The Region's Airports

Expanding major airport capacity is one of the biggest development decisions the New York Region will be making over the next several years. A new airport would cover 15-25 square miles—an area that could instead house a complete new town of 75,000-200,000 persons.

An airport is a magnet that with one pole attracts cer­tain kinds of development, like manufacturing and mo­tels, and with another pole repels development by the noise and activity it generates.

Well located, it could draw to it some 100,000 persons per day, for whom a new or partially new transportation system would have to be built. Poorly located, it could be a half-billion dollar white elephant, actually deterior­ating the Region’s air service.

No one yet knows whether any of the proposed airport sites would relieve pressure on the present three major airports significantly. The Port of New York Authority’s past reports suggest they would not.

No one yet knows the relative cost of the several al­ternatives for meeting the demand for fast inter-city travel. There are several ways of expanding air travel capacity and possible alternatives to air travel for some trips.

And no one has laid out the full costs of even one of the ways so the public can rationally compare the costs of adding capacity for fast inter-city travel with the bene­fits of the added travel. For example, by continuing pres­ent policies on non-airline flying (general aviation), a fifth and probably a sixth major airport would be needed before the end of the century. If the policy toward general aviation were changed to charge private fliers the real costs of their use of the major airports and to discourage use by small planes of fields built for huge airliners, it is even conceivable that no additional capacity for airliner movements would be needed by the turn of the century. The Port Authority’s own projections indicate that added capacity would not be needed by 1980. Yet only Regional Plan Association has presented the issue of general avia­tion as a critical element in the airport decision.

Persons who use airliners see only the delays they now suffer. They are not told the potential for satisfying air travel demand without adding a fourth airport: diverting general aviation, improving air traffic control, encouraging enlargement of airliners, spreading peak airliner movements, expanding present airports. They do not consider the impact of the added airport on the Region as a whole.

Persons living near the site of proposed airports see only the personal loss they would suffer if a new airport is built. There is insufficient evidence to convince the flying public that an additional airport is not needed; there is insufficient evidence to convince residents near pro­posed sites that their sacrifice is necessary for the good of the Region.

This paper points the way to provide more convincing evidence. It argues that before building more airport capacity, this Region should consider what it will be getting for the cost, including not just the cost of con­structing an airport but also the cost of transportation to it, the cost to the airlines of operating an additional airport, the cost of noise and the disruption of the de­velopment forces a new airport lets loose. Then, all the alternatives for achieving added air travel service should be analyzed and compared. A fourth airport lying far from the Region’s center is not the only way of obtaining it.

This is obvious: who would pay upwards of a half­-billion dollars for a commodity and not even know what added service he is really buying? Who would go into a project covering some 20 square miles without exploring possible alternatives?

This Region is about to do just that.