$10 Billion Renovation Planned for JFK Airport

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, unveiled a $10 billion plan to remake John F. Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday. They have also plans to improve the roads and mass transit that feed it.

The plan calls for road expansions in the area, modernizing a Long Island Rail Road station connecting to JFK, new security measures, expanding and building new terminals so they become interconnected, and raising the number of flights out of the airport. Cuomo said of JFK that, when it was built it was ahead of time.

The facility was built in the 1940s, with the first commercial flights taking off in 1949 out of what was then known as Idlewild Airport. It was officially re-named John F. Kennedy International Airport on Christmas Eve, 1963, barely one month after the president had been assassinated.

There was no mention of where the $7 billion private sector money would come from, but Cuomo remained optimistic, almost adamantly so.

The state DOT also plans to rebuild a knot of intersecting roadways in Kew Gardens, Queens, that Driscoll, who took the stage alongside Cuomo and other officials to present the project, called a major bottleneck to traffic onto the Van Wyck.

The number of passengers moving through JFK every year is expected to nearly double over the next few decades, reaching 100 million by 2050 from around 60 million this year, according to the governor.