Airport Opponents Plane Wrong

0

Funny how things change.

You might remember a few years ago, there was an earnest effort to push airline flights out of Los Angeles International Airport and into the smaller airports in the region, such as the ones in Ontario, Burbank and Orange County.

The reason: deep concern that air traffic was growing so fast that already choked LAX could never handle it. So Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in 2006 revived a committee made up of representatives from Los Angeles and surrounding counties to advance the notion that was called, rather innocuously, “regionalization.” It didn’t really get off the ground.

Committee members had plenty of air traffic in their communities, thank you, and they didn’t want L.A.’s spillover. Riverside County Supervisor Bob Buster was quoted in an article we published four years ago saying the whole effort was “L.A.-centric” and he had more or less dropped off the committee – along with most other members from other counties. They weren’t buying any of it.

“If regionalization means they’ll spread their pain somewhere else and dominate them politically, that’s not my idea of regionalization,” Buster was quoted at the time.

But it’s funny how things change. That big air-traffic problem just never materialized.

Today, most of those smaller terminals would love to take some of LAX’s planes, as if LAX had any to give. Some of those airports are so quiet you’d think Will Rogers and Wiley Post had piloted the last plane out of there. As you can see in the article on page 1 of this issue, some merchants around Bob Hope Airport are hurting because of the slowdown in air passengers. And it’ll get worse in a few weeks when American Airlines decamps from Burbank.

You can almost hear the conversation now. Former member of the regionalization committee: “Say, on second thought, we just might take some of those excess LAX flights off your hands.”

LAX: “That’s OK. We’re good.”

What happened? Well, as Reporter James Rufus Koren wrote in his article, the LAX modernization plan is going better than envisioned a few years ago, and, of course, there was a recession. What’s more, airlines have altered their operations and now tend to cluster in fewer but bigger airports.

In short, things changed.

The airport situation is a good reminder that we humans tend to see problematic trends, some of which don’t even exist. Well, more often, they really do exist for a time, but then technology or demography or something shifts – things change – and the “problem” goes poof.

Trouble is we tend to react to worrisome trends that we don’t need to. We probably react to 10 out of the four trends that really do exist. (And then miss a few we didn’t see coming.)

After all, computer programmers all agreed – the science was settled – that there was a frightening meltdown looming at the turn of the millennium, and companies were herded into blowing through bazillions fending off the imaginary Y2K bug.

We could go on. The point is we (companies, governments, individuals) fret about troubling trends, and I often wonder how much time and money we waste preparing for and dealing with problems that don’t exist.

Or, more often, problems that really do exist for a time. Until, you know, things change. Funny how that happens.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].

No posts to display