Air traffic congestion at O’Hare International Airport was reaching critical levels before Sept. 11, 2001, and the grace period afforded by those events is over. Serious chronic congestion, sometimes even during good weather, is back and getting worse.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta recently summoned the airlines to Washington, D.C., to beat them up for “overscheduling” at O’Hare. But the airlines are not to blame. Like any business, they only are responding to customer demand.
We should blame them for bringing business to our city? Most cities would love to have this problem.
Nor is the secretary of transportation, or the Federal Aviation Administration that he supervises, to blame. The FAA does not plan or develop new runways or new airports. Under our system, airport development is left to local initiative.
Nor are our local government officials really to blame. Sure our region has not developed more airport capacity; we have failed to exploit our greatest natural resource, our location.
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Nevertheless there is plenty of airport for Chicago-bound passengers. It is the connecting traffic to other destinations (about half the passengers at O’Hare) that drives congestion.
Congestion is caused by national network flows, not local traffic. Local governments have other worries than the welfare of the national air traffic network.
So who can we blame? A system in which the network is national (what happens in San Diego affects Chicago, which affects Boston) and in which the infrastructure responsibility is local (feuding local interests decide whether to expand O’Hare) is inherently dysfunctional. We can blame the system. It is a legacy of early aviation history and our notions of federalism.
If we can’t change the system, what can we do to reduce O’Hare congestion and the associated billions of dollars in economic loss? Two steps are necessary.
First, the O’Hare Modernization Program must have Manhattan Project-type priority. It must have the power to move mountains today not tomorrow. This means expediting the FAA’s own review processes. It could mean legislation to short-circuit environmental challenges that can only delay, not stop, the project. It could mean operational changes at the airport–curfews, traffic diversion and so on–to facilitate construction.
Second, we need a temporary program to ration O’Hare capacity. We are looking at three years before any relief and perhaps five years before airfield capacity can match demand. During that time, there will be a capacity shortfall.
There are three ways we can respond:
– Just accept long and unpredictable delays, with direct and indirect costs of many kinds to the airlines and all passengers. I submit this is the most costly way to handle the problem–and it is the one we are using now.
– Regulate traffic through administrative or political devices.
– Ration airspace capacity using marketplace tools. In most of our economy, the scarce good–here, a landing slot at O’Hare–goes to the party willing to pay the most. Until recently a slot control system at O’Hare allowed limited trading in landing slots by the airlines. The old system dated from 1968 and was cumbersome, riddled with problems and correctly abandoned. But it did serve to control traffic.
Of these choices, a market allocation system should be preferred. Ideally it would be voluntarily developed and managed by the airlines, with some supervision by the FAA to mitigate antitrust concerns and to protect service to smaller cities. It would assure consistent service for Chicago-bound passengers. Through price tools, it would force the airlines to divert some connecting traffic elsewhere until the airport can accommodate it with schedule reliability.
This might not be a perfect solution. But it would be far better for all parties–the airlines, the FAA, the Chicago-area economy and the traveling public–than the present condition of massive, costly delays.