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'The Edge of a Precipice'Published: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 7:38 AM PDT Living in San Diego often feels like standing on the edge of a precipice: Something really great could happen that would save you from falling off the edge; something terrible could befall you like getting pushed over the edge; but without a doubt the uncertainty is going to kill you. I have lived in San Diego now for almost seven years. What I have discovered in that short time is that this City -- our City -- is on the precipice of something really great, and yet something terrible inevitably happens that prevents us from realizing the City’s full potential. For instance, in 2004, the City’s pension underfunding calamity was being revealed publicly, and San Diego citizens knew that things at City Hall had to change. So they voted into office Mike Aguirre -- only one of two city-wide elected officials -- as an important agent of change. But instead of the City coming to realize its full potential in these past four years, Mike Aguirre has obstructed positive change at every opportunity. That’s what I mean when I write that something terrible seems to inevitably happen before we get to where we need to be. Another example is playing out as we blog: The airport master plan for San Diego Lindbergh Field. In November 2006, a vast majority of voters nixed the idea of trying to steal from the military one of its most valuable wartime assets -- U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Miramar -- during a time of war no less. So now our government leaders are tasked with the daunting feat of making the best and highest public use of our existing airport at Lindbergh Field. The task is especially daunting because it was initially left to a government entity whose narrow focus is limited to inside the bright-line boundaries of the airport. This organization could not seem to see beyond those boundaries to appreciate the impacts its master planning on the airport would have on the entire region. Given the magnitude of the task at hand (to maximize Lindbergh Field for the foreseeable future), how does the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority respond? Let’s build out 10 more airline gates; let’s expand the taxiway holding area on the north side of the runway; and let’s do some runway repairs; then we’ll do some more planning in 2015. That’s pretty much it. Where is the vision here? Where is the all-encompassing embrace of San Diego’s fullest potential? --LEE BURDICK
21 Comments so far on this story...
Simply put the problem with the "north terminal" vision is that who in the heck will pay for it? Airlines are a strapped, low margin business. They are not going to pay for something that does not put more bodies into planes and/or increases the margins they can generate (which means more first class, long haul passengers). The North Terminal plan does neither. So unless _SAN DIEGO_ taxpayers want to foot the ENTIRE bill to free up bayfront property (or simply trade moving the terminals for more land for private development on the existing terminal footprint) the move is a non starter that fails airline economics 101. And you have fundamentally missed the reason why we need the 10 new gates. RIGHT NOW SDIA has a morning rushhour congestion, caused in part because our evening curfew and lack of a north taxiway (cont.) (cont.) Several dozen flights are trying to take off and land in the peak AM hours. The gates help reduce taxiway holds and the problem of not having enough gates to accomodate all the arrivals/departures that are forced into that narrow window. Unless you want to wait till 1 p.m. before you can get to Sacramento or San Franciso, you WANT SDIA to be able to handle the morning crush efficiently and effectively (I would submit that your clients at Higgs in the Bay Area want you there for morning meetings and depos and/or are going to be unhappy seeing hotel charges on their bills because being in San Diego severely constrains your ability to make it to Bay Area before 1). While I would agree that sometimes San Diego is where good ideas go to die, the North terminal move is NOT one of them. What do you mean by Mike Aguirre obstructed positive change? Mike Aguirre saved the city-owned Montgomery_Field from being closed due to FAA safety violations. The Developer and City Employee_Union plan included selling the public land and constructed luxury high-rise condominium projects without infrastructure in_the name of affordable workforce_housing and splitting the profits. The plan also included moving the small private planes from Montgomery Field to Lindbergh-SDIA which would create the same type of small versus big aircraft navigation hazard as PSA Flight 182 which crashed in 1978. link Overflight Easements for Navigation or Flight in air were to be required over private Chain-of-Titles in Districts 2, 3, and 4. link Kevin Faulconer and Mr. Aguirre stood up for public safety, private property rights, killed the Overflight Easement scheme, and preserved our Quality_of_Life. Mr. Aguirre obstructed corruption, protected the public's interest, and this is the thanks he gets? I see Steve Peace as a professional meddler, hardly a visionary; he was the driving force behind California's deregulation of electricity that lead to the Western Energy Crisis and Enron's rip-off of California consumers. Meanwhile, Mike Aguirre has hardly obstructed positive change--name what progress he has obstructed--but he is still appealing unfunded retirement benefits. As for the "precipice of something really great," we've seen this visionary stuff before--that's where the tax money went, that was not only supposed to go to the retirement fund, but the funding maintenance of parks, water/waste, roads, and fire prevention, as well. The title of your article is deceiving. If you wanted to slam Aguirre you should have just said so in your heading. At least Aguirre is not deceiving......The Voice should change it's name to AGUIRRE SLAM SLIGHT. Unbelievable! I don't know if the North Terminal plan is the best idea or not, but it seems pretty sensible on the surface. And the dozens of times I've flown in or out of Lindbergh or picked people up there, I've never once experienced any serious congestion compared to other airports. With higher fuel costs and airline ticket prices, I wouldn't bet on the Airport Authority's massive growth projections coming true anytime soon. Wouldn't the smart thing to do be to take a little more time and plan it right, as Ms. Burdick suggests? What's the big rush? The Airport Authority and their staff seem to be reacting to a crisis that doesn't exist by pushing a half-baked plan and claiming the sky will fall if we don't implement it yesterday. The statement that Mike Aguirre obstructed positive changes at every opportunity sounds like corporate welfare sour grapes. If you have flown out at 7 to 8 on a weekend at Lindbergh and had a 30 minute taxi wait that is a funciton of the congestion I am talking about. Again simple guy - who PAYS??? Passengers? Think they really will accept $50-60 surcharges? Erik - What is the basis for your claim that the Airport's 10 new gates on the south side, grade separation and parking structure will be cheap and easy, whereas the north terminal plan will require massive passenger surcharges? And I have flown in and out of Lindbergh many times on the weekends and have never had a long taxi wait, certainly nothing compared to what you can expect when you fly through LAX. Have I just been getting lucky? My bad. Meant Weekdays when there really is a bad AM crush right now. The reason the construction is easy is that the west wing of Terminal 2 was essentially 1/2 built. Take a look on google map to see that it looks like someone took a razor blade and cut it in half. Really all that is required is to build the mirror image of what already exists which you could do with minimal (none?) disruption of activities. Hopefully this link will helps...http://maps. 1) Erik must have a baseball hat concession at the airport, so for him, more is more. In my view, less is more, and morning automobile congestion could be remedied by strategically rerouting traffic at airport entrances, plus removing obstructive "valet parking" from the middle of the mess. 2) Slamming City Attorney Mike Aguirre with distorted allegations does not advance Ms. Burdick's other arguments: it makes me question their validity as well. I suggest she stick to her apparently intimate knowledge of FAA regulatory practices -- based, BTW, on what? 3) Airport Authority plans to "remodel" Lindbergh eastward during an economic downturn and declining numbers of flights can only be explained by potential development opportunities along the harborfront that would benefit the developer relatives of director, Alan Bersin, and his sidekick, Steve Peace, who works for developer John Moores. Not car congestion - AIRPLANE congestion. Remember, you can't GET flights into Lindbergh in the middle of the night (curfew) so essentially everything that flies out in the AM needs to be parked over night. Thus you get this big demand for gates (to fill up passenger) right at the same time AM flights are landing and needing gates to deplane. PLUS since you don't have two full taxiways EVERYTHING pretty much has to go on the south taxiway by the mail sorting facility. It creates delays and inefficencies. And no, I don't own a concession - just think that we need to stop wasting time and make Lindbergh an efficient airport since that is what we got and all we are going to have rather than throw up pipe dreams that do nothing but delay the pratical improvements that need to be made. The airport is operating at 65% of its maximum annual capacity. During the peak times, the gates are full and then some. Overnight, there are more planes than gates. Get your facts straight. The FAA won't pay a dime for terminals which means its paid for by the airlines. The FAA only funds capacity, meaning runways, taxiways and navigation systems. 10 gates at half a billion is a heck of a lot less than 60 gates at $3 billion plus the cost of roadways, a train station, parking structures and land puchases. Well, there you go: Eric's focussed on Lindbergh airplane congestion and I'm stewing about automobile traffic jams outside the portals. I guess I'm always worried I will miss my flight because of the wild derby on the roadway before I can check in; once I'm on the plane I leave congestion hassles to the pilot. Between the two of us, it seems Lindbergh could use improvement pretty much everywhere you look. But I agree with Eric's comment that efficiencies don't need to be gargantuan in scale, they just needs to be well designed. Erik is right. Moving to the north solves roadway congestion, but it only includes a single taxiway at the main departure end of the runway which will result in massive airfield congestion. One benefit of the terminals where they are is that planes have a place to go at the east end of the airport to wait for departure. I've seen what it looks like when they depart to the east (reverse direction) and planes line up in front of the terminal. Its ugly. The north terminal will be this way every day. Check that. Ms./Mrs. Bowens and others have stated the maximum gate capacity for the airport is 65 gates. The airport has about 230,000 operations per year and a according to the FAA a single runway can support 260,000 operations a year putting it at 88% of its capacity. BTW.. Didn't Ms Burdick just lose a case with against the airport with Jimsair? Axe to grind??? Simple Guy, I think what Erik means is this. Lets say 10 gates cost $500 million. And lets say that costs the airlines $10 a ticket to cover. $10 is an amount people can probably swallow. The north terminal proposes dumping the existing terminals (one that probably isn't even paid for yet built in 1998) in favor of 60 new gates. Obviously 60 gates will cost more than 10 gates, plus infrastructure. Financing terms are the same thus the cost per passenger is 5-6 times ($50-60 per passenger) more which isn't tolerable. Now, lets say its a new airport, and it costs $5-7 billion. The benefit here is that the FAA chips in a bigger chunk to pay for runways, because the runways double capacity, the airlines can leverage that capacity by adding more flights to reduce unit costs. They have higher costs for 5-6 years like Denver did, then the airport becomes a gravy train (like Denver). Now, if you don't add runway capacity but only replace gates, you can't offset those costs and you start a downward unrecoverable financial spiral. Thus, small incremental additions make more sense. So if the Marines and the city didn't want the airport up at Miramar, what makes us think they will give up some or all of MCRD for this north side plan? So if the Marines and the city didn't want the airport up at Miramar, what makes us think they will give up some or all of MCRD for this north side plan? So if the Marines and the city didn't want the airport up at Miramar, what makes us think they will give up some or all of MCRD for this north side plan? Reader feedback
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