--- In BATN@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "1/30 Sacramento Bee" <batn@...> wrote: Published Monday, January 30, 2006, in the Sacramento Bee Dan Walters: San Diego, other California cities feeling airport squeeze By Dan Walters SAN DIEGO -- Lindbergh Field may be the only major airport in America accessible to pedestrians. Not that many actually walk to their flights, however, and its location on the city's scenic waterfront, just blocks from downtown offices and hotels, is as much curse as blessing. As convenient as it may be, Lindbergh's single runway and proximity to buildings and homes tightly limit how many flights, and thus passengers, it can handle -- while posing no small potential safety problem. Local business and civic leaders have yearned for years to build a new and larger airport. If it cannot upgrade its airport to handle more and larger planes, local leaders fear, San Diego's extensive efforts to remake itself into a world-class tourist and convention locale may be doomed. The current estimate is that Lindbergh Field, which handles 16 million passengers a year, will be maxed out in less than a decade. San Diegans began seeking a replacement for Lindbergh just after World War II, but 60 years later they are no closer to finding the 3,000 acres needed for two 12,000-foot runways that can handle today's jumbo jets and thus bring transoceanic airline access to the city. A newly created San Diego County Regional Airport Authority is busily examining potential sites, but the Navy long ago locked up the two most convenient pieces of suitable land for its own flight activities -- North Island and Miramar -- and is unwilling to cede either. Given the geographic constraints of water and semimountainous terrain, San Diego's airport planners are entertaining some remote and expensive alternatives, such as building an airport 75 miles away in the Imperial County desert and shuttling passengers via a high-speed magnetic levitation train (price tag: $17 billion). San Diego is not alone in facing increasing demand and diminishing land and political will for expanding airport facilities. After a flurry of terminal and runway additions in the mid-1990s -- one of the few bright spots in California's dismal record on infrastructure -- airport expansion has been grounded. But since then passenger traffic is up 11 percent, even counting the sharp post-9/11 dip in travel, to 174 million a year at the state's 30 commercial airports, and Southern California's air passenger demand is forecast to double over the next quarter-century. Just this month, the Los Angeles City Council ratified Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's deal with critics of long-pending plans to expand immense Los Angeles International Airport, which handles more than 60 million passengers a year. Big-scale expansion is being shelved in favor of modest reworking of two LAX runways. For years, Southern California airport planners had seen the Marine Corps' El Toro air base in Orange County as the best site for a new regional airport to relieve pressure on existing facilities, but when the Marine Corps decamped, fierce local opposition shot down plans for a commercial airport. Orange County is now planning to modestly expand John Wayne Airport, which suffers from some of the same geographic restrictions as San Diego's Lindbergh Field, but the defeat of El Toro was a major setback for airport planners throughout the region. There's been talk for years about shifting some of the LAX traffic to Palmdale, another remote desert location, but it's been a non-starter so far. More likely, Ontario International in San Bernardino County -- owned by Los Angeles -- will expand, since it's the only regional airport with room to grow. Northern California faces a squeeze as well. San Jose's expansion plans are stalling. San Francisco International has dropped its plans to upgrade parallel runways that are too close for comfort, and hopes that a new radar system will allow modest increases in operations, which actually have been decreasing of late. Oakland International's business is up 45 percent over the past decade, largely because Southwest Airlines abandoned San Francisco and consolidated in Oakland. As Bay Area airports run into expansion roadblocks, it's inevitable that more of the region's traffic, passengers and cargo, will spill into inland airports that have room to grow, such as burgeoning Sacramento International (up 37 percent in the past decade). Reach Dan Walters at (916) 321-1195 or dwalters@... --- End forwarded message ---