p.m. (because I forgot): Also, it's worth celebrating how wonky the airport's social media folks get in the YouTube comments, which on other accounts are traditionally are a cesspool of ignorance, racism, and filth.
Probably the cutest thing I'll see all day.
Comments (5)
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You need to send that tape to your landlords for their Green Tree Speakers. I think it would make Atlantic Station even more Trumanesque, and I mean that in a surreally cool kind of way.
Love the video. But I'm not a fan of such a huge undertaking to add only 12 gates -- at an airport that already has 182 gates, making this a 6% increase in capacity at a cost of $1.4 billion. I understand that the growth was needed and that the terminal does more that just add gates -- but there's an economy of scale in the building process, and even more gates will be needed in the future. It looks to me that ATL has been very penny-wise and pound-foolish.
On the other hand, the main other thing that the terminal intends beyond adding gates is to provide an alternate front door for international travel. But, unfortunately, it doesn't create a new front door for the airport; rather, it creates an ugly back door: The Jackson Terminal will be approached by car through an unattractive sea of maintenance lots. Perhaps MARTA will run a bus to it (or not, depending on the economy), but getting to the MARTA Airport Station (at Hartsfield-Jackson's REAL front door) or even to the rental car areas, will require schlepping, with one's luggage, on an airport shuttle bus.
It strikes me that they could have leveraged the existing people mover tracks to get people to the other side by running trains between new terminal stations outside the security zone, which trains wouldn't open their doors inside the security zone, of course. For added security -- since all inside-security stations are on a central corridor -- they could have ordered cars that have operational doors on only one side, and run those cars on an oval-shaped (hourglass-shaped) track so that the doors would always face the wall when passing the inside-security stations at Baggage Claim and the various concourses. But instead they went for the cheap solution and decided that passengers could just get on a shuttle.
It's a beautiful building, based on the previews we've seen. But, then again, so is Dulles Airport in Washington. And just like Washington has done with Dulles, we're going to spend the next several decades, and untold amounts of money, fixing and struggling with the design flaws of this beautiful new structure.
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