IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

102 Chapter 5
Planning a big transport hub is like designing a city with more than half
a million inhabitants. But it’s not like living in one. A big hub handles
more than a thousand airline movements a day, and the ground traffic generated
by all the associated workers, passengers, well-wishers, cab drivers,
and so on is also enormous. 5 Frankfurt’s airport, with a workforce in excess
of forty thousand, is the biggest single-site employer in Germany. London’s
Heathrow employs fifty-five thousand people directly—meteorologists, air
traffic controllers, pilots, cabin crew, cleaners, caterers, check-in staff, baggage
handlers, engineers, firemen, police, security guards. Another three
hundred thousand or more people are employed by myriad suppliers—all
those van drivers and sandwich makers. Airports are also the world’s largest
employers of dogs.
Costs on this scale are sustained because airports and railway termini
have become large multinational businesses in their own right. Less
than 50 percent of Heathrow’s earnings come from landing fees or servicing
aircraft. Commercial activity on the ground is one of the main sources
of airport revenue, and hence one of the main drivers of airport design.
Transit passengers not flying spend an average of thirty-five dollars a head
at Heathrow’s hundreds of shops, restaurants, hairdressers—and four caviar
bars. Heathrow is also the largest market for Havana cigars in the world—
including Havana.
Powerful commercial and network operation agendas drive the way both
space and time are designed. In the old days, when airports and transport
hubs were conceived as transport utilities—if only for an elite—engineers
and operations people would have regarded an idle passenger as evidence
of system inefficiency. Not today. Mobility is just one of the products
on sale at a modern interchange. To commercial managers, ‘‘passenger
discretionary time’’ or ‘‘dwell time’’—the time spent by passengers killing
time between journeys or between links of a journey—is a sales opportunity.
The management of dwell time to optimize commercial yield is
one reason—traffic jams are another—that throughout my lifetime, the
proportion of time I have spent in the air on a journey has steadily
decreased.
The design of work and the experience of mobility are merging. In
today’s networked economy, many people spend their lives doing projects
to earn a living; they do not necessarily have jobs. For project workers, life
on the road has replaced the daily commute to an office. The growing