This is a bit of a hyperlocal story, but the LA Times today writes about the horror of flying in and out of LAX:
Alexa Woodward arrived in California for the first time and was immediately lost. Outside Los Angeles International Airport, she and a friend tried unsuccessfully to order an Uber. The hum of jackhammers added to the anxiety, and except for the smell of weed in the air, this wasn’t the introduction she had expected.
“It’s not super clean, there’s lots of construction, and we don’t know where to go,” the North Carolinian said, before a Times reporter led her to the shuttle for the designated taxi and ride-share lot.
For decades, the trip in and out of LAX has been one of the most challenging parts of a journey. The serenity of the Pacific Ocean is only two miles away, but that can be difficult to remember as travelers spend an hour on the nightmarish horseshoe loop known as 1 World Way.
I've read about a thousand different versions of this story, and it's true that LAX is no fun. That horseshoe loop gets pretty crowded.
But I've flown in and out of LAX dozens of times, as well as plenty of other airports. It's not that bad. I don't know why Alexa Woodward was "immediately lost" since there are all the usual signs pointing you to rental car lots, long-term parking, hotel shuttles, and so forth. Nor does it take an hour to navigate the loop. I suppose it might at absolutely peak times during the holidays, but in my entire life it's never taken more than ten minutes to make a complete loop. I'll grant that it seems longer, but it's not. And exiting from the central parking lot has always been pretty quick.
The appearance of LAX can be daunting. That loop really is crowded. And yes, there's a lot of construction at the moment. But you basically get in and out the same way as any other airport, and it doesn't really take much longer than it does in any big city.
The only real problem with LAX is that it doesn't have any convenient way of getting from terminal to terminal. That would be a bigger problem if LAX were a popular connecting airport like O'Hare or DFW, but it's not.
So why the hate?
In 2019 I had a connecting flight in LA traveling from Sydney to Philadelphia. Since there was a 12hr layover I decided to visit with my daughter in Long Beach. She licked me up and we drove the 45 min trip back to her place, had dinner and chatted. I gave myself 3.5 hrs to uber back to LAX and literally made the flight with minutes to spare. Spend 1.5 hrs just getting around the horn to the terminal.
Ha ! Try Logan on a busy weekend. It's a 100 decibel nightmare and getting out the freeways (or are they parkways?) are appalling.
Logan is a maze! Have they ever finished the spaces security is supposed to be in? It was so toght it wasn't ADA compliant, you were tripping over stanchions.
I'm sure LAX works ok for people who are familiar with it. It's our most hated airport for our family. The signage is poor or non-existent, if there were signs telling us that we needed to catch a shuttle to go interterminal we didn't see them, didn't know where to catch them, and couldn't identify the spots we were supposed to line up nor where each passing bus was going. Staff was not just completely disinterested in pointing us the right way but actively hostile to being asked a question. And nobody knew where our plane left from forcing us to criss cross the entire airport three times with the finale hopping over the fences in the middle to run across the parking area in the middle dragging all of our luggage by hand after we ran out of time after lining up to check in in multiple different terminals.
But the biggest issue is the staff's disinterest in helping anyone.