Peak-period pricing could help at Logan

By Scott Lehigh, Globe Staff, 4/6/2001

LET'S FACE FACTS: Boston needs a new approach at Logan Airport. But a new
runway? Well, consider the Philadelphia story.

Philadelphia International Airport was congested, delays frequent. The
answer, the airport experts said, was simple: A new 5,000-foot, one-way
runway to serve the turboprop planes that made up 40 percent of airport
traffic.

If that sounds a lot like Boston's 14/32, the $33 million bouncing baby
runway that is the gleam in a proud parent agency's eye, it was. But instead
of slicing delays by the projected 30 percent after its 1999 opening,
Philly's new strip trimmed the waits by less than 10 percent.

Why? Because in the 21/2 years the runway took to build, Philadelphia saw a
dramatic shift from the smaller turboprop planes to regional jets: 35- to
60- or 70-seat planes designed for flights from between 150 and 800 miles.
Many of the new jets can't or won't use the new landing space.

''It has not been as good as it was forecast to be because people did not
anticipate the boom in regional jets,'' said Richard Golaszewski, an
aviation consultant with GRA Inc. in suburban Philadelphia.

With that cautionary tale in mind, look again at Logan. Almost 40 percent of
runway use at Logan is from turboprops, small planes carrying between nine
and 34 passengers. Substitute a regional jet flight for two or three
turboprop trips, and the need for a new runway decreases substantially.

Which is where peak-period pricing comes into play; it could tap the logic
of market forces to maximize efficient use of limited landing-space
resources.

The way Logan Airport currently allocates runway space, it's cheaper to land
a turboprop than a larger jet - even though the larger plane serves far more
passengers. Thus there's little reason for small airlines to move to
decongesting regional jets. But imposing higher takeoff and landing levies
in peak hours would provide the incentive: a $150 or $200 flat fee spread
across 40 or 50 passengers rather than across 10 or 15 means cheaper
relative fares.

Peak-period pricing would also encourage more flights to move to nonpeak
hours. And if it catalyzed a shift from turboprops to longer-range RJs, it
might also nudge someflights to bypass Logan entirely.

Yet, pricing policy as a demand-management tool is something Massport and
the Federal Aviation Administration have given only a limited look, under
restricted scenarios. Why? Because, Massport officials insist, current
delays aren't a result of inadequate capacity.

They aren't? On days when northwest winds limit Logan to its two-runway
configuration, capacity limitation is precisely what backs the airport up.
Impose peak-period prices at a lower operations-per-hour level (or use
higher fees than Massport employed in its analysis), and there would be a
larger incentive for airlines to carry passengers more efficiently.

Finally, as Philadelphia's experience shows, it's important to look long
range. The busier Logan gets, the less effective another runway is at
cutting delays - but the better peak-period pricing works. Even in
Massport's incomplete evaluation, under the busiest scenario for the year
2015, peak-period pricing slices projected delay by 37 to 42 percent; the
new runway cuts it by only 28 percent.

Which suggests an obvious idea: Why not experiment with peak-period pricing
before firing up the bulldozers? After all, we tried a smarter pricing
policy in 1988, to great effect. ''We went from 18th to second in the
country in on-time performance,'' recalls former governor Michael Dukakis.
And in just 11 months. A hostile federal Department of Transportation ruling
finally killed that experiment. But DOT is now more amenable to pricing
solutions.

So here's the $33 million question: Is the ''new'' Massport open-minded
enough to try a market approach first? Or is the agency's vision so fogged
in by its expansionary ambitions that it can't see beyond the end of its
runway?

Scott Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.

This story ran on page 25 of the Boston Globe on 4/6/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

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