I really really wish the U.S. would implement some sort of transit facilities and regulations for airports. Needing a visa just to pass through without ever needing to leave a secure section of an airport is ridiculous and anachronistic.
- This would still make sense to have at many hub airports (NYC and Atlanta come to mind) - but as the Wall Street Journal points out in this lovely article, "American airports are typically run by politicians in conjunction with the dominant airlines, which help finance the terminals in return for long-term leases on gates and facilities. The airlines use their control to keep out competitors; the politicians use their share of the revenue to reward unionized airport workers. No one puts the passenger first." -- https://www.wsj.com/articles/third-world-u-s-airports-that-i...
- In the case of New York especially, you'll note that the Port Authority runs ALL the airports: JFK, LGA, Newark. Yep, these are the same people who run the world's most favorite bus terminal ever. And (as the same article above notes), "Federal law generally requires that airport revenues be spent on aviation, but that statute, passed in 1982, contains a grandfather provision excluding the Port Authority." So your landing fees are subsidizing the fancy over-budget new World Trade Center PATH terminal, among other nonsense, instead of keeping your airports from falling apart, let alone making improvements for international passengers.
It was not worth it.
Even the director of the Port Authority (the one in 2015, not the one when it was approved) declined to hold an opening ceremony because he was troubled at the cost overruns, decrying the station as a "symbol of excess".
>The terminal is pretty. But it was 10 years behind schedule. It costs $3.75 BILLION dollars to build, making it the world's most expensive transportation hub. And it runs about 46,000 passengers a day. (Compare and note that Grand Central does five and a half times that many). It was not worth it.
That... doesn't actually sound bad? According to what you wrote there it's serving around 16-17 million passengers a year, which would mean the entire $3.75 billion only works out to ~$220 a passenger for a single year, so it could be entirely recovered by a surcharge or temporary rate bump or whatever of around 50-60 cents a day in just a single year. If built properly so the capex can be amortized across five years or a decade or more, all that drops proportionally. That doesn't seem like a huge ask in NYC.
I mean yeah, it certainly apparently is far from the most efficient design. But even so it's worth considering that even a public infrastructure project here with huge scheduling delays and cost overruns that produces a big upfront bill isn't necessarily that inefficient compared to other forms of competing transport (like cars). It's easy to get too silo'd and forget the fundamental efficiencies and reliability vs the wider world, and in many cases it might be worth "reinvesting" some of those gains in the form of making something more aesthetically pleasing (and thus attractive to the public users) or politically greased, because even if it's worse relative to an internal ideal it might still be better for society. And humans are humans, sometimes some "inefficiency" is necessary from a practical standpoint.
The real question I'd have isn't the one time capex, it's ongoing maintenance. If all that money went into building something that'll be extremely reliable and have either equal or lower maintenance structures vs the rest of the stations, amortization can take care of the rest all right. If however delays and other issues result in higher running costs, that's a much much bigger deal and would be more interesting to know about then the $3.75 billion upfront.
It works out so that $220 extra per commuter per day would pay off the station in a year. If you wanted to pay it off like a mortgage at 2.5% interest over 30 years, that'd be a a rate of about $322/mo.
For comparison, a 30-day unlimited pass for the entire PATH system currently runs $89.