I’m sure there’s a factual answer in here, but if it turns out to be IMHO it would be okay with me.
With the start of the holiday travel season, we are once again told that the world’s busiest airports are Atlanta and Chicago-O’Hare.
A little Googling showed various lists, but they average out to five out of the 10 busiest commercial airports in the world are located in the U.S. Why?
Is airline travel that much more prevalent in the U.S.? I’d think that as a combination population/business center, somewhere like Tokyo or Hong Kong would handle a lot of traffic.
Why not Europe? Paris, Frankfort or even Amsterdam are conveniently located to serve a lot of people going around Western Europe.
Or does everyone in the world have some sort of migration instinct that causes them to change planes in Atlanta?
Because an American commuting between say Atlanta and Houston has to fly, if s/he wants to get there in a reasonable amount of time. It’s not like you can hop on the train.
How about comparing passenger train service from say Amsterdam to Penn Station?
I’m not surprised my the busy-ness of US airports in general, but Charlotte, NC’s airport is the 11th busiest in the world! A friend there told me that Charlotte is also the second largest financial center in the US. When I moved away from the SE 40-some years ago the whole area was poorly filled with sleepy burgs; Charlotte could’ve been Mayberry with a college.
However, being Delta’s chief hub helps ATL get extra business. The joke goes that a trip to heaven requires a stop in Atlanta.
My guess would be the combination of relatively affluent population (many people can afford a cheap plane ticket at least), the large land area, and a lack of other forms of mass transit. Is the US also maybe unusual in the amount people typically move around in a lifetime? In a less geographically mobile society, people won’t have to travel long distances to visit relatives.
In most other countries, long trips mean international flights, which are more expensive, have more security, higher taxes, etc. In addition to the other factors mentioned, having a huge domestic market makes the US very unusual. Moving around western europe is pretty straightforward nowadays, but it’s still nowhere near as simple as flying round the US.
Having a single, big country must be important along with the lack of fast rail services. The organisation of the US carriers with their “hubs” will be a factor - two years ago we had to travel from New Orleans to Miami via Charlotte with US Airways :rolleyes:
One other possibility: in the US is it more common for cities to have only one airport? Looking at the top 30 by passenger numbers I see that both London and Tokyo have two airports in the list with a combined total greater than Atlanta or O’Hare. The total movements for London must be enormous (>125 million compared to Atlanta 86 million) if you add in Stanstead, Luton, and London City.
An interesting related question would be how does the number of passenger movements per head of population each year compare between the USA and the European Union. No figures but I would guess this has changed radically over the last 5-10 years with the growth of Ryan Air, Easy Jet, and all the other European low cost, no frills, carriers.
Flying around Australia is pretty simple though… I could quite easily catch a plane from, say, Brisbane to Sydney first thing in the morning, have Breakfast in Sydney, then catch a plane to Melbourne, have Lunch in Melbourne, fly to Hobart, have Dinner there, and then fly back to Brisbane, and be back in time to watch the Late Night B-Move on SBS that night.
It wouldn’t be especially cheap, but it’s quite feasible.
The US also has, I believe, the highest number of immigrants and number of international businesses in the world. So you’re going to get a lot more international flights between businessmen, and people returning to their old nation to visit relatives.
But London Heathrow usually claims to be the busiest International airport in the world. It’s the domestic flights hubbing through Atlanta and Chicago that make them so huge.
Part of it may just be a space issue - there’s more room in the US. Heathrow would be twice the size it is now if it had expansion room and night flights were allowed. As it is they are in the process of scaling it up. There is continuing talk of adding a third runway, which would need to be carved out of the surrounding suburbs.
The BIIG issue is hubbing. At ATL, only about 1/3rd of the passengers who fly in there on any given day stay there. The rest board another plane & leave within a couple hours.
Other hub airports are similar in their traffic fractions, varying from ~30 to 40% actual passengers (“O&D pax” in the vernacular) & ~60 to 70% connecting passengers.
So when you see ATL handled X million passengers last year, divide by ~3 to see the true demand for air travel to /from ATL.
Major international gateways (JFK, LAX, SFO) have a similar situation & a similar so-called through-fraction.
If you rank order the US cities by population, the top 20 or so are hubs for some carrier, and are urban areas of world-class size as well. So when you multiply the top 20 US cities natural travel demand by 2.5-3, it’s hardly surprising many of them come close to top in the world league tables as well.
The U.S. is big. Really big. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to the U.S.
Seriously, the U.S. is a big place. It’s impractical to drive when your destination is across the country. I’m driving to San Diego today. About 120 miles. In Europe, you might drive that distance and be in another country. Train service in the U.S. is not as widespread as it could be, and (at least when I’ve checked) prices are comparable or greater than airline tickets. And we have less vacation time than a lot of places. When you only get two weeks per year, many people don’t want to spend a day or two each way driving.
Atlanta is unusual in that it is a big city with only one major airport. Many large U.S. cities have more than one.
New York - JFK, LaGuardia, Newark
Chicago - O’Hare, Midway
Dallas - Dallas/Fort Worth, Love Field
Los Angeles - LAX, Burbank-Glendale, John Wayne, Ontario
San Francisco - San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose
Washington, D.C. - Dulles, Reagan
There are many others as well. Some of the secondary airports are smaller, secondary sites with limited access but some are full-fledged major airports of their right.
The U.S. airport situation is unusual in many ways. Remember that U.S. metro areas are fantastically large. The San Jose airport is 60 miles from San Francisco but is part of one continuous urbanized area that in fact continues for miles in all directions. The city of Baltimore lies about 40 miles from Washington, D.C. but its airport is called Baltimore-Washington and people do commonly fly there to go into Washington even though those flights would be counted separately.
The days of thinking that you go from a point to a point are long gone. In the U.S. today you go from a blob to a blob. Airports pull in from country-sized regions and disperse people to similarly-sized regions. That’s bound to increase traffic.
Heck, the way I see it, DC has three. Dulles, National, and BWI (if you can count Dulles in northern VA then I think you can count BWI in southern MD.) Remember that BWI is fairly far south of Baltimore.
Does Love Field really count? Southwest is the major carrier in Love Field and it is only recently that the stupid Wright Amendment was somewhat repealed.
Factors would include affluence (most folks can afford to fly), distance (the US is big), hubs, a big population that generally vacations within the US, a “tradition” of far-flung families (I have no cite but bet that families within the US are much more spread out than most other countries) and a high number of students and tourists.
Europe has some of these factors. But more cities to dilute the numbers. Business people increasingly (according to the Economist) prefer trains or driving via the Chunnel. Air travel in Europe can be very cheap, but still has lots of hassles like getting to the airport early or finding out that the RyanAir Frankfurt airport is nearly two hours outside the city. (I won’t make THAT mistake again!); in the US, you have few choices if you want to get quickly from LA to NY.
As a person from Charlotte formerly, Charlotte makes a lot of spurrious claims. For instance Charlotte is headquarters to the nations two largest banks. Because these banks control total assets of $1.1 trillion, it makes that claim. But those assest don’t sit in Charlotte. Just the headquarters of Bank of America (Formerly in SF) and Wachovia.
Charlotte Chamber of Commerce makes claim to being the 5th largest urban area. But the commerce defines that as a circle of some 300 miles from a center point at Charlotte. Which is a weird kind of logic.
The hub system undoubtedly helps America with Airports, plus one thing is no one city anymore really totally dominates the United States. No city in France can approach Paris, same can be said of London for the UK.
NYC long lost manufacturing to Chicago, and many Los Angeles is the number one industrial area in the United States. And 'though NYC holds the finance in the nation, with computers this influence is declined.
Also regional competition exists not allowing one city to dominate. For instance Dallas and Houston.
NYC loses a few because it has three MAJOR airports to Chicagos one major and one minor airport. Thus instaed of having one HUGE ranking, it produces more rankings that are just large.
