Big Changes May Be on the Way for NYC-Area Airports

February 1, 2011 at 8:52 AM | by kjb | Comments (0)

If you�ve ever had the pleasure of flying to or through any of the New York City area airports, it was probably fairly clear that they could use a little bit of help. Many of the terminals at LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark are older and lacking, and worst of all there are just too many darn people and planes trying to escape and arrive at any given time�so delays are pretty much the expectation and the norm.

A new little research plan from the folks over at the Regional Plan Association agree that things are less than ideal, and they only see things getting worse as travel demands increase over the next 20 years or so�especially if nothing is done to prepare for the influx of planes and passengers. They�ve offered up a little bit of a plan to hopefully fix things in the future, but unfortunately it�s going to cost like $15 billion across the three airports.

Over at Newark-Liberty, recommendations include building a brand new runway to tackle some of this growth. To make way for the new asphalt, Terminal B would have to be sent to airport heaven, and parts of Terminals A and C would also have to be moved around or built elsewhere to accommodate the new runway.

At JFK another runway seems to be the solution as well, and this would be the airport�s fifth landing strip. LaGuardia would also probably benefit for a little more room to takeoff and land as well, but unfortunately there�s no room for any of that stuff due to the airport�s limited real estate. The group thought about building another huge airport somewhere else near Manhattan, but there�s really no place to do it, so fixing what they have now is really the best solution.

As of now it�s all just blueprints and PowerPoint presentations, as who knows if the Port Authority and the governments of New Jersey and New York would even go along with sending all three airports into a see of orange-barreled construction zones.

There�s also that whole money issue, because we�re pretty sure no one has billions in cash just hanging around. We agree that something kind of needs to be done in the future to expand things and prevent constant delays and headaches, but have no idea how they�re going to do it�maybe start playing the Powerball?

[Photo: Krzysztof Urbanowicz]

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