New York City's LaGuardia Airport is getting a makeover. The four aging terminals, built over the course of several decades—seemingly by people who didn't realize there was already an airport there—will be leveled and replaced with one shiny, "structurally unified" terminal and "best-in-class passenger amenities."
As anyone who has flown through airport can attest, this is a Good Thing. LaGuardia is old, cramped, and designed for an earlier era of aviation, before the dominance of the hub and spoke system, before passengers commonly transferred from one airline to another. Flights are frequently late, and sometimes it seems like the only good thing about the place is that it's really close to Manhattan.
The renovation is expected to cost well north of $4 billion in public and private financing (Delta Airlines is kicking in a bunch of cash to redo its terminals). And yes, it will be nicer than the rubbish pile Vice President Joe Biden described as something you'd find in "some third world country."
But there's no reason to believe the new LaGuardia will solve the current airport's biggest problem: an infuriatingly high rate of delays. Just 76 percent of flights left on schedule in 2014, according to the DOT's Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
The renovation plan includes ways to streamline how planes move around the tarmac (partly by adding more space), along with the workings of baggage claim and security. That won't hurt, but the real source of delays is above the airport.
These delays aren't the result of rundown facilities. They happen because the region's airspace is ridiculously congested. Every day, roughly 4,000 flights move through the New York/Philadelphia Metroplex. There are just so many planes flying in and out of the city's three main airports (never mind smaller facilities like Islip, Westchester, and Teterboro) that the skies are filled up. It's the most crowded airspace in the country.
That's why Newark and Kennedy, which have the long runways and tarmac real estate LaGuardia lacks, posted similarly dismal on-time numbers last year. 71 percent of departures from Newark were on schedule. At JFK, it was 77 percent. The national average? 90 percent.
In April, the GAO identified six airports needing significant capacity upgrades. All three major NYC airports and Philly are on that list. All four will continue to be constrained through 2030, at least.
Unlike the crummy facilities at LaGuardia, which you can avoid by just not going there, this airspace problem affects everyone who flies into, out of, or within the US. The airports in the New York and Philadelphia area accounted for nearly half of all delays in the nation as of 2011, up from just a third in 2005.
Cleaner bathrooms and better restaurants will make waiting more pleasant, but won't help you leave on time. "While it's very nice to have nice aviation facilities, flying is not a substitutable good," says Adie Tomer, fellow and aviation policy expert with The Brookings Institute. We don't use LaGuardia because we like LaGuardia. We fly there because it's the way to get to New York City, or out of it.
What we actually need is a vastly improved air management system, one that eases congestion by allowing planes to fly closer together and make more efficient use of runways. Which is exactly what the FAA is working on with its NextGen program, a suite of upgrades to systems on the ground and in aircraft that will let planes navigate storms better and design more efficient approaches and departure routes, by using a tracking system based on GPS rather than radar. It may not make all of New York's problems go away, but it will provide real progress.
Too bad it's monstrously delayed and over budget. A 2012 GAO report found that out of 30 NextGen-related programs, half were delayed—some by more than 14 years. Costs were $4.2 billion over initial estimates.
We're sure that the new LaGuardia will be gorgeous, but no one goes to the airport to get a burger at Five Guys. If the choice were between the current airport with on-time flights and a fancy new building with the same delays, we bet New Yorkers would happily keep LGA a craphole and banish dissenters to the even more run-down Penn Station.
