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It’s long been known that Logan Airport will undergo—and is already undergoing—dramatic changes to keep up with steady passenger growth. But it’s easy to forget the scope of the growth: A new parking garage, major terminal additions and renovations, fresh vehicle ramps and Silver Line buses, and more.
The need is certainly there. The airport’s passenger volume is expected to jump to 47.6 million annually by 2024, a 17 percent increase from 2018, the Globe’s Jon Chesto points out in a rundown on the changes. That passenger volume has increased by 10 million—or more than 30 percent—in just the past five years.
Some of the biggest changes have to do with transportation. These include a new 2,000-space parking garage next to Terminal E, and a doubling of the Silver Line fleet servicing Logan. Officials from Massport, the airport’s owner and operator, also plan to reroute and to limit curbside access so that only buses and similar high-occupancy vehicles can pull up.
Massport hopes that that and other measures boost ridership on mass transit—hence the Silver Line additions—and thereby cut congestion at the airport and in surrounding East Boston, including via app-hailed concerns such as Uber and Lyft. As Chesto points out, the number of app-hailed pickups at Logan jumped annually by 3,000 a day in 2018.
The changes, particularly the new ramps and renovations, will take years. The reroutings and limitations should be felt faster—Uber and Lyft pickups and drop-offs could be pushed to Logan’s central garage from outside of the terminals by this fall. Stay tuned.