Peak-period pricing at Logan a road not taken

By Scot Lehigh, Globe Staff, 4/27/2001

HERE'S A QUESTION for the new, respectful, open-minded Massport.

Why didn't Virginia Buckingham, the agency's $150,000-a-year executive
director, bother to stick around for the evening session of Wednesday's
packed, passionate hearing on Logan Airport's proposed runway?

Sure, the business community had largely had its say by that time.

Still, had Buckingham deigned to remain, she would have heard an outpouring
from Logan's neighbors, many of whom were unable to attend until after work.
Asked why his boss bailed sometime after 5 p.m., spokesman Jose Juves said
she had heard plenty of opposition during the afternoon session.

''It's very repetitive,'' he said.

Not as repetitive, certainly as jet noise rumbling overhead minute by
minute, hour by hour, day after day. And it was only one evening, after all.

No matter. As to those who couldn't make the hearing during working hours?
Well, as Marie Antoinette would have put it, Let them speak late.

Still, Buckingham's failure to linger and listen only adds to doubts about
Massport's professed desire for an open, exhaustive, consensus-building
evaluation of its proposed 5,000-foot runway.

Who knows, had she stayed, Buckingham might have had creeping doubts about
Massport's assertion that the new runway is the best solution to Logan
delay.

Perhaps a lightbulb would have gone off upon hearing state Representative
Eugene O'Flaherty, Democrat of Chelsea, note that Massport's argument that
another runway is crucial for the economy is more than 25 years old. The
agency made the same claim in the mid-1970s. The runway was stopped. The
economy has roared on.

Certainly she could have benefited from the critique offered by former
governor Michael Dukakis, now vice chairman of the Amtrak board.

Noting that one of every three flights out of American airports is for 350
miles or less, Dukakis said: ''Those people ought to be on a first-class
high-speed-rail passenger system. And if they were, both in this part of the
country and across the country, there would be no airport problem.''

After a quarter century of trying, high-speed rail has finally arrived.

By the end of the year, Amtrak will have 18 round trips a day - basically
one an hour - between Boston and New York, including 10 high-speed Acelas,
which streak from downtown to downtown in about three hours.

Service will be so good that Logan could phase out the Boston-to-New York
shuttle altogether, Dukakis said.

Now, that sounds optimistic. But Dukakis's larger point is dead on. Should
Logan really be flaps down on its runway plan when we are finally about to
have the option of regular high-speed rail?

The former governor's next point was just as telling: Why won't Logan first
try peak-period pricing, the demand-management technique that charges higher
takeoff and landing fees during busy periods? Such a policy would encourage
small planes to reschedule flights to less hectic hours, while catalyzing a
shift to larger, congestion-relieving regional jets.

And this is no shoo-fly-pie-in-the-sky; when Massport experimented with a
smarter pricing policy in 1988, the effect was dramatic.

''Within a matter of months we went from 18th to second in on-time
performance at major airports in the United States,'' Dukakis said.

Back then, Logan was forced to abandon peak-period pricing in the face of a
hostile Department of Transportation. But with increasing airport
congestion, the Department of Transportation now looks favorably at that
kind of market-based solution.

Which makes Massport's reluctance to reimpose peak-period pricing as an
immediate demand-management tool all the more perplexing, since even
according to its own environmental impact statement, under one scenario PPP
does more than the new strip to reduce projected delays. And simply by using
the self-sorting logic of the market. In short, it's a perfect conservative
solution.

So, as we enter the new age of high-speed rail, why not try peak-period
pricing and see how it works before building a new runway, Dukakis asked?

His query hangs in the air, awaiting a good answer from Massport.

This story ran on page 19 of the Boston Globe on 4/27/2001.

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