Policy Wonk Travel: Secretary Mary Peters Wants to Touch That Paper
7/22/2008 at 2:15 PM
Tags: Airport Hell, New York Area Airports, EWR, JFK, LGA, Mary Peters, Chuck Schumer (all tags)
While last year's summer of airline hell has yet to repeat itself, the US government is still working on a way to keep it from happening again. And Transportation Secretary Mary Peters thinks that slot auctions are the way to go, something she's been hyping since at least last December.
But the airlines don't want to pay more for landing rights they already have--especially when they're already bleeding cash. And while Secretary Peters makes some decent points in her latest defense of auctions, her case is more than a little thin.
Secretary Peters took to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times today to lay out her case:
My department has proposed auctioning the landing and departure slots at Kennedy, La Guardia and Newark Airports, to let the market determine the cost of using them during periods of high demand. (About three-quarters of all air travel delays nationwide are caused by congestion in New York.) Unfortunately, a bill in the Senate would block our plan.
You’re already familiar with the concept of demand-based pricing. It’s why using your cellphone at night is cheaper than making a call on your lunch hour and why renting a beach house in New Jersey costs more in the summer than in the winter.
The current system, though, doesn't let markets determine the price of a landing slot. Instead, aircraft of equal weight are charged the same landing fees whether they're scheduled to touch down at 9 am (good!) or 3 am (awful!). That also gives airlines an economic incentive to use smaller planes, further tightening the supply of seats at high-demand times.
Secretary Peters says that the reason technology improvements of the type demanded by Senator Chuck Shumer (D-NY) are lagging is because there's no money to pay for them--because current fee structures vastly undervalue those high-demand landing slots.
The huge hole in her case though comes near the end of today's essay:
It’s understandable that the airline industry wants to protect its interests. But the Transportation Department is in the business of protecting consumers, fostering competition and providing reliable air travel, not placating special interests. Independent economic experts of all political backgrounds agree that either auctions or congestion pricing is far preferable to the failed experiment we have now.
Really? Care to name any of them? Or cite any studies that've been done on this? No? Well, then, we're not really buying it!
Secretary Peters may indeed be right that auctions are the way to go, whether the airlines want them or not. But we won't know until she presents some actual evidence supporting her claims.
Related Stories:
· End Gridlock on the Runway [NYT]
· Will Slot Auctions Save New York's Airports? [Jaunted]
[Photo: triplexpresso]
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