Congestion Pricing at New York Airports

Publication Date: November 2007

Publisher: Reason Foundation

Author(s): Michael E. Levine

Research Area: Transportation

Type: Report

Coverage: New York

Abstract:

Congestion, caused by demand far in excess of airport capacity, and the constraints of a strait-jacket air traffic control system, has put a heavy tax on the convenience and utility of air travel. Nowhere have the problems been worse than in New York, where congestion has reached alarming and prodigiously wasteful levels at Kennedy and LaGuardia, and is scarcely better at Newark. Spurred on by these developments, the prospect of their being duplicated elsewhere and the demand that it "do something" about them, the Department of Transportation is proposing to introduce congestion charges at New York's LaGuardia and Kennedy airports. Collecting congestion charges would both assign existing capacity to use by those who value it most and signal that more capacity was needed-- valuing capacity expansion and funding it.