Major revamp of LAX is stuck at the gate

[question everything]

Source: LA Times

The cramped facility needs a lot of work to compete with more modern airfields. Lack of consensus and other problems are cited.
By Jennifer Oldham
Times Staff Writer

9:10 PM PDT, June 9, 2007

Except for periodic face lifts in several of its nine terminals, Los Angeles International Airport hasn't changed much since shoulder pads, leggings and feathered hair were all the rage. Today, the airport that ushered the country into the jet age in the 1960s and set the standard for international service in the 1980s is ill-prepared for the new planes that are expected to revolutionize air travel. Fed up with its cramped ticket lobbies and waiting rooms, gridlocked access roads and outdated airfield, passengers and airlines are increasingly taking their business elsewhere.

(snip)

Lack of cohesive political leadership, a history of mistrust between the city's airport agency and nearby communities, grandiose visions for expanding the facility and an incredibly complex planning process have combined to leave officials without a blueprint to modernize LAX. And time is running out.

(snip)

An effort to devise a modernization plan — which has spanned 15 years and cost Los Angeles about $150 million — is on hold while the new executive director of the city's airport agency, Gina Marie Lindsey, becomes acquainted with boxes and boxes of documents. Waiting anxiously in the wings are airline representatives and residents who want to win over Lindsey to their sometimes-conflicting views on how the airport can best be fixed.





Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lax10jun10,0,1135852.story?coll=la-headlines-california

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

1. because this is California where we can't build shit

Except for the odd shopping mall, hell were fucking Americans and we can't even build prisons! is there anything more American than building prisons?

LAX is more quite today that it has been at any time since before the Second World War, the locals should shut up and be greatful they haven't wound up like "Surfridge". The same goes for the assholes in Costa Mesa and Newport Beach fighting John Wayne.

When the residents of "Surfridge" who were drawn by cheap coastal / end of runway property started to fight LAX, they got their asses condemned and bulldozed. Visit the LA Public Library, they have a mountain on the dispute. When you fly into LAX you can see the remains of Surfridge just after you fly over the beach. It is nothing but vacant winding streets and a few street lights.

However, this is California where any special interest group that is loud enough can derail absolutely anything they happen to disagree with. And a generation of thinking about property values, pardon me "thinking of the children" has left us with a giant infrastructure disaster.