Massive Transit

The sheer size of airports has always seemed to me the result of great optimism. (After all, travel itself is an optimistic activity.) It seems ludicrous to say airports are big, but unless you have to walk the breadth of a terminal, the size of an airport is not really all that evident. In the last month, I’ve gone through three last-minute gate-change announcements. This happened at Toronto Pearson, twice in one day, and the two gates could not have been farther apart. The other time, I was at O’Hare in Chicago, and our new gate was (what seemed like) a half-hour away. Whenever you have to  walk far, doesn’t it always feel like half an hour, even if it’s not? Especially when it’s not.

An efficient airport is one where you enter the building, check in, walk through security and get to your gate in more or less a straight line as quickly as possible. But even in the most efficiently built airport terminal, you’re not always going to follow the path the planners laid out for you. Planners can’t account for everything that might happen to a passenger at an airport.

Detroit, one of my favourite airports, used to be, essentially, a long corridor. At Amsterdam Schiphol, the distance from point A to point B seems remarkably short. Then again, the Dutch seem to have the ability to figure out this kind of thing embedded in their DNA. They don’t make you walk far but still manage to get you to pass by myriad shops.

There’s nothing wrong with size. Bigness means something, after all. It sends a message to the arriving passenger. Some of the newer terminals in the world (Beijing, Madrid, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Dubai) are more than big – they are gigantic, predicated on a world with more and more passengers flying to more and more destinations for both business and pleasure. And I admire the optimism of that kind of planning.

There’s great joy in watching sheer masses of people moving around the world. Travel is about interconnections. To be a part of this massive movement of people is, in the end, humbling.

But bigness also means something gets lost – often, we’re lost in the world of big. Perhaps it’s why I would rather stay in a smaller hotel; sometimes those big airport terminals make me feel like a mouse in a forest of redwoods. That’s when the efficiency planners enter the picture to try and make everything fit a personal scale, getting us to point B with as much speed, and humanity, as possible.

The AB List

The people, places and things that make travelling a whole lot better.  
 
1 Hotel Burnham
Chicago is one of the world’s great cities, home to a stunning urban landscape, much of it the work of architect and planner Daniel Burnham. His namesake hotel is housed in the Reliance Building, completed in 1895 and often cited as the precursor to the modern skyscraper. Completely redone by Kimpton Hotels, it is now one of America’s most unique boutique properties. The well-appointed rooms hide behind old office doors, where you half expect to find stenographers running around taking messages. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places but feels ultramodern. Highly recommended.
1 W. Washington, Chicago, 877-294-9712, burnhamhotel.com

2 World Hum
Travel websites are a dime a dozen; few of them teach you anything about the world you’re travelling in. Then there’s World Hum, an entertaining and informative site that combines top-notch writing with wit, great curiosity and the joy of travel. “Travel dispatches from a shrinking planet,” indeed.
worldhum.com

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