LAX Plan Would Let Cars Return

Mayor James K. Hahn is expected to announce today that private cars will be allowed on the horseshoe-shaped road inside Los Angeles International Airport as soon as Saturday--for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But those who drive to the airport will find a vastly different environment--with private cars forced into left-hand lanes and required to enter parking structures to pick up or drop off passengers. Private vehicles will continue to be banned from parking at the curb.

Surface parking lots, which are outside structures, and Structure 6 will remain closed because they are considered more vulnerable in the case of a bombing, leaving about 7,600 spaces of the previous 9,025 in the central terminal area.

Los Angeles Police Chief Bernard C. Parks has suggested even more stringent security measures--including an expanded police deployment, inspections by National Guard troops of some vehicles and the closure of several access roads onto airport grounds.

It remains unclear how many of those measures will be put into place. Parks has requested that National Guard troops at LAX be re-stationed to provide additional security checks, said Deputy Chief David Kalish. The troops are currently being used only to oversee screening checkpoints within airport terminals.

The role of bomb-sniffing dogs may also be expanded from baggage checks to more regular searches of the facility’s parking garages, Kalish said. And the chief would like to add more surveillance cameras on the perimeter of the airport.

“The modified traffic plan makes sense, but we have to harden the target,” said Kalish, referring to the fact that Parks wants to make the airport less attractive to terrorists.

Although the double-deck roadway at LAX was designed to make approaches to the airport driver-friendly, private cars will now be shunted into a limited number of lanes and then allowed to stop only once they have stopped in parking structures.

Allowing the cars to stop at the curb would be too big a danger and a logistical nightmare, because the FAA requires immediate evacuations within 300 feet any time a car is left unattended, even momentarily, officials said.

With private cars forced to the left side of the roadway, the lanes on the right will be open only to taxis, shuttle buses, commercial vans and limousines.

But preliminary tests this week of the new traffic arrangement revealed potential flaws that indicated that it may take time for drivers to adapt to the traffic flow.

In the tests, officials set up orange traffic dividers on the airport’s upper deck--leaving two lanes on the right for commercial vehicles and three lanes on the left for private cars.

The setup quickly led to a traffic jam in the two lanes nearest the curb as buses, shuttles and taxis jockeyed for space to drop off passengers. Officials then moved the plastic traffic dividers, to give the commercial vehicles three lanes to maneuver on the right.

Transportation planners for the airport agency are continuing to reexamine how many lanes will be allocated to commercial vehicles.

The plan continues to ban parking in surface lots, because bomb blasts there could cause particularly widespread damage, officials said. Parking Structure 6 will also remain closed because its design has not yet been determined to pass bomb-blast safety requirements, as other structures have.

In the weeks since the terrorist attacks on the East Coast, Los Angeles airport officials have maintained among the most stringent controls in the nation on vehicle traffic.

On at least three occasions in the last several weeks, security concerns from federal and local law enforcement officials prevented the airport agency from reopening the central terminal area to cars and trucks.

Most recently, airport officials decided against reopening the access road last weekend after the FBI recommended they keep the ban in place. Prior to that, the reopening was postponed by officials who cited fears of reprisal for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

Los Angeles officials, including Chief Parks, said security at LAX remains a particular point of concern because the airport has previously been threatened by terrorists.

Speaking at a legislative hearing this week, Parks said: “Terrorists never throw away a plan. It could happen years from now,” he said, just as a second attempt to destroy New York’s World Trade Center was successful eight years after the 1993 bombing.

LAX was the target of an alleged terrorist threat in December 1999. Algerian Ahmed Ressam, an associate of terrorist Osama bin Laden, was arrested that month at the U.S.-Canadian border with a car trunk full of explosives. He later said his goal was to bomb LAX.

The many delays in reopening the central terminal area illustrate the delicate balancing act airport officials undertake each time they consider reopening the access road. Administrators are being asked to weigh concerns presented by the FBI, the FAA and the LAPD, against those of union employees and others who insist that their economic well-being is being threatened by the continuing closure.

The airport agency has lost more than $1 million a day since the Sept. 11 attacks. A large part of its losses have come from the absence of parking fees collected from garages inside the airport.