website logo   Why 2035?

In coming months, the Southern California Association of Governments, SCAG will finalize its plan for how many Southern Californians will fly 28 years from now, in 2035, and which airports will serve them.

SCAG has made a Regional Transportation Plan and aviation forecast every three or four years. Prior forecasts, whose time has come, have been consistently wrong. Typically SCAG predicted a number of air passengers that would require at least one more good sized airport than was actually needed.

Forecasting air travel demand is difficult business. This past spring, several airport managers in the region tried to look a few months into the future and predicted a summer surge which did not occur. John Wayne airport predicted that travel would be up by a whopping ten percent in 2006, but it went down.

The computer models used by SCAG for forecasting had no way to predict the Asian SARS epidemic, the 911 attacks and the skyrocketing cost of fuel. The computers similarly can not guess whether there will be a Bird Flu epidemic, war in the Middle East, a major California earthquake, or terrorist attacks that cut off the supply of oil. Bad stuff happens and the models probably will be wrong again – predicting demand on the optimistically high side of reality.

If forecasting demand is tough, predicting the supply of airport capacity should be easier, were it not for the role played in the planning by politics.

If allowed to, airports keep increasing in capacity as a result of larger aircraft, sophisticated scheduling which results in higher load factors on the planes, improved air traffic control and better methods for dealing with weather.

However, SCAG continues to treat the region’s key airports as though they will be untouched by technical advances in the industry and will serve no more passengers in 2035 than they are politically constrained to handle today.

A good example is Los Angeles International Airport. In 2003, a senior LAX official told SCAG’s Aviation Task Force that the airport runways could handle 89 million annual passengers (MAP).

However, two L.A. mayors promised voters that they would limit the airport to 78 MAP. To do this, LAX will remove passenger gates to choke off service. The FAA has gone along with this tactic but only until 2015. Meanwhile, SCAG plans that LAX will be frozen at 78 MAP indefinitely – or at least for 28 more years.

In Orange County, John Wayne Airport is beginning a major physical expansion that will add 300,000 square feet of terminal and increase the number of gates from 14 to 20. County officials are not saying how much that can yield in additional capacity. SCAG is forecasting John Wayne to continue indefinitely with a passenger cap that was negotiated in 2002 and expires in 2015.

There are some similarities at Long Beach where a cap on flights exists and at Burbank where there is a ten year moratorium on expansion.

Because the planners at SCAG will not forecast growth in the supply of air travel at existing airports, they must turn elsewhere to accommodate their forecast of burgeoning demand. They look perennially to Palmdale where few passengers seem to want to venture and where airlines will not fly unless they are subsidized by the taxpayers. They turn to futuristic magnetic levitation trains or other costly high speed rail concepts to remote airports in Victorville, Riverside and San Bernardino.

Time may prove some of this to be impractical supply side fixes for unrealistic demand side forecasts. Until reality converges with the forecasts, Southern California may decide to do as the Greater New York area, Chicago, San Diego and several other major population centers have done – and give priority to maximizing the utilization of its existing airports.

Long range planning is useful only when it leads to action that would not otherwise be taken. In the case of airports and their ground access, that means committing billions of dollars. Such action is not taken lightly.

Meanwhile, what can be done tomorrow to get ready for 2015 when the agreement to reduce gates at LAX expires, the passenger cap on John Wayne expires, and the expansion moratorium on Burbank is past? Eight years from now, will the folks moving into Ontario and Riverside be any more accepting of airport noise, pollution and traffic than those who live near urban airports today? Will air travelers, who have shown a marked preference for local airports, be any more willing to use remote airports than they are today? If not, what needs to be done?

Current leaders and officials should deal with the near term, rather than leaving a distant and uncertain future in the lap of future administrations.
Leonard Kranser, Editor  April 2, 2007