Sky Harbor's Sky Train - a $1.6 billion pork boondoggle?????
Well not if you are one of the special interest groups that got to build it and take a cut of the government pork dished out by the city of Phoenix
Since the Arizona Republic almost always supports these government pork project, I suspect they will end up getting a cut of the pork too. That's just a guess
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Sky Harbor vaulted hurdles for Sky Train
By Sean Holstege The Republic | azcentral.com Sun Mar 31, 2013 12:49 AM
No one had ever tried it: a train bridge over an active jumbo-jet taxiway.
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport took the idea even further. The train — designed to link three terminals, a Metro light-rail station and parking lots — also would travel over a bustling roadway at one of the busiest airports in the country. It had to be done without disrupting flights, halting traffic, or breaking the bank.
The airport asked the Federal Aviation Administration for permission in 2007. And waited. Anxiously.
It was do or die. Without the FAA’s approval, the PHX Sky Train automated people-mover project might never happen because of physical, financial and political obstacles.
On April 8, the first phase of the $1.6 billion project opens to the public. Passengers will be treated to the spectacle of a train passing directly over a Boeing 747, set against a backdrop of the airport control tower and desert sunsets.
It’s “the best E-ticket ride on transit and the best view in town,” project planner Paul Blue said. [Yea, especially when you are getting someone else to pay for this billion dollar boondoggle.]
The bridge is the most novel element of Sky Train. If the bridge saved the project, then Sky Train guarantees the airport’s future and reshapes its connection to the community in ways still unimagined.
Sky Harbor has grown from a one-terminal airfield serving 3 million people in the early 1970s to a three-terminal international hub. It tore down the original terminal, built three more, and last year served 40 million passengers. It expects to swell to 60 million annual passengers by 2030.
It’s hard to imagine handling that many people without Sky Train, but airport Director Danny Murphy has an idea what it would be like.
He started a recent public presentation by showing a picture of the road and curb in front of Terminal 4 during the 2008 Super Bowl crush. It showed congested pandemonium.
“This is what our roadways could look like every day,” Murphy said, noting that the worst congestion during the busiest days would occur every day without advance planning.
When Sky Train opens, an estimated 7,000 passengers a day will travel from the 44th Street light-rail station and the East Economy Lot to Terminal 4, a trip that will last five minutes end to end. The driverless electric trains will run every three minutes, free of charge. Each of the 18 cars holds 53 passengers.
Two weeks after it opens, experts from the people-mover industry will come to town to celebrate the industry’s half-century and describe the future of airport people movers. [And they will also be celebrating the billion dollars in government pork the city of Phoenix stole from air travelers and gave to them]
Sky Train has its critics. Some say it costs too much and carries too few. Others would prefer a direct transit link. [Only $1.6 billion too much]
Also, the airport reported a slight drop in the number of passengers in 2012, one of only three major U.S. airports to see a decline from 2011. It may be a temporary blip, but it comes as airport officials watch the merger of US Airways and American Airlines with caution, recognizing that mergers typically result in fewer flights.
Sky Train has been more than a quarter-century in the making. But it overcame numerous hurdles that threatened to undo the project.
How Sky Harbor vaulted those hurdles is a story of trust, determination and unconventional thinking.
1971: The Jetsetters
3 million passengers.
Sky Train’s story began in another state, in another era.
In 1964, during the infancy of the jet age, when air travel was a luxury for most Americans, Westinghouse Electric Corp. engineers developed a prototype for a driverless train. Three years later, Disneyland visitors marveled at the monorail that took them to Tomorrowland.
Tomorrowland in aviation came in 1971 when Tampa used Westinghouse’s technology to open the world’s first automated airport people mover.
That revolutionized airport design. Airports spread out like octopuses with long concourses to the gates, rather than the bus-station model of the time, which put gates as close to the road as possible.
Over the next 40 years, 18 other U.S. airports opened automated people movers.
But Sky Harbor became a pioneer of another kind. Most cities put their airports on the outskirts of town, in fields or on waterfront landfills. Phoenix’s airport grew in what would become the heart of town. At first, that brought rewards.
“When I got here in ’75, there was a Terminal 1. The bags were dropped off at the curb, and you parked right next door,” remembered Jack Tevlin, who retired 10 years ago after a 21-year career at City Hall.
With the explosive growth of the Valley and its main airport, however, that convenience would become a curse, and for Sky Train, a challenge.
1983: The Road to 60 million
8.6 million passengers.
Airline deregulation in 1978 changed the game. Upstart airlines, including Southwest Airlines and America West, became major players, and flying became affordable for average Americans.
Southwest and America West became Sky Harbor’s major tenants, and the airport grew quickly. Sky Harbor became a hub for both airlines.
By 1983, airport planners predicted that 60 million passengers annually would pass through Sky Harbor by 2030. They already had opened two new terminals and were planning for Terminal 4.
New terminals and runways were one thing. Getting passengers and a growing workforce around the airport on roads squeezed between those runways was another.
“We were principally worried about the roadway traffic. We were already thinking about how to mitigate it,” said former aviation Director David Krietor, who is now an executive for a business group aiming to revitalize downtown Phoenix.
Early on, planners considered, then dismissed, making Sky Harbor Boulevard a toll road. It became increasingly clear that the road to 60 million passengers would require something else. Maybe a train.
1989: The Secret Tunnel
20.7 million passengers.
By 1989, the rail option pulled ahead as the best way for moving tens of thousands of passengers a day.
As Terminal 4 went up, engineers deliberately placed thicker and longer concrete piers, which support the building, at wider intervals to make room for a future train tunnel in the basement at an additional cost of $9 million, Tevlin said.
Some longtime Phoenix residents still believe there is a tunnel hidden deep in the bowels of Terminal 4. In fact, the tunnel is only loose earth between the piers, which would make it easier to bore a tunnel.
In 1989, Phoenix voters were asked to use local taxes to support a city train system like Chicago’s “L” or the Bay Area’s BART system. It was to be called ValTrans and travel under the airport. For every voter who supported ValTrans, two did not.
The secret tunnel remained dirt. But the airport kept growing.
2001: The New Normal
35.4 million passengers.
By 2000, the rail idea came back in another form.
Phoenix voters were asked again to support a transit project. This time it was light rail, and they bought in.
Sky Harbor began thinking about putting light-rail stations under its terminals. In August 2001, Paul Blue left his economic-development job at the city to help shepherd the airport plans. He expected an airport serving 45 million passengers by 2005.
The nation’s aviation system was maxing out. Runways, terminals and air-traffic-control centers were getting congested. Solutions were not obvious.
Blue arrived at Sky Harbor thinking: “There aren’t places to put more cars. We’ve got what we’ve got, and it won’t get better. How do we manage what is coming?”
What came, six weeks later, changed everything. The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, thrust the country not only into war, but into a multibillion-dollar quest to secure airports. It brought the airline industry to its knees and nearly put America West, Sky Harbor’s second-most traveled airline, out of business.
Suddenly, a basement train tunnel seemed a bad security risk. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars on transit didn’t seem as valuable as overhauling the airport’s passenger and bag-screening areas. And keeping a major partner afloat.
Without America West, there would be no 60 million passengers, so the airport put the train and every non-critical construction project on hold.
“Everybody else needed a transformational change. There was a conversation about the new normal for 18 months,” Blue said. “For me, the new normal was my only normal.”
The aviation industry rebounded quickly. By the middle of 2002, Blue was feeling better about the airport’s future.
By then, the concept had shifted again.
Before 9/11, Sky Harbor focused on how to improve internal circulation. After months of long security lines and frustrations, Blue’s team began thinking more about customer service.
“How do we make the experience less of a hassle,” he said.
2005: The Reset
41.2 million passengers.
By 2005, the year after Maricopa County voters agreed to extend light rail beyond the Phoenix city limits, it had become clear that linking rail to a people mover was an idea whose time had come.
The city tapped project manager Jane Morris to oversee the job, having just completed the new City Hall. From the onset, she saw problems.
“When I got there, it was very clear the entire project had not been clearly defined,” she said.
She toured the Terminal 4 basement with rail- and airport-design experts to see where the trains were to arrive.
She asked how passengers would get to their gates. The experts pointed down a dark corridor at a sea of electrical boxes. The tunnel was below the water table and would be half-submerged.
“This wasn’t going to work. It was another light-bulb moment,” she recalled.
She told Phoenix officials the project could not move forward without a complete rethink that she called “the Reset.”
She found problems with the connection to light rail, too. Originally, there was supposed to be a link at 24th Street and 44th Street. But a west-side track interfered too much with the runways, and most passengers would be going to Terminal 4 on the east side.
One by one, Morris, Blue and Krietor questioned assumptions. More and more dominoes fell. Morris charted what had to be done, and gave the chart a home on her wall and a name: the Bubble Map.
The Reset trimmed at least $300 million from the project.
The tunnel became a bridge. A 24th Street connection was abandoned. There would be only one station, at 44th Street.
Dead-ending the people mover at the light-rail station wasn’t going to work either, Morris concluded. Trains need excess emergency track beyond the platform. The Sky Train station had to be rotated 90 degrees to make it parallel with Metro.
City officials supported Morris, applauding her courage to tell everyone they’d been wrong. They embraced the Reset.
“We asked Jane to come out to make sure we didn’t make a mistake,” Krietor said. “It was critically important we all had confidence in her judgment that it was the right thing to do.”
The Reset kept Sky Train on track.
2007: The Four Walls Room
42.2 million passengers.
Solutions kept falling into place. But that created new challenges: engineering puzzles, financial constraints and tricky political maneuvers.
To flesh out answers, Morris turned a Terminal 4 conference room into a space she called the Four Walls Room. Each wall represented a major component of the Sky Train project. Each was covered with such details as cost, engineering, environmental issues or customer-service implications of the various options.
The Four Walls Room became the place for the team to brainstorm, to brief outsiders and to sway skeptics.
Chief among them were the airlines. For decades, airlines had routinely resisted helping airports pay for improvements to facilities. A simple bargain held the truce: Airlines would be responsible for getting passengers and bags from gate to gate. Airports would get them to and from the gate. The cost-conscious airline industry reasoned that sprucing up anything on the land side of the gate was the airports’ problem.
Sky Harbor controls two major sources of funds — parking fees and landing fees charged to airlines. The airport historically kept landing fees low to remain competitive, and it didn’t want to bump them for Sky Train. Airlines didn’t want to pass the extra cost along to customers. They had delayed or killed people movers elsewhere.
Sky Harbor would have to find the money itself, because FAA grants pay only for such improvements as runways, taxiways and air-traffic control.
Back in the Four Walls Room, there was added pressure. Sky Harbor has 30-day leases with its airlines, meaning airlines could walk away or the airport could evict them on a month’s notice.
“That requires a lot of trust,” Blue said. “What made the difference was we never gave up talking.”
The airlines never actively opposed Sky Train, so when Morris pointed out that all of the other options would cost them more in the long run, they accepted the plan.
Plans continued to crystallize in 2007. The FAA learned that Sky Harbor wanted to become the world’s first airport with a passenger train running over an active taxiway. It was a gamble. The PHX Sky Train team had no way of knowing if the plan would fly.
“If we hadn’t had agreement from the FAA to go over the taxiway, this project probably never would have happened,” Krietor said.
In December, the FAA gave the project the green light. Not everybody came away satisfied, though.
The elevated track, 90 feet above the taxiway, needed somewhere to go. The city decided to abandon a freeway spur, Arizona 153, or Sky Harbor Expressway, which linked Tempe to the airport’s eastern entrance. The city converted much of it to trackbed for the people mover, forcing a redesign of 44th Street, which became the airport’s new east-side portal.
The city started condemning small businesses and private land at the eastern end of the airport, in historically African-American neighborhoods.
“Not all wanted to sell,” Morris said. “That was the hardest part, the saddest part of the whole project for me.”
All along, the Sky Harbor team made trade-offs.
The East Economy Lot station has a spartan feel to it, with no walls or air-conditioning and bare, angular concrete supports. Aesthetics were sacrificed for savings.
On moving walkways, the airport spent extra money to help the environment. Throughout the system, the escalators and moving walkways run at slow speeds until sensors detect foot traffic. It costs more up front, but saves energy, and money, later.
The biggest concession was the scope of the entire project. As the Great Recession bit down hard, the city realized it couldn’t complete Sky Train. It broke the project into phases.
The first phase, a $644 million job, will connect 44th Street, the East Economy Lot and Terminal 4. Terminal 3 will have to wait until 2015, and midway through the next decade, the robotic trains will reach the West Economy Lot and the car-rental facility.
“My biggest regret was that we couldn’t build the whole thing at once,” Blue said.
It’s the nature of the beast, with a 25-year, $1.6 billion project that survived the worst recession in generations.
“The thing about a megaproject, every megaproject: Things change,” said Morris, who is now the aviation director at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport.
2013: The Airport’s Front Door
40.4 million passengers.
The 44th Street Station is a towering metal-tube structure, designed to resemble an aircraft fuselage. Sky Harbor officials call it “the airport’s front door.” They also call it an airport terminal without airplanes because some passengers will be able to check their bags there.
But 44th Street Station also is the city’s front door to global visitors. It promises to fundamentally change the experience of arriving in Phoenix.
Research shows that a growing number of vacationers and conventioneers consider airport-transit links when they pick their destinations. It’s not a decisive factor, but it’s important.
“The problem with a lot of airports is many times they don’t look at the whole trip,” said Art Guzetti, vice president for policy at the American Public Transportation Association. “They only look at the gate-to-gate trip. Phoenix is saying, ‘We can do better than that.’ It’s an awesome statement of customer service.”
Since 9/11, people spend more time at airports. Some, like London’s Heathrow, reinvented themselves.
It’s an international hub on the edge of a major city. For years, taxis were the best way to get there. Inside, passengers entered a huge hall with buffet food and little to do. Today, leading shops and restaurants keep people entertained for hours. If they have long layovers, they can take the Tube into the city for a quick museum visit, a meal or visit with friends. Londoners can likewise meet friends at Heathrow.
The Tube connection changed Heathrow’s relationship to London. Some predict Sky Train could do the same for Sky Harbor’s relationship with Phoenix.
Sky Harbor is opening a string of the Valley’s finest restaurants in Terminal 4, advertising that locals can eat there at street prices. Sky Harbor is in the middle of the Metro system, within 40 minutes from anywhere on the rail line.
When Metro opened, few envisioned the cultural phenomenon that followed. Nothing prepared transit experts for elderly people coming into central Phoenix from Mesa just to have group lunches at the Spaghetti Factory or people using light rail for scavenger hunts.
Metro planners said they’re studying how a better airport connection will affect station parking lots. In other cities, rail stations have become the new airport entrances. Some systems charge for airport parking, or market the service to attract riders.
Like Metro’s opening, Sky Train’s debut is expected to create buzz.
Morris gets choked up when she thinks about people riding the Sky Train.
“People will ride the train and see the sky and see the mountains and see where they are,” she said. “At 44th Street, we have a truly beautiful thing.”
Once the novelty wears off, though, Sky Train will be measured on how well it improves airport circulation and makes Sky Harbor an easier place to reach.
“The test will be in 10 years,” Blue said. “Will anybody remember what it was like to use the airport before Sky Train?”
Reach the reporter at sean.holstege@arizonarepublic.com.
$1.58 billion Sky Train pork project opens Monday.
Of course that isn't the end of the story. The $1.58 billion Sky Train pork project hooks up with the $2 billion+ Phoenix light rail project which is another boondoggle waste of tax dollars in the Phoenix area.
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PHX Sky Train to make its debut
By Amy B Wang The Republic | azcentral.com Sat Apr 6, 2013 11:00 PM
On paper, the PHX Sky Train is simple: a few extra lines and dashes near the center of metropolitan Phoenix’s already-crowded map.
In reality, some say, the Sky Train symbolizes much more — a major city’s coming-of-age, the final piece of the puzzle that fully integrates the Valley’s still-nascent light-rail system with one of the busiest airports in the country.
The $1.58 billion automated, interterminal train system opens at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on Monday. Once operating, the driverless train will connect airport passengers for free between Terminal 4, the East Economy parking lot and the Metro light-rail station at 44th and Washington streets.
Trains will arrive and depart every three to four minutes and operate non-stop, 365 days a year.
The Sky Train’s new stations at 44th Street and the East Economy lot are imposing, gleaming silver structures, adorned with $5.6 million in public art and energy-efficient features.
However, the technology of the train itself is nothing new, said Bill Sproule, a professor of civil engineering at Michigan Technological University who has studied airport planning and design for about 40 years.
“Airport people movers have been around since the early ’70s,” he said, rattling off a list of the earliest adopters: Tampa, Seattle, Dallas-Fort Worth.
The Sky Train will be little different. The automated trains are electrically powered, operating on a center-rail line, much like dozens of people movers at airports across the country.
On board, there is the predictable, anonymous, soothing female voice that announces the train’s next destinations. It symbolizes convenience for the airport passenger, Sproule said. It will be reliable, if not flashy.
“It’s pretty dependable, just like an elevator,” Sproule said. “We’ve gotten over the idea that you’ve got to have an operator on board, and I think the safety elements are almost foolproof with all of the redundant systems that are there.”
Aviation experts say that those involved in the Sky Train project have been major players. Bombardier, a Canadian manufacturer that built the Sky Train, is the largest transit equipment automated people-mover company in the world. The city hired engineering firm Gannett Fleming and Hensel Phelps Construction to design and build the other components of the system.
“All the folks you’re talking about are people I would pick if I were doing this,” said Bill Fife, a retired 46-year airport executive who has conducted more than 150 airport peer reviews and who headed the AirTrain project for John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.
“It’s simple, in a way: If someone screws up in the aviation business, they don’t get any more work,” Fife said. “You don’t hire the screwups.”
Fife does, however, have a long list of things airport officials should do when opening a people-mover system.
The automated systems, the signals, the moving walkways, every last component of the train and the pieces that connect to it must be working well, he said.
And airports often forget to sweat the small stuff, which is a mistake, Fife added.
“I saw one airport, the signing was terrible,” Fife said. “They didn’t think through their whole analysis, and the end result was that they had duty supervisors acting as folks to direct people because people were going in the wrong direction. You need to make sure you’re out there early and often to test it out with people who aren’t familiar with the system so they don’t get lost.”
“People have to figure out the worst-case consideration, not the best-case consideration,” he said.
Sky Harbor officials didn’t take chances, even as delays to the system’s opening raised questions about the project.
“We would have loved to have it for spring training,” Phoenix aviation director Danny Murphy told airport aviation-board members in February, when an opening date for the project remained uncertain, pending a long punch list of unfinished tests.
Nevertheless — even at the expense of missing one of the Valley’s biggest tourism draws — Murphy emphasized that it was more important to scrutinize “every last detail” because, once running, the Sky Train would operate 24 hours a day, leaving little chance for repairs without interrupting the entire system.
“We want to make sure everything is absolutely perfect about the train,” Murphy said.