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Grata's Guide: Hey, Councilman Ricciardi, don't be 'insulted' by the facts
Sunday, October 17, 1999 By Joe Grata, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
City Council likes to meddle, meddle, meddle in transportation matters -- the wrong ones. Facts often be damned.
Last week, for example, Councilman Gene Ricciardi assailed a county-sponsored study that concluded that air fares out of Pittsburgh International Airport aren't so bad despite the dominance of US Airways.
The consultant, Boyd Group/ASRC Inc. of Evergreen, Colo., said discount fares available with advance purchases and Saturday night stays were reasonable. And being the hub for an airline, Pittsburgh offers nonstop flights to four times as many destinations as nonhub cities.
Ricciardi was quoted as saying the study results "insulted" his intelligence, because people could save at least $1,000 flying out of Cleveland to some of the same cities, such as Albuquerque, N.M.
On Friday morning, when he was interviewed on John Cigna's KDKA radio show, Ricciardi said lowering the landing fees at Pittsburgh International might prompt US Airways to lower Pittsburgh fares.
Unless my hearing is going bad, he also said 600,000 people a year who would normally fly out of Pittsburgh were now flying out of Cleveland.
What Ricciardi actually did was insult the intelligence of anyone who knows anything about the airlines and Pittsburgh International Airport.
First, if the county Aviation Department were to eliminate -- not just lower -- landing fees, US Airways would be able to cut the price of every ticket it sells by a dollar or so.
Wow! They could save that by cutting out those little bags of peanuts.
The landing fee that major airlines such as US Airways pay at Pittsburgh International is $1.2219 per 1,000 pounds of gross weight, or $116.45 when a DC-9 lands and $139.30 for every Boeing 737-300, the planes most often flown in and out of here.
That is about $1 a seat.
Also, if landing fees are a significant factor in ticket pricing, as Ricciardi suggests, why aren't all air fares higher in Cleveland, where the landing fee (at $2.93 per 1,000 pounds) is more than twice as high?
Second, if 600,000 people a year are driving from here to Cleveland to use Hopkins International Airport, that figures out to be more than 11,500 a week.
The short- and long-term parking lots at Hopkins -- with the capacity for half that many cars -- would be overwhelmed with faded, peeling Pennsylvania license plates.
Third, Ricciardi used a bad example, because who wants to go to Albuquerque?
US Airways asked the same question several years ago.
It no longer flies there from anywhere.
Finally, why should we care what Ricciardi thinks?
He is a member of the same City Council that, in recent weeks, has wanted to go to court to halt formation of the new county Airport Authority; decide where stop signs should be erected, despite state and federal regulations and an engineering department; and establish silly rules for bicycle messengers already policed by their employers and state law.
Instead of worrying about high air fares and airplane landing fees, Ricciardi and his colleagues should be addressing more important transportation matters to erase the city's image as a no-man's land for getting around.
Such as:
And City Council could work at:
There! That ought to keep City Council occupied for a while.
Meanwhile, the last shall come first. In this case, it's Genevieve Hyatt of Moon, who likes to stop at the picnic areas to eat while traveling the Pennsylvania Turnpike several times a year.
"This may seem minuscule when roads are in need of repair, but I notice there are almost no picnic tables" along the turnpike. "I wrote [to the Turnpike Commission] about this, and never got any kind of reply."
We reply. In the late 1980s, the turnpike began replacing wooden picnic tables with heavier, more durable concrete tables.
Many of the wooden ones were being stolen.
The turnpike also vastly cut the number of picnic tables and picnic areas for safety and sanitary reasons, and because fewer people were stopping.
A few roadside picnic areas are still available.
Picnic tables also are set up in grassy areas of most service plazas for those who opt to pack their lunch instead of patronize the fast-food joints.
Over the same time frame, turnpike travelers also may have noticed that most of the openings in the median have been eliminated. These are the places where police and workers make U-turns. Also gone are many of the big roadside parking areas where tractor-trailer drivers by the hundreds once parked their rigs and slept.
We miss you, too.
Send your transportation questions, complaints and suggestions to Joe Grata c/o The Post-Gazette, or e-mail him at jgrata@post-gazette.com. Please include your address and phone number.
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?Outrageous private parking rates and one of the nation's highest parking taxes.