To the editor: Guest contributor Jacob Wasserman isn’t thinking big enough (“Only Los Angeles could spend $1.5 billion to make airport traffic worse,” Dec. 16).
I like to drive. Far. During my road trips, sometimes my wife flies out to join me for a few days, which has had me picking up or dropping off at Dulles Airport near Washington, the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston and the Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. No matter what time I got to those airports, traffic was, at worst, 20% of that at LAX. Why?
Dulles is a 40-minute drive from Washington without traffic. It does not have a horseshoe as LAX does. It is one long terminal where people drop off passengers at various spots. George Bush and DFW are quite different. Their terminals are spread out and the road system into those is like a freeway that has various offramps for each terminal. One does not have to follow the traffic of every car through the entire airport to get to the correct terminal, unlike at LAX.
The latter two should be models for every new airport. But with so little land, how could this be done at L.A.’s airport? The answer is, it cannot — if we insist on having our airport where it is currently located.
In the late ‘60s, the city bought 17,000 acres of land in Palmdale for a planned “second” airport. There was a great deal of criticism over the distance from the city and the lack of mass transit to it, and the airport was never built. Los Angeles World Airports, however, still owns the land, which means, in theory, the Palmdale airport could come to fruition decades later.
I suggest that where people once lamented traveling, they would now go willingly. But where to get the money for such a project? Easy. Sell LAX. I would think that the beach-adjacent location would make it easy for the city to sell the land to salivating developers.
So, if our airport leaders simply want to apply a larger bandage, Wasserman’s suggestions would be good. But if they want to actually solve this significant problem, they should try doing what other cities have done with success.
Joel Drum, Van Nuys
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To the editor: Congestion at LAX has gotten intolerably bad. Overriding all of the attempts to improve flow is the extraordinary lack of awareness, courtesy, concern and good citizenship of many of the travelers and drivers. Many picking up or dropping off passengers stop and idle across two lanes, sit at the curb waiting, dawdle loading or unloading their passengers as others wait for the precious spots and block access to the curb.
The international terminal is the worst. I don’t know if adding more lanes to funnel into LAX is the long-term solution, but I’m positive that if we had more traffic control officers who sternly ordered these cars to move, the LAX traffic experience would be much improved.
Paula Glosserman, Los Angeles
