Opinion: Vegas, baby, Vegas -- but not the airport
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Take heart, Los Angeles — we’re not the only American metropolis whose major airport is pitifully incapable of handling the city it serves. Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport may soon join our own humble facility in that category:
Las Vegas’s chance for a new boom may be limited by its airport, which is busting at the seams even before the addition over the next four years of around 40,000 new hotel rooms on the Las Vegas Strip, Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Lerner said on Tuesday. To fill those rooms, nearly all of which are aimed at upscale customers, the gambling center will need to attract 75 percent more visitors between now and 2012, he said at the Reuters Travel and Leisure Summit in Los Angeles. That will be ‘difficult to impossible to achieve’ given constraints on transport infrastructure, including McCarran The analyst said McCarran will likely be able to handle normal visitation growth for a couple of years, but plans for a new airport are still in the works and it would not come on line before 2017 at the earliest.
I have to admit — given how regularly Angelenos are (correctly) reminded of what a disgrace LAX is, it’s satisfying to see another city be the focus of your-airport-sucks news coverage, if only for a few days. Doubtless it’ll be a while before McCarran gets so cramped that Vegas-goers from L.A. opt instead for the six-hour crawl through the Inland Empire and up I-15.
And speaking of LAX — was anyone else struck by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s praise for JetBlue after the airline’s recent announcement that it’ll start serving LAX? Since he took office in 2005, Villaraigosa has spoken about the need to spread out domestic air service in Southern California to the region’s smaller airports — telling airlines they shouldn’t serve or increase service at LAX if they could do it at airports like Ontario and Burbank. And, up until now, JetBlue had done precisely that, staying completely out of LAX (except for emergency landings) in favor of extensive service from Long Beach and smaller operations and Burbank and Ontario.
So you’d think Villaraigosa wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about a low-cost domestic carrier cramming into crowded LAX. Quite the contrary:
‘JetBlue has operated successfully in a very challenging aviation marketplace in recent years by attracting business and leisure travelers with premium service at low prices,’ said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. ‘The expansion of service in Long Beach and introduction of new routes at LAX and Burbank will, I believe, show that regionalizing air service in the L.A. Basin -- a high priority of my Administration -- is the flight path to future success. Moreover, because of JetBlue’s new focus on global partnerships, the new LAX service will help strengthen the LAX international gateway as a key driver of Southern California’s economy.’
I’m not sure that adding a few low-fare non-stop flights to Boston and New York will ‘strengthen the LAX international gateway.’ We’ll see.