There’s been a lot of coverage this week of the opening of the new New York LaGuardia Central Terminal building (a.k.a. “headhouse“) which serves United, American, Air Canada and Southwest. The old terminal B was ugly, the new terminal B is bright from natural light and new. So, shiny things.

Credit: Port Authority of New York New Jersey

There’s new restaurants, and upscale brands, because more passenger spending means more money to cover the new building costs. And there’s new high-end retail, because more passenger spending means more money to cover the new building costs. But no airline passenger ever said “what this airport really lacks is a sufficiently high-end shopping experience.”

The truth about the new project is there’s only one thing about it that really makes the travel experience better, and that’s only going to last a short period of time: new restrooms. That’s genuinely great, but you know the restrooms won’t be well maintained and kept clean because the airport is still overseen by the Port Authority and they still use substantially similar contractors.

Credit: Port Authority of New York New Jersey

The point of an airport is to get somewhere. The best airports are the ones get are easiest to get to and get through. They make your travel more efficient, rather than adding to an already cumbersome and stressful experience.

The best airports are close-in to the city center, and once you get there security is near the entrance and gates are near security. There’s enough runway capacity to handle flights, and surrounding airspace isn’t congested, minimizing delays.

For local passengers the most important things are:

• How easy is it to get to and from the airport? That’s a function of both distance from city center and connectivity.
  
• Once there, how quickly can you get through security and to your gate?
  
• How congested is the airport facility? Does it have wide enough taxiways and enough runway capacity – in other words does it have the necessary throughput?

For connecting passengers, how quick and easy is it to transfer between gates? How efficiently can an airport handle connecting baggage? And of course throughput matters to connecting passengers too — perhaps even twice as much since they’re both arriving and departing by air. Everything else is secondary.

That’s why complaints about New York LaGuardia’s aging facility just didn’t matter to me. The roof leaks? Call a roofer. Ceilings are low? Who cares, you’ll be in the sky soon.

LaGuardia’s problems – even after spending billions of dollars on a new waiting room – are:

1. Getting there by means other than car. Public transport options are bad.
   
2. Throughput. New York airspace is congested (and FAA has been terrible about fixing this) and LaGuardia needs another runway, which would require building into the water.

New terminals? Who cares. In fact central security will likely mean more time from curbside to get. Remember that this new building doesn’t mean more flights. The airport is slot restricted. Better use of space is nice, so is fewer bottlenecks as planes try to get out to a runway. There may be better food options for when you’re still stuck on the ground due to endless delays that the project has done little to alleviate.