YVR's 80th anniversary triggers an opportunity to celebrate one of this region's great business success stories. A few months ago, Vancouver International Airport was chosen as the best airport in North America for the second year in a row based on surveys of millions of passengers. It also won second place for staff service excellence in North America. The Fairmont Vancouver Airport ranked No. 1 in North America.
That's just the recognition part. Behind those accolades lie years of back-room work, especially by those who shook the airport loose from its "sleepy hollow" profile in the 1980s.
That's the expression used by former Vancouver Board of Trade CEO Darcy Rezac, who was promoting post-Expo 86 economic development for the federal government when he and then federal economist John Hansen latched onto the idea of local governance for the airport.
After six years of dogged negotiation by the likes of the late Chester Johnson and Graham Clarke, the federal government gave up control to a community board in 1992. The airport took off. The new governance allowed for independent capital financing off the government's books and a contentious airport improvement fee to help pay for it all.
Over the years, that led to a new international terminal, an additional runway, an atrium between the domestic and international terminals, the biggest collection of Northwest Coast Native art in the world and a big investment in the Canada Line. Passenger count jumped from 10 million in the early 1990s to almost 17 million passengers last year.
The new governance model has been adopted by every major airport in Canada and spawned the creation of Vancouver Airport Services (YVRAS). Jointly owned by Vancouver Airport Authority and Citi Infrastructure Investors, it operates 19 airports around the world.
All of this activity has been a major economic boon to this region: 23,000 direct jobs, $369 million in revenues last year and total economic output in the billions. It's big.
What's ahead for YVR in the next 80 years? How will YVR balance unlimited growth in air travel with rising costs of fossil fuels, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other unsustainable environmental impacts? Because airplane exhaust in the high atmosphere has three times the impact as the same emissions on land, aviation is expected to account for around 15% of worldwide GHG emissions by 2050.
YVR is justifiably proud of its sustainability initiatives so far: solar hot water, hybrid taxi subsidies, energy-reducing efficiencies (baggage conveyor belts shut down when no bags are present), a big, new concrete barrier to deflect sound upward and getting 16% of customers and staff onto the Canada Line.
But these are marginal gains.
A 2004 paper from the Stockholm Environment Institute says the industry is ultimately going to have to face up to its harmful environmental impact in three ways: by pricing externalities so that "prices tell the ecological truth"; by getting short-haul passengers onto rail; and by using videoconferencing to substitute for physical travel. In short, by putting fewer planes in the air.
How do we do that when we all still want to travel by "jumping on a plane," and when the immediate economic benefits of air travel are so palpable?
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is counting on more fuel-efficient aircraft to help achieve its modest goal of carbon-neutral future aviation growth, along with heavy reliance on biofuels and carbon offsets, the latter strategies shaky at best.
"Environmental issues should be firmly placed in the wider context of sustainable development, striking a balance with social and economic objectives," cautions IATA.
Definitely. But the economic health of future generations will depend on a much different balance than the one so admirably achieved by YVR in its first 80 years.