The more I think about it, the less I care about (what is being called) the privatization of airports (which is what this article is mostly about).

I mean, I care about the people who work there, and want them to have good, well-paying jobs. And I care about air safety and related infrastructure concerns.

But despite their being great big capital investments that consume billions of dollars of our time and energy, I just don’t see them as being as important as they’re being portrayed.

– even in a good year, I’ll only visit an airport three or four times. Compare with the internet or roads, which I use every day

– air travel is really expensive, environmentally wasteful, and has always been the preserve of people with more money rather than less

– they’re not efficient – there’s a real upper limit to how many people we can put in metal tubes and fling through the air, and the more people we try to serve, the more expensive it gets for everyone

– while we need air travel to cross large bodies of water at a reasonable speed, and to serve remote communities, there’s no other real compelling reason to fly other than it’s a bit faster than other alternatives

Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars of public money on airports and air travel? Even if we keep the focus on transportation, making the same investment in rail and public transit will help many more people.

And I honestly don’t care if air travel becomes more expensive. Again, this is not going to impact most of us on most days. It’s not even going to make goods and services more expensive – most cargo travels the way we should: over land and sea.

Let them sell all the airport concessions they want. I don’t care.