Oil prices good news for PDX neighbors: no third runway

Port of Portland decides economic conditions are not right for proposal

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, Jul 20, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (15 Reader comments)

Tribune file photo

Planes landing and taking off at Portland International Airport will not have a third runway because the Port of Portland has removed that proposal from its long-range plan.

The skyrocketing price of oil has killed the “800-pound gorilla” that had been hanging around Portland International Airport for much of the past eight or nine years: the possibility of a third parallel runway at the airport.

There will be no third runway at Portland International in the next 30 years — and maybe for many years after that, said Bill Wyatt, executive director of the Port of Portland, which runs the airport.

The seemingly very real possibility of a third runway got much attention when it was mentioned in the airport’s 1999 master plan — as a possible need by 2020 or shortly thereafter.

Since then, residents of neighborhoods near the airport, and others, have worried publicly about the effects of another PDX runway, especially on land and neighborhoods surrounding the airport. The concern has been a part of the debate about what should happen, for instance, with the Colwood Golf Course just south of the airport — and with airport officials’ stated interest in buying some of the land.

“That third runway has really been the 800-pound gorilla in the room” in airport officials relations with airport neighbors, Wyatt said.

Downward pressure

But the gorilla has left the room — mostly because of how different 2008 is from 1999.

In 1999, the airport’s master plan forecast that by 2020, there would be 485,000 takeoffs and landings at PDX — which the master plan indicated would produce something close to airplane gridlock on the airport’s two parallel northwest-southeast runways. That 1999 forecast followed a significant increase in airport use, and number of passengers, at PDX throughout the 1990s. By 1999, there were 322,000 takeoffs and landings at the airport.

But the terrorist attacks of September 2001 decimated air travel for more than a year afterwards. And takeoffs and landings at the airport have yet to reach that 1999 level. Takeoffs and landings last year totaled 264,000.

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