Schemes for White Elephants? -- Aerotropoli

In place of having airports to accommodate cities, plans are being made for having cities to shape themselves instead around gigantic airports of the future called aerotropoli.   This is based on such projections as having 12 billion people riding planes in 2031.   Every year, every month, every week, or even every day?   The video report on BBC's Fast Track doesn't say.

I don't get this at all.   What about the fuel for the planes?   I thought the oil was supposed to start getting short for airliners before the 20 years spoken of here are even up.

But the report is also careful never to speak of oil.

The plan, the projections, the schemes must be the thing, and the jobs that creating those behemoths will furnish -- for a short while.   But just because something is built at great expense doesn't mean that it will ever have to be used for its stated purpose.

The Great Pyramids are long-lasting testaments to that.

But don't mind me.   I haven't ridden on a plane for almost 10 years, and am hoping very much that I never will again.   It's not at all that I'm afraid, of either the possibilities of terror or those of some plane malfunction.  Instead it's all the suspicion, the security stuff.

I only took that quick trip to San Francisco and back in the fall of 2001 because personal circumstances absolutely demanded it.   Otherwise I would never have gone.  Not then anyway.

It was only weeks after 9/11, and my wife and I experienced directly the first demeaning that the response to 9/11 brought to air travel, and all I hear indicates that if anything, the rigors of the security checks have only increased, and the report doesn't make it sound as if that will be any better in the monster airports of tomorrow either.   I didn't think that taking off my shoes and having my luggage very closely checked at "random," and all the rest of it made my time sitting thousands of feet up in the air any safer then, and I'm equally sure that it wouldn't now.

If people want to know what real terror is, albeit at a generally lower level, though for a lifetime, they ought to try being a Rainbow man in this country and actually in most other places in the world as well.  Not just any such person, though.   A thinking one instead.