Toronto's Island Airport is Neat, But ...
Great ... for Microsoft Flight Simulator Pilots.
The Toronto Island Airport is very cool. You can take transit, bike or even walk right up to catch a flight from the dense urbane surrounds. Security is a breeze (or so I hear, because like many people I have never actually flown out of there), and its facilities are super nice — it’s like our own little taste of Singapore or Vancouver-style airport excellence right in Ontario.
And I mean it! The Island Airport is a neat vestige of the past, like when Chicago or famously Hong Kong had airports right near “downtown”.
The government of Ontario wants to expand the airport to handle jets and more flights and for other less clear reasons that I want to dig into, but one does have to ask from the jump: what exactly Chicago and Hong Kong — certainly excellent world cities — got wrong.
What feels clear to me, and what I think is the most obvious reason an expansion doesn’t make sense, is that the things that make the island airport cool mostly have to do with its smallness. Now, that smallness might not be economically sustainable anymore, but it would be good if we could just be honest about that instead of pretending that scaling up this cool small thing wouldn’t ruin what makes it cool and good.
On the face of it, the expansion for jets feels neat. I like planes as much as the next dude and planespotting A220’s from the waterfront would be cool. Unfortunately, a lot of things that don’t make sense, like a Waterslide from the top of the CN Tower, or a house with a big backyard at Queen and Spadina just happen to be “cool”.
Is a waterfront airport totally unprecedented in a developed world city with decent urban principles? Kind of. Vancouver does have its cute seaplanes after all — but that operation is at least an order of magnitude smaller, much more so than even the current airport. Perhaps more comparable, London City Airport does exist, but like a lot of London airport names, this one is a lie and the airport is actually like 10 kilometres from the city — like if Billy Bishop was at Long Branch or Woodbine Beach. This is still decently useful for London given the excellent rail links (imagine taking a streetcar from Woodbine or the West End — of course, adding a regional rail station would be deemed unthinkable), but at the same time as anyone in London will tell you, city airport is not really for the commoners, and as locals will tell you, it makes a real racket. Look, my point is that planes aren’t touching down on the Thames by Tower Bridge or in Sydney Harbour and anyone who proposed it would be laughed out of town (obviously it’s a bit different when the airport already exists, but those cities would 1000% be talking about winding it down).
I thought a lot about how to best frame this, and I think it comes down to four or five major issues, let’s look at those.
1. New York?!
One of the things that stands clearest in my mind is hearing the minister of transport talk about how the Island Airport expansion is about being competitive with New York ... what?
Toronto is actually much better situated than the big apple when it comes to airport planning, as it’s plagued with multiple competing, not quite complementary airports, which weakens their hub status because not all flights go to a single massive hub. This weakens connectivity, makes trip planning annoying, worsens connection and hub potential, and spreads resources inefficiently across multiple sites — duplicating all kinds of expensive things.
I've seen people point out that by having airports in different parts of region, you can provide access to people from different parts of the region, but that seems like a land transport, not an air transport problem. Build better trains.
The outcome of these things is that connecting through these cities in not great, and the facilities are a real mixed bag, LaGuardia is nice now, (well besides all the delays and other issues, and lack of good transit) but only after years and years of being miserable.
And then theres the transit. LaGuardia has no rapid transit, Newark has a people mover to incredibly hit or miss service from commuter trains on the Northeast Corridor, and the New York Regions prime airport? Another people mover, albeit at least the JFK Airtrain connects to good rail service.
Contrast this with the status quo in Toronto. Pearson’s facilities are (embarrassingly) much worse than Vancouver, but it’s still probably above average for a developed world city (though not for long at this rate). The connections are pretty good and can be made great trivially with some airside connections — Island Airport is small enough not to dilute the hub. Transit again isn’t world-class, but it’s good and certainly better than any New York airport with all manner of buses and an express train to three subway lines and the downtown core that takes less than half an hour even during rush hour and costs less than an Uber.
And somehow, our solution is to add another major airport where even when you put aside all the externalities will weaken Canada’s biggest hub airport (which desperately needs attention and investment), while simultaneously ruining what made that airport good to begin with?!
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