Issac Bailey | One way Myrtle Beach is better than New York - our revamped airport

Had I not recently returned from New York, I would have been taken aback by reports that renovations for the former Myrtle Beach International Airport terminal will cost more than three times initial estimates.

The dollar amount should still be scrutinized, as it should with every public project.

But sitting in one of the old LaGuardia Airport terminals for a few hours sold me on the importance of the continued improvement of Myrtle Beach’s airport.

Leaving LaGuardia and walking from the plane into our airport was akin to leaving a third world country and making it back to U.S. soil.

LaGuardia, one of the main points of entry into one of the world’s great cities, was awful.

Awful.

The food choices were essentially Dunkin Donuts, a little deli, Hudson News and an overcrowded closet of a bar.

The place was dank and dark. I didn’t see any of the large rats New York is known for, but they would have felt at home in that terminal.

Outlets for electronic devices were few and scattered. I watched several people leer at others lucky enough to be able to charge their phones like vultures circling over soon-to-be dead prey, ready to dash from their seats when someone unplugged from an outlet.

Wifi was so slow I stopped trying to use it.

Before I was able to make it into the terminal, I had to get into the ticket line because there were no electronic kiosks to let me bypass it — something I was able to do on my way out of Myrtle Beach.

There are more up-to-date parts of LaGuardia than the terminal I was relegated to. But it is telling that any portion of that airport is in that kind of shape in 2015.

Which brings me back to Myrtle Beach international. Years ago, there was a lot of consternation about plans to build a new terminal, concerns about cost and process and the rationale for the construction, including claims about increasing air traffic. I raised plenty of those concerns myself.

I can’t say every promise made before the new terminal was built has become reality. I can say walking through the Myrtle Beach airport after escaping LaGuardia hell was a breath of fresh air.

I know New York is exponentially larger than Myrtle Beach, making most comparisons illogical. (Times Square was a larger, more brightly-lit, high-tech version of South of the Border in Dillon.) On this point, though, it mattered that one of the Grand Strand’s primary entry points was clean, up-to-date and aesthetically pleasing, just as airport proponents said it would be.

New York can afford to get some of these things wrong — the overpasses I saw while there were also horrifically bad, rusted and rotting — but Myrtle Beach can’t.

I couldn’t tell if the roads in New York are in worse shape than they are in Myrtle Beach and throughout South Carolina.

But the stark contrast between LaGuardia Terminal B and Myrtle Beach International Airport made me think back to last year. While I was getting to know journalists from various parts of the globe, I found out that infrastructure in America is in some ways light years behind countries otherwise not as advanced as we are.

The speed of our Internet connections is laughably slow compared to some other parts of the world.

Just as less-prosperous nations do some things better than the U.S., not everything in Myrtle Beach is second-tier compared to New York.

It might be worth the money to renovate the old Myrtle Beach terminal to further drive that point home.

This story was originally published January 28, 2015 at 3:03 PM with the headline "Issac Bailey | One way Myrtle Beach is better than New York - our revamped airport."