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If you want to fly from Toronto to New York, and your journey is starting downtown, you have two options. You can take a dedicated air-rail link, the UP Express, from the downtown rail station to Pearson International Airport in the western suburbs. Or you can take a shuttle-bus from the rail station for a few blocks, and then walk through a tunnel to Billy Bishop City Airport. While Pearson handles the bulk of Toronto's air traffic, Billy Bishop specializes in smaller aircraft, serving business travellers and downtowners who want short-haul flights to or from cities across eastern North America, notably Ottawa, Montreal, and New York City.
Billy Bishop Airport as seen from the CN Tower, after this photo by Leonora Enking, available under CC2.0
Billy Bishop's days are numbered. The fact that this is so shows how unserious Toronto is; a species of unseriousness common across the West.
As of last fall, the airport operated under a lease scheduled to expire in 2033. When airport operators requested a 40-year lease extension to justify major safety investments, community groups argued strenuously against a lease extension. Moreover, the airport also wanted to install new infrastructure to permit it to continue to operate safely, and the groups wanted to deny permission for that as well. Had they gotten their way, the airport would have been forced to close. That was the goal, to kill the airport and then convert its former site into a combination of park and infill housing.
Fortunately, Toronto City Council did not give the airport's opponents what they wanted. But they didn't give the airport operators what they wanted either. Instead, they split the difference, granting permission for safety investments as well as a 12-year lease extension to 2045. These concessions were enough to avoid immediate shutdown, but insufficient to support raising and investing the kind of capital that modern infrastructure requires.
Billy Bishop's plight reflects a broader crisis: across the developed world, we have stopped building airports. The most recently-built major airport In North America is Denver International, which opened in 1995, three decades ago. Since then, despite massive growth in air travel and urban populations, not a single comparable facility has been built in the USA or Canada.1
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