Friday, August 22, 2008
Selling landing rights
The Record, Hackensack, N.J.: Get ready for another round of airfare price hikes, compliments of U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary E. Peters.
As the Bush administration’s leading advocate for privatizing roads and highways — and funding new highways with tolls — Peters wants to know how much landing and departure time slots at the nation’s airports are worth on the open market. So she’s pushing an experiment, and those who use Newark Liberty International Airport are the guinea pigs. Using chronic congestion and flight delays as a pretext, she wants to start auctioning flight slots to the highest bidder next month.
It is one of the most harebrained ideas to have come out of Washington in the past seven years, as ideological purity and political spin have all too often trumped sound reasoning and proven results. Rather than targeting the underlying problem — insufficient capacity — the Peters plan attempts to fix the nation’s overcrowded airways by pricing passengers out of the market. Granting takeoff and departure rights to whoever is willing to pay the most means higher operating costs for financially strapped airlines. And that translates into ticket price hikes estimated at 12 percent.
If the Newark experiment goes through, the lame-duck Bush administration intends to auction 70 to 80 slots at each of the three area airports before it leaves office in January. Increased airfares — add them to the list of Bush administration legacies.