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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to this, after your flight you no longer walk 3 minutes and then rest for 15.

You get to partake in a half-marathon, dragging along your jetlagged kids and your numerous bags, jackets, etc. It’s a excellent example of optimizing for metrics instead of optimizing for people.

Imagine your hotel moving the valet service from downstairs to a parking lot two miles away. You tell the reception desk you need your car, and sure enough, your car is ready by the time you’ve made the walk.

Imagine being so detached from reality that you think making your passengers take an extra 20-minute walk around the terminal is an elegant solution

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> It’s a excellent example of optimizing for metrics instead of optimizing for people.

It seems like the opposite. The change directly led to less complaints from people. It's more like optimizing for human comfort rather than giving people what's supposedly best for them via an objective metric. Though I'd say even more specifically (assuming the story is even true) it's optimizing for keeping the small percentage of squeaky wheels comfortable.

I would replace "comfort" with "perception" but otherwise I agree.

> The change directly led to less complaints from people.

Less complaints about waiting time, that is.

I mean, I really doubt this story actually happened the way it did, if only because at most major airports gate capacity is so constrained that there is no such thing as a separate gate for arrivals that you can just move planes to. (Planes arrive and leave from the same gate; any more moving around and they'd be wasting precious taxiing capacity and man hours, so if an airplane is getting moved it's usually for maintenance or to standby somewhere else.)

> that there is no such thing as a separate gate for arrivals

The passengers from international flights must be routed through border control first.

In every international airport I’ve been too, this is achieved with a gate that has entrances to two or three levels. International arrivals on floor A and everyone else on floor B, sometimes also splitting domestic arrivals and departures.

While I agree with the point you're making

> there is no such thing as a separate gate for arrivals

You might be surprised. In many of the newish airports I've been to (outside the US) the gates are designed such that arriving and departing passengers for the same aircraft never bump into each other.

They do this by clever design; immediately after exiting the aerobridge and onto the terminal building, there's a split (staircase or a sloping walkway) of some kind. So, the departing and arriving passengers are on different floors.

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