LAX has one-way runways. This means that planes can only land and take off in one direction: they take off toward the Pacific, and land from the east. This means that about half of all planes landing and taking off from LAX must fly past the airport and turn around. I estimate the cost of this at about 900 million a year just in fuel and passenger time, ignoring the cost of time lost for airplanes and crew salaries. So we're wasting a billion dollars a year. Building a runway in a modern US city costs about a billion dollars (witness Atlanta's and St. Louis' new runways), so we could be building a new runway every year with the savings from having a bidirectional airport. Even if we had to fill in some adjacent sea it'd be worth it. There'd be of course the safety issues of keeping airplanes from crashing into one another, but can't we use the vastness of three-dimensional airspace for that? Can we really not keep planes in more than a single one-dimensional line in three-dimensional sky without them crashing into each other in the 21st century?

Now wind direction plays a role in the selection of the direction of take-off and landing, to minimize landing speed and maximize take-off speed, but for a billion dollars a year just at LAX, can't we figure out a way to safely land and take off in the opposite direction at the low wind speeds characteristic of LA? All it should take is a little more use of breaks and engines!

To grow into the 21st century, LA needs an airport that faces both East and West.