La Guardia Airport to Be Overhauled by 2021, Cuomo and Biden Say
By PATRICK McGEEHAN

La Guardia Airport, whose dilapidated terminals and long, unenviable record of traveler delays have made it a target of jokes and complaints for decades, will be completely rebuilt by 2021, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced on Monday.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport in northern Queens, estimates the overhaul will cost about $4 billion, most of which will go toward tearing down the Central Terminal Building, rebuilding it in place and augmenting it with a grand entry way.

The project “replaces the airport in its entirety,” Mr. Cuomo said at a Midtown Manhattan luncheon for the Association for a Better New York. He said that airport officials and planners had concluded that there was no way to fix La Guardia, that it essentially had to be torn down and rebuilt. With no place to create a substitute anywhere near Manhattan, they decided it had to remain crammed between Flushing Bay and the Grand Central Parkway.

The big thought was to create an aesthetically pleasing, unified airport in place of the collection of disconnected terminals, decades old, that form the airport, said Daniel R. Tishman, a developer appointed by Mr. Cuomo to lead a committee to create a master plan for La Guardia.

The plan went beyond aesthetics: The airport buildings would be moved south, closer to the parkway. The move would allow the creation of roughly two miles of new taxiways that officials said would help alleviate the airport’s chronic delays.

Travelers would also have better options to get to La Guardia; Mr. Cuomo said the plan called for a rail link between the airport and a subway station in the Willets Point section of Queens, as well as re-establishing ferry service to the airport.

Terminals C and D, which are operated by Delta Air Lines, would likewise be shifted toward the highway and connected to the new central terminal, Mr. Cuomo said.

Mr. Tishman said: “This is a huge deal for New York City and for the country. To be the greatest city in the world, you have to have the greatest infrastructure in the world.”

He said he took it personally when, in February 2014, Mr. Biden likened La Guardia to something a traveler might find “in a third world country.”

“It hurt me just as much as it hurt the governor when I heard the vice president’s remarks,” Mr. Tishman said. Still, he added, “I have noticed the decay.”

But on Monday, Mr. Biden was in the city not to pillory La Guardia any more — well, maybe just a little more — but to praise Mr. Cuomo and other officials of the state and the Port Authority for pressing fast-forward on the overhaul plan.

The vice president predicted that the big transportation projects Mr. Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, has championed, including the building of a new Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River, would spur other projects elsewhere that would create “middle-class jobs” and keep the national economy growing.

The governor said the project would create 8,000 construction jobs and additional permanent jobs in the expanded airport, which would have more stores, restaurants and possibly even a conference center and a hotel.

“Best of all, it’s not a plan, it’s not a sketch, it’s not a dream, it’s not a vision,” he added. “It is actually happening.”

Mr. Tishman said the “secret sauce” in the La Guardia plan is the elimination of the parking garage and surface lots that fill the acreage between the highway and the front doors of the terminals. By first building two parking garages elsewhere on the grounds, the Port Authority will clear the space needed to build new terminals while the old ones remain in use. Some of this work has already begun.

La Guardia is not just one of the most delay-plagued airports in the country, but one of the busiest of its size in the world. It was built when air travel was a luxury and still a bit of a novelty. Its outmoded setup, combined with the density of the airspace in the New York metropolitan area, leave it at the bottom of the rankings for on-time performance year after year.

So far this year, La Guardia ranked last among the 29 largest American airports in on-time departures, with slightly more than 70 percent of its flights counted as on time, according to the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

In 2012, a survey of travelers by Travel & Leisure magazine ranked La Guardia as the worst airport in the nation. The magazine said La Guardia had the “dubious honor of ranking the worst for the check-in and security process, the worst for baggage handling, the worst when it comes to providing Wi-Fi, the worst at staff communication, and the worst design and cleanliness.”

Complaints of that sort spurred the creation of the Global Gateway Alliance, a group that advocates improvements in New York City’s airports, La Guardia and Kennedy International. The alliance’s chairman, Joseph Sitt, a developer, had been critical of Mr. Cuomo’s insistence late last year on creating a master plan for La Guardia just as the Port Authority was about to choose a consortium to rebuild the Central Terminal Building. The Port Authority postponed that decision until May, pushing back the start of work on the project.

On Monday, Mr. Sitt said in a statement that the announcement was “an important step in bringing New York’s airports into the 21st century” and “a win for the more than 117 million annual passengers that use our airports and for a regional economy that relies on the airports for more than $50 billion in activity.”

There seemed to be even more unanimity about the need for a better La Guardia, which the governor characterized as “un-New York” because it is “slow, dated” and “almost universally derided.”

Mr. Biden called it outdated, overcrowded and poorly designed but he praised Mr. Cuomo. “I’d like to take him with me and encourage and embolden other governors to do the same thing,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Cuomo.

拜登曾批「像第三世界」 紐約拉瓜地亞機場將重建

紐約官員27日宣布，曾被美國副總統拜登比喻成「第三世界國家」的拉瓜地亞機場（LaGuardia）即將徹底重建。

紐約州長郭謨在曼哈頓一家旅館裡宣布了這項計畫，他說：「我們需要一座下世紀仍能和紐約名字匹配的全球著名機場」；郭謨宣布這項計畫時，副總統拜登也在場。

「過夜機場指南」曾在2014年的報告中，把拉瓜地亞列為全球第10糟的機場。

改建經費將從公民營合作提供的40億美元資金來融通，達美航空也會承擔部分的經費。改建計畫可以創造約8000個新的就業機會，初期工程預定2016年上半年開工，第一個階段改建部分將在2019年對乘客開放。新機場會更靠近中央公園大道約600呎，以空出更大的飛航作業空間，最終並將與鐵路網連結。

郭謨形容現在的機場「不太紐約」，「是一個遲緩、陳舊、糟糕的紐約門戶」。

拉瓜地亞機場在1939年啟用，去年有將近2700萬乘客進出該機場，預料2030年時將增至3400萬。拉瓜地亞的跑道短，四周有水道環繞。新計畫將增加將近3.2公里長的滑行道，可讓飛機起降容易一些。

郭謨還表示，也將為紐約最繁忙的甘迺迪國際機場設計改建藍圖，計畫可望在12個月內完成。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/28/nyregion/la-guardia-airport-to-be-rebuilt-by-2021-cuomo-and-biden-say.html

2015-07-28．聯合晚報．A6．國際焦點．編譯陳澄和