Current Events –
La Guardia Airport To Be Torn Down, Rebuilt
It’s considered by many as one of the worst airports in America. Now, New York City’s La Guardia Airport is set to be torn down and rebuilt.
Current Events
La Guardia Airport will no longer be the butt of jokes when it becomes a sparkling, brand new, state-of-the-art facility by 2021. So says New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who was joined on Monday by Vice-President Joe Biden for the announcement and unveiling of design plans. Vice-President Biden had previously called La Guardia Airport something he would expect in a Third World country. Now all of that is about to change.
The ancient pre-9/11 design, the dilapidated terminals and the record number of traveler delays, combined with the fact it is surrounded by water and therefore landlocked, has given La Guardia Airport quite the negative reputation. However, it’s close proximity to Manhattan, allowing residents and visitors alike to avoid long treks to JFK Airport on the outskirts of Queens, or Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey, has made it clear La Guardia Airport is very worth saving.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates La Guardia Airport, has estimated the huge construction overhaul will cost about $4 billion, most of which will go toward tearing down the Central Terminal Building, rebuilding it in place and augmenting it with a grand entry way.
“The project will replace the airport in its entirety,” Gov. Cuomo said Monday at a Midtown Manhattan luncheon for the Association for a Better New York. He acknowledged that airport officials and planners realized there was no way to fix La Guardia, so it had to be torn down and rebuilt. With no space to create a brand new alternate airport anywhere near Manhattan, the decision was made for La Guardia to remain in its current location, crammed between Flushing Bay and the Grand Central Parkway.
Plans for the new La Guardia Airport include an aesthetically pleasing, unified airport in place of the current collection of decades old and disconnected terminals, said Daniel R. Tishman, a developer appointed by Gov. Cuomo to lead a committee to create an airport master plan. However, plans have gone well beyond aesthetics. The airport buildings will be moved south and closer to the parkway, allowing for the creation of roughly 2 miles of new taxiways that officials believe will help alleviate the airport’s chronic delays.
Inside the long central terminal, passenger gates will be accessed by foot over long “sky bridges,” which will be high enough above the tarmac to allow planes to pass beneath. Planners say this would cut down on idling planes and emissions. Travelers will also have better options to get to La Guardia Airport, with plans for a new rail link, as well as re-establishing water taxi service to the airport.
Current Events
Gov. Cuomo expects the massive project to create 8,000 construction jobs, as well as a multitude of permanent jobs in the expanded airport, which will include more stores, restaurants and possibly even a conference center and hotel.
“Best of all, it’s not a plan, it’s not a sketch, it’s not a dream, it’s not a vision,” he added. “It is actually happening.”
According to Mr. Tishman, the “secret sauce” in the La Guardia Airport plan is the elimination of the parking garage and surface lots that fill the acreage between the highway and the front doors of the terminals. By first building 2 parking garages elsewhere on the grounds, the Port Authority will clear the space needed to build new terminals while the old ones remain in use. In fact, some of this work has already begun.
La Guardia is not only one of the most delay-plagued airports in the country, but one of the busiest of its size in the world. It was built when air travel was a luxury and prior to 9/11, before airports needed huge screening areas for TSA. La Guardia’s outmoded layout, combined with the density of the airspace in the New York metropolitan area, has consistently left it at the bottom of travel rankings for on-time performance year after year. So far this year, La Guardia ranked last among the 29 largest American airports in on-time departures, with just over 70% of its flights counted as on time, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
In 2012, a survey of travelers by Travel & Leisure magazine ranked La Guardia Airport as the worst in the nation. The magazine said La Guardia had the “dubious honor of ranking the worst for the check-in and security process, the worst for baggage handling, the worst when it comes to providing Wi-Fi, the worst at staff communication, and the worst design and cleanliness.”
Well, get ready, because the new La Guardia Airport will go from a punchline to one of the best city airports in the nation!
It's about time. Every time I ever flew to this airport it was always a bad experience. It's the closest to New York city so it's convenient but it needed work bad. Glad they decided to spend some money to fix it up.