A Half-Baked LAX Plan

Mayor James K. Hahn’s $9-billion plan for remaking Los Angeles International Airport is as urgently in need of an overhaul as the airport itself. The time to fix the proposal is now, before it goes to the City Council for approval early next year.

When he first introduced the plan just weeks after 9/11, Hahn called for making LAX more secure against terrorism. Experts disagree over whether all those billions would boost security as billed. More important, no plan to redo LAX can be credible as long as it sidesteps the fundamental problem facing the flying public in this region: overcrowding on the roads to the airport and in the number of passenger and cargo flights the airport must manage daily.

Hahn’s plan would demolish Terminals 1, 2 and 3, put a massive new terminal complex where the parking garages are now and move parking and passenger drop-off to a remote “ground transportation center” to be built near the San Diego Freeway. An automated people mover would ferry passengers and their meeters and greeters between the drop-off center and the terminal.

The payoffs are questionable. The added “rings” of security rely on unproven technologies like facial recognition software; Hahn’s plan doesn’t say what these futuristic devices would cost or who would operate them. And although relocating the passenger drop-off might protect terminal buildings from car bombs, people would remain just as vulnerable at the remote site.

Closing the terminal area to cars would solve a long-time complaint that the constantly clogged horseshoe-shaped road slows emergency vehicles. But Hahn’s plan contains other, less drastic ways to reduce congestion, such as adding new “fly away” bus routes and extending the Green Line light-rail service all the way to the airport.

Hahn’s plan keeps an unwise campaign promise to cap the number of passengers at LAX even though, under federal law, cities can’t limit flights or passengers unless a cap was in place before the government deregulated the airline industry. Hahn aims to achieve his cap by cutting the number of gates for planes to load and unload passengers, essentially crowding them out and forcing them to go elsewhere. That just raises another question: Where?

The best way to serve a projected doubling of passengers in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties is through a system of regional airports. But where is the evidence that Hahn’s expensive gamble would force such a system into existence? Voters in Orange County last year killed plans to make the closed El Toro Marine base into a commercial airport. Other outlying airports currently serve no commercial customers, and all lack the high-speed rail connections that planners say are critical to making a regional system work.

Under deregulation, airlines decide which airports to use and what fares to offer based on passenger demand and profitability; short of jiggering landing fees, cities wield little influence. Hahn and others who want to spread the load -- and lessen the appeal of any single airport as a terrorist target -- should lean on the California congressional delegation.

Delegation members should push the federal government to allow enough re-regulation to establish a rational regional system, at the very least to test such a plan in the nation’s most overcrowded flying market. This would take unprecedented teamwork on the part of federal, state and local legislators; Hahn can’t do it alone.

In the post-9/11 world, most experts counsel staying flexible to see which security technologies prove useful instead of investing billions now in steel and concrete that may not accommodate tomorrow’s innovations. And the economy of Southern California can’t hang on a plan that doesn’t present clear strategies to address the air traffic growth that is surely coming. The current LAX plan needs dramatic revision to take account of these realities.