Port Authority Touts Airport Upgrades and Manhattan Bus Terminal Overhaul as Promises Kept

At last, New York’s airports—and Manhattan’s most maligned bus terminal—get the upgrades their status demands, portending broader shifts in how cities view mobility infrastructure.

It was not long ago that a departing international visitor’s clearest impression of New York was not the statue in the harbour or the skyline’s jagged teeth, but a dank, malfunctioning airport or the warren-like misery of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. This autumn, Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, assembled a glowing report card for the city’s once-sorry transit gateways before a crowd at City & State’s Transportation Summit. Such reformations are less cosmetic than fiduciary: billions are being deployed, reputations recast, and civic pride restored at waypoints that move nearly 140m passengers a year.

The substance beneath the shine is formidable. LaGuardia Airport, once shorthand for American second-rate infrastructure, was anointed America’s best airport by Forbes Travel Guide for the second year running in 2023. Both LaGuardia and the new Terminal A at Newark Liberty, which opened less than two years ago, have scored five-star ratings from SkyTrax, an international standards-setter. Only three airports in the United States bear such laurel wreaths; two are now in New York’s backyard.

Cotton was keen to highlight another display of earnest progress: ground recently broken on a brand new AirTrain for Newark, a $3.5 billion investment. Once complete, the system aims to provide more reliable, pleasant access—no small matter for an airport often hamstrung by grim commutes. These undertakings, the agency insists, are not empty gestures but a promised transformation of region-spanning stature.

For the city at large, such renovations matter beyond mere tripadvisor rankings. Airports are gateways in every sense, shaping the city’s appeal to tourists, business folk, and émigrés. Their quality colours not only first impressions, but the ease with which commerce, investment, and high-spending travellers flow in and out. After years of ignominy—London, Dubai, and Singapore as beacons of what could be—New York’s airports stand poised, at last, to compete.

Improved infrastructure portends broader benefits, not least for the region’s economy. The Port Authority’s capital spend is vast: its 2017-2026 plan allotted $32.2 billion, much of it poured into airports. Construction, design, and ripple effects create an estimated 211,000 job-years and $11.6 billion in wages across the tri-state area. If the overhaul is completed on time and budget—still no small “if”—the return on public investment could be correspondingly robust.

How far this metamorphosis reaches into the city’s social and visual fabric is no minor question. The Port Authority’s ambitions shadow Eighth Avenue: the Manhattan Bus Terminal, long ridiculed as the nation’s most unloved commuter node, is next for a hard-hat renaissance. Details remain embryonic, but officials envision not merely a functional depot but a “reimagined” anchor for Midtown—retail, pedestrian plazas, and, with luck, fewer whiffs of diesel rot. A world city deserves a front door not redolent of 1980s municipal malaise.

These local efforts echo wider national anxieties about American transport shabbiness. Aging public works—from the creaking Penn Station to shuddering highways—are symbols of underinvestment and legislative gridlock. Post-pandemic, cities face the twin challenge of enticing back travelers while serving a more peripatetic, sometimes remote, workforce. If New York’s model of persistent, well-financed upgrades holds, it may prod other metros from Atlanta to Chicago toward similar ambitions.

Globally, the bar is punishingly high. Asian and Middle Eastern airports, awash in yen and petrodollars, regularly outclass their Western rivals in both form and function. New York’s upgrade is thus overdue, if not entirely visionary. Still, the doggedness—and, for once, follow-through—of officials like Mr Cotton at least rebuts the trope that American metropolitanism is fated to moulder in decline.

Yet the margin for error is slim, and politics never sleep

The city’s tradition of ambitious plans without corresponding delivery haunts even the cheeriest project update. If budgets slip or NIMBYism flares, progress will falter. Nor is public opinion always gracious; delays, overruns, or merely unpopular design tweaks can soon drain the goodwill now accumulating. Airport improvements risk being eclipsed, for voters and users alike, by more urgent anxieties over rent and crime.

For all its glassy concourses and expanded gate counts, improved infrastructure alone cannot salve the region’s deeper woes: a puny affordable housing stock, persistently slow subways, and the capriciousness of state and federal funding. The Port Authority’s realm is formidable—but finite.

None of this diminishes the genuine achievement in taking LaGuardia from national punchline to two-time winner. City administrators and civic sceptics both should draw some cheer—and some lessons—from the rare public works saga that so far appears not to be a boondoggle.

If New Yorkers approach these projects with the same blend of scrutiny and optimism that Mr Cotton displayed at the summit, the city may yet reclaim not just its status as a capital of finance and culture, but as a place where civic ambition translates into amenities its citizens—and visitors—actually notice.

The city’s upgraded portals show that even New York can, on occasion, get it right—provided it ignores its own history of self-sabotage. ■