As much as it pains me to say it I have to agree, some of the recent 'improvements' I feel have actually made things worse.
Lifts - I really have tried to make this make sense in my mind but I just can't. I've had conversations with many people about them and am yet to meet one who thinks it's a positive move, I'm also yet to step in one and not hear a negative comment from another person. It just seems unbelievable that you can arrive from public transport at the departure area only to be told to get a lift downstairs to then queue for the same lift to come back up again. I don't buy the safety argument either. Bullring Shopping Centre sees circa 40 million visitors per year, many with shopping bags and has multiple escalators. New St Station sees just under 37 million pax per year, many with luggage and has multiple escalators. I even used escalators last year in FRA, quite successfully I must add, one of the busiest airports in the world.
Anyone know if lifts are generally cheaper to run and maintain than escalators?
Security - I appreciate that their hand may have been forced with new regulations but they took a perfectly well functioning security area and made it smaller with less lanes and then wonder why there can be massive queues at peak times. This combined with the lifts and the smaller upstairs queueing space can make it such an awful experience in peak season.
T2 'improvements' - When there can be 7 or 8 Jet2 arrivals in a period of 30 mins or so five e-gates are nowhere near enough. In-laws took 75 minutes to clear T2 last month with 55 of those minutes spent queuing for the e-gates, I've heard others report similar.
So much money spent and purely from my experience, things have become worse. As said baggage reclaim is awful, the T1 departure lounge is hot and overcrowded at peak times and we still have the building works going on 3 (?) years after they started. It also feels as if standards have slipped, going into the toilets and seeing cubicle doors missing or people having to wait because door locks are broken or missing.
With the first phase of the new plan set to be completed by 2031 they really need to get this right as I think we're all getting fed up of the constant terminal 'reconfigurations'.
Here we go again...!
I dont think you'll find anyone anywhere who would suggest that a bank of lifts would be better than a bank of escalators. But the problem is the lack of space. The previous escalator was slap bang where security now is, so had to go. You could orient them parallel to the building frontage (i.e. as per the previous escalators) but that means you lose loads of space downstairs in that general mingling area. And you'd need at least 3, possibly more, with at least one running permanently down (we'll come back to this in a mo). Better to orient them perpendicular to the building frontage. But that leaves you either having to have a u-turn to get on the escalator at the bottom or a u-turn at the top. Both of those are, from a crowding perspective, terrible ideas. And the other problem with escalators is that they need a space at the top or bottom to spill out in to. If that space is not available, because there is a queue say, the only solution is to turn the escalator off. Lifts have the handy advantage of not requiring any of that - you can walk in and a few seconds later walk out exactly where you need to be. And if theres congestion, you can hold them for a period of time.
This is precisely the reason why the arrivals escalator is hardly ever in operation.
BHX's other issue was the desire to minimise the extension of the footprint of the building. Taking the building out too far would've triggered security issues with the sterile area immediately outside. Would probably quickly mean the car park being constrained, and/or closed. If you could've moved the building out much further then, yes, escalators may've been the right solution. But that is also far more expensive and cost is key here - especially as that directly translates in to landing fees and hence passenger fares.
The other problem that the security area has is the orientation of it in relation to the rest of the airport. Thats a legacy of many years of bolt ons, starting from the main build in the 70/80s. We dont have the luxury of the spanish (say) approach to airport design which finds a big piece of flat land and has a massive frontage to spread load.
Final point here - the air rail link will be no more soon. Once it goes, there will be no one going down in the lifts, so 4 lifts (plus 2 more a bit further down) and a heap of optimisation of space including expanding in to the current air-rail link space will follow.
Re the rest of your comments, i challenge you to find a security area anywhere in the sensible world that doesnt have challenges at peak hour. If you travel at peak hour, you should expect things to take longer. Every time i've been through security in the last 2 years ive been in and out in less than 5 minutes, with the exception of 1 occasion where i had the misfortune of being stuck behind a group of seemingly first time travellers who caused a heap of delays (but added no more than 5 minutes). That includes peak time travel.
I accept that arrivals isnt fantastic and the baggage reclaim hall in 'T1' is poor/old. Thats on the list of things to sort though, no?
As ever, a lot of the hyperbole online seems to think that we can magically make all those pesky passengers go away. Or proposes construction ideas that seem to imagine them not being there. We cant shut the airport. We cant cancel flights to reduce pax flows. 'improvements' have to be designed and delivered whilst catering for all of that - which means some hindrance during the construction phase. It also means you need to move one thing to create some space to allow you to move another thing to create some other space, etc. etc. Its a moving jigsaw puzzle with more pieces than there are spaces. And of course, all of these incremental changes need to be compliant with design regs, acceptable to the security services, etc.
This is partly why i've suggested before that, in some ways, the simplest solution is just to build a new airport somewhere else (e.g. the other side of the motorway) and start from scratch, but that is crazy money and there is no political will to make that happen (despite it being shown to be exactly the right thing to do many times across the world in recent years).
All in, i dont really understand the negativity. Unless that negativity results directly from reading a few negative articles on Birmingham Live or facebook - places not known for sharing positivity...!
