Stop the Bickering and Start Planning to Blunt the Airport Crunch

By Jane Holtz Kay

Membership in the frequent-flyer fraternity isn't what it used to be. Not since the Wright brothers took off from Kitty Hawk have we had tighter squeezes, sparser seating, grimmer eating, and more en route or takeoff delays. A low ceiling has taken on new meanings.

Last month, Chicago passengers hit that ceiling over delays; this month, New York put a lid on its ceiling for more flights out of LaGuardia and Kennedy. But if those ceilings are low, there is one that is still lower in this town: the ceiling for civility, community, and cooperation in working out a transportation policy.

Cities and towns are not only involved in a war of the airways against more planes and runways, but enjoined with each other in what has become a class war and contest of historic upmanship. On your east, witness besieged East Boston et al., clamoring that they have had enough noise attacks from Logan.

On your north, observe the greener climes of Concord hollering at us. In the struggle for the wild blue yonder, it is not whether we should suffer the latest assault by yet more airplanes and runways but which.

Which place is more worthy of peace and quiet in the name of history and equity.

Is it the fields below Hanscom's air path above Lexington and Concord where the militia marched over the rude bridge that arched the flood? Or the sacred soil under Logan's planes where the tea was heaved into the water and the Boston Massacre galvanized colonialists?

Which zone is worthy of peace and quiet in the name of equity and social justice? Is it the eternally embattled midscale citizens of the hub, or the threatened upscale inhabitants of Concord and kin on their suburban landscape? Well, thank you, but please allow me to circle none of the above.

As someone who has suffered more hours waiting inside airplane terminals than flying inside airplanes lately, as someone who knows Massports noise abatement telephone number by heart - and, more important, as someone who has watched the chaos and fragmentation of transportation decisions by muddle-headed officials, active and retired alike in this state - let me utter a plague on all these planes and partisans.

More positively, let us all ask for something more: for the chance to end today's turf wars and seek transportation policies grounded in a future of economic and equitable responsibility.

Better rail is the first way to ease air congestion and Acela, the high-speed Amtrak train, is close to the gate.

Not only will its three-hour trip to New York relieve as much as 30 percent of Logan's traffic and siphon folks to downtown and Route 128 rail terminals, but it will attract more riders and service from other New Englanders. Only last week, Burlington, Vt., and Portland were given funding for corridors to use this high-speed train to Boston.

Will enough trains come to connect these corridors and cut down air traffic? On one condition. If we support them with the single most important transportation project in the state and region: the North-South Rail Link allowing them and us travelers and commuters a through route from North to South Station and onwards.

With the link, passengers from all New England can make their way seamlessly along the entire route ... and plane traffic tapers down.

But only if you build it - only if we finance the rail tunnel's missing link in the slot awaiting beneath the Big Dig. Today, the vital step, the long-dawdling Major Investment Study to analyze that financing is still stalled.

Ahh, yes, financing. Boston, we know, is smothering from the costs of the Big Dig, of course. But the city and state don't have to go it alone on this rail project. All New England has an interest in this tunnel out of our troubles; both sectors public and private, share that interest.

While the Midwest's new highspeed rail initiatives and California's passenger train growth are showing us how, the state is running in reverse.

Its plans, multi-billion dollar Urban Ring (around), a parking-lot studded, car magnet that harks back to the deplored and defeated Inner Belt and the Seaport's impotent $2 billion Silverline bus folly are amateurish and inept.

The slowness to fund a smooth-moving rail link is not about financial scarcity, in the end. It is about financing gone amok on such silly willy-nilly dead end projects plus a glut of local highway pork small and deadly like Route 3's environmentally pernicious South Shore road-widening.

We can do better. If we can't just call a moratorium to the auto-air age solutions that have us stuck in air and ground traffic, at the least we can cut the small planes and obey the injunction to study all alternatives before we fly.

The FAA has never engaged in a comprehensive airside demand study of the larger Northeast region. Like the highway gang, the airline band skips exploring alternatives that make expansion into the community the last resort.

Thus, our sad, impacted citizens resort to class and civil warfare instead of allying for better access and mobility. Our ancestors knew better.

Call out the militia. United we conquer, divided we fall prey to today's attack on land, sea and air.

From the Boston Globe, op ed page editorial, October 21, 2000.

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