Top 50 US Metros ranked by average daily airport O&D traffic.

[bnk]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

Here is the list modified to include all three SF and DC area airports, and the 6 LA/Riverside airports. If there are other cities so split, others can feel free to modify & combine.

.

Kindly add Milwaukee to Chicago.

[Evergrey]

Originally Posted by bnk

Same issue with Milwaukee's airport. Those figures highly inflated from Chicagoland travelers and should be included in the Chicago Airport number boosting it to at least 3 internationals. Then there is Gary and Rockford too to figure in. But where does one stop.

I'm sure there is some overlap in catchment areas there... but Milwaukee is 90 freakin' miles away from Chicago... it's not like SF/SJ or DC/Balt. The zeal amongst some Chicagoans to absorb Milwaukee into their metro based on a thin, intermittent urbanized lakeshore corridor is beyond the pale. Milwaukee is an independent market that has close ties to Chicago based on relative proximity. It is not a junior partner in some multi-nodal mega-metro like Baltimore to DC.

And Milwaukee's O&D number does not appear to be inflated like say... Baltimore. Milwaukee had 2,269,921 O&D passengers... which is less than similar sized markets Columbus (2,412,368) and Indianapolis (2,964,237).

[blade_bltz]

I would think Manchester and Providence should be added to Logan. I've never flown out of Manchester, but I do know they market themselves as a Logan alternative. (just looked it up...in 2006 the airport's name was changed to Manchester-Boston Regional Airport...)

I definitely know that Providence's TF Green is very popular in the western burbs of Boston. Good news: an MBTA commuter rail stop at Providence's TF Green Airport is currently under construction, and will be completed sometime next year. It'll provide the closest rail-to-air connection in the country.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by VivaLFuego

It would seem that in general, this measure confirms the stereotypes of which metro areas are the most "white collar" and wealthy, and thus able to fly more: BalWash and Bay Area are tops.

Atlanta has a reputation of "white collar and wealthy", at least relative to the other cities on the list?

And Baltimore too? I would think Baltimore is synonymous with blue-collar and port activities. East Baltimore working-class whites with the funky accent, John Waters movies, huge black population, etc.

And how is flying nowadays a proxy for wealth? A Southwest super-saver serves the wealthy?

In many cases, flying is cheaper than driving. Sometimes it's even cheaper than the train.

While I'm not entirely sure what drives per-capita numbers, relative remoteness sounds like a good theory. Denver serves a giant area, while the Northeast and Southern CA serve tighter geographies.

[BrianSac]

I am not surprised that Sacramento has the highest percentage of O&D according to this list. Sacramento = 83.80% O&D

16.20% non O&D:
From which cities are the non O&D passengers transferring in Sacramento? These transfers must be from small cities within Northern and Central California on very small aircraft. Most connections are made out of SFO and LAX.

[novawolverine]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Atlanta has a reputation of "white collar and wealthy", at least relative to the other cities on the list?

And Baltimore too? I would think Baltimore is synonymous with blue-collar and port activities. East Baltimore working-class whites with the funky accent, John Waters movies, huge black population, etc.

And how is flying nowadays a proxy for wealth? A Southwest super-saver serves the wealthy?

In many cases, flying is cheaper than driving. Sometimes it's even cheaper than the train.

While I'm not entirely sure what drives per-capita numbers, relative remoteness sounds like a good theory. Denver serves a giant area, while the Northeast and Southern CA serve tighter geographies.

I don't think they're known as white collar, but they are. Atlanta is as white collar as anywhere, IMO. It also has a fairly high median income IIRC. Maybe only DC is more white collar. Baltimore is less dependent on the port activity and has diversified into other things like healthcare along with having a good amount of gov't, or gov't-related workers. BWI is the big southwest hub for the DC/Balt. area, so they do have a lot of good deals. If I can't fly out of Reagan National, BWI is where I prefer to fly out of.

I think remoteness is the most important aspect too, but I think if you're looking per-capita, it wouldn't surprise me that wealthy and otherwise significant cities(tourism) are high on the list.

[brickell]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

and (apparently) Tampa with whatever PIE is.

I was just throwing it in there for completeness. It's St. Petersburg-Clearwater International.

I doubt any of these are transfers so, it looks like it'd add another 700k or so.
http://www.fly2pie.com/media/statistics/tdcreport.pdf

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by bnk

Same issue with Milwaukee's airport. Those figures highly inflated from Chicagoland travelers and should be included in the Chicago Airport number boosting it to at least 3 internationals. Then there is Gary and Rockford too to figure in. But where does one stop.

i'd be shocked if there are more chicagoans who travel north to use MKE than milwaukeeans who travel south to use ORD.

and seriously, gary and rockford? really? woo-hoo, that'll boost chicago's numbers by another several dozen people!


EDIT: actually, RFD is much busier than i would have ever guessed, with 215,000 passengers in 2007, but still rockford is not a part of chicago's CSA, despite the fact that they renamed the airport "chicago rockford international airport" as a marketing ploy. Gary currently has no regularly scheduled commercial passenger service.

Originally Posted by bnk

Kindly add Milwaukee to Chicago.

no. there is some overlap between those two markets, however there is no census bureau definition of any kind that combines chicago and milwaukee into a single metro entity, not UA, not MSA, not even the mighty CSA. SF/SJ and DC/baltimore were combined by cirrus because the census bureau does define those places as single entities when using its most liberal formula of metro area definition.

Originally Posted by Evergrey

but Milwaukee is 90 freakin' miles away from Chicago...

i agree with your larger point, evergrey, but for the sake of accuracy, the straight line distance from downtown chicago to downtown milwaukee is actually 80 miles. the straight line distance from the city of chicago's northernmost border to the city of milwaukee's southernmost border is only 63 miles.

[VivaLFuego]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Atlanta has a reputation of "white collar and wealthy", at least relative to the other cities on the list?

Yes, Atlanta's median income is pretty high, though it's not as high on a per capita basis (sort of a reverse from Houston, where the insanely wealthy lead to a high per capita but the typical/median household is much lower).

And Baltimore too? I would think Baltimore is synonymous with blue-collar and port activities. East Baltimore working-class whites with the funky accent, John Waters movies, huge black population, etc.

Baltimore metro, not city. And Washington pulls up the CSA figures by being so dramatically full of high income white-collar professionals on both a median and per capita basis - I would guess that if broken into MSAs, then yes, Baltimore wouldn't be as white collar, but we're talking CSAs here, and BalWash taken as a whole is no doubt in the same league of overall wealth as the Bay Area.

And how is flying nowadays a proxy for wealth? A Southwest super-saver serves the wealthy?

Southwest's primary market is non-business travel, which most people would consider to be very distinct from 'poor people' - unless you're a jet-setting finance/consultant type who can expense flights and get treated to frequent first class upgrades, I suppose. Southwest <> Greyhound, not by a long shot.

While I'm not entirely sure what drives per-capita numbers, relative remoteness sounds like a good theory. Denver serves a giant area, while the Northeast and Southern CA serve tighter geographies.

Agreed - or at least, the availability of alternatives (be it auto, train, or whatever) certainly plays a role in the relative attractiveness of flying.

[Buckeye Native 001]

I dunno about Southwest on the East Coast, but I'd reckon at least half of its passengers on the West Coast use the airline for business travel. They run ridiculously cheap rates among the California cities, and most travel times from gate-to-gate are only about an hour.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

...
... Although Boston might crack the top 10 if Providence and Manchester were added to Logan. Combining Boston and Providence gets you 55,290 O&D passengers, good for 11th place and only 1,355 behind Atlanta for 10th. Unfortunately OP's link to the original report is broken, so I can't look up Manchester to see if it's big enough to cover that 1,355 difference.

Start doing that and you'll have to add Gary to Chicago, and maybe even Milwaukee, since a significant portion of northern Chicagoland treats the Milwaukee airport as part of the metro area. There's an Amtrak stop at the airport, too, which lets you get there from downtown Chicago pretty easily. Even I've flown in and out of it, and I live in downtown Chicago. Obviously some of their traffic is for Milwaukee, but then again some of San Jose's and Riverside's traffic is for San Jose and Riverside totally apart from LA and SF, too.

One could even make an argument for South Bend, since the South Shore train leaves from under Millennium Park in Chicago and terminates right at the end of the departure gates at the South Bend airport. So from Downtown Chicago, you can actually take trains with no connections to four airports - O'Hare, Midway, Milwaukee, and South Bend. Five, if you count Gary, although that takes a little more work.

[Gordo]

Originally Posted by Buckeye Native 001

I dunno about Southwest on the East Coast, but I'd reckon at least half of its passengers on the West Coast use the airline for business travel. They run ridiculously cheap rates among the California cities, and most travel times from gate-to-gate are only about an hour.

That, and unlike on the East Coast, Southwest flies into every major airport on the West Coast. I never fly them for coast-to-coast business travel, but they're usually most convenient for the quick Bay Area to LA or Seattle or Phoenix or Salt Lake City or Vegas or Portland trips, just because you have so many choices on departure times. It's nice to book a flight and know that if you finish a couple hours early you can just head to the airport and catch an earlier flight. The frequent flier upgrades to business/first class don't much matter on flights that are just an hour or ninety minutes (to me at least).

[iheartthed]

South Bend has an airport?

[novawolverine]

Originally Posted by emathias

Start doing that and you'll have to add Gary to Chicago, and maybe even Milwaukee, since a significant portion of northern Chicagoland treats the Milwaukee airport as part of the metro area. There's an Amtrak stop at the airport, too, which lets you get there from downtown Chicago pretty easily. Even I've flown in and out of it, and I live in downtown Chicago. Obviously some of their traffic is for Milwaukee, but then again some of San Jose's and Riverside's traffic is for San Jose and Riverside totally apart from LA and SF, too.

One could even make an argument for South Bend, since the South Shore train leaves from under Millennium Park in Chicago and terminates right at the end of the departure gates at the South Bend airport. So from Downtown Chicago, you can actually take trains with no connections to four airports - O'Hare, Midway, Milwaukee, and South Bend. Five, if you count Gary, although that takes a little more work.

I don't think we should start doing that, there are probably a number of places that could be consolidated in that case.

[fleonzo]

Originally Posted by PA Pride

New York has SIX airports?? Didn't know that.

Yes,

JFK- NYC
La Guad- NYC
Newark- NJ
McArthur- Long Island, NY
White Plains- Westchester, NY
Newburgh- Orange Co,NY

I've flown out of all them and they all pretty much suck...all are super busy. But if I had to pick the least sucky one I'd pick McArthur way out in eastern LI!

[SlidellWx]

For some reason the link gets pasted in with those damn ellipses. If you open the link in a new window...it should work fine. Sorry about that.

Thanks for pointing out PIE. I will add that to the totals. I should have noticed PIE popping up instead of TPA at times in the tables. Concerning Chicago...the Gary airport has no commercial carriers at this time, so it does not have any O&D traffic that is measured by the DOT. I tried to find every airport located within the boundaries defined by the Census bureau for the 50 largest MSA's in the country. I thought about doing it for CSA, but went with MSA instead. I see that other members took the numbers and combined into a CSA. I have no problem with that.

I found some stats very interesting. I was shocked at the low O&D traffic for Cincy...but it now makes sense after reading the other posts. I also noticed the isolated western cities phenomena. Salt Lake, Denver, Seattle, and Portland all have high O&D numbers. Looks like alot of people drive in from great distances to fly out of these airports.

Thanks for the interest in these stats. It took a good 20 hours to get it all together. Thought it would be cool to share.

[Cirrus]

I've flown into Manchester as a Logan alternative, but my final destination was Lowell, which is a lot closer to Manchester than Boston anyway. A lot of people use Manchester and Providence if they live near or outside the 495 loop, but I doubt very many people who actually want to go to *Boston* use either of those alternatives.

BWI, on the other hand, gets as many people going to downtown Washington as Dulles. BWI is 30 miles from downtown Washington; Dulles is 27.

Anyway, it's not like the modified lists I posted are official. If you want to know what they'd look like with a different set of combinations, please feel free to modify them yourself.

[202_Cyclist]

emathias--

Start doing that and you'll have to add Gary to Chicago, and maybe even Milwaukee, since a significant portion of northern Chicagoland treats the Milwaukee airport as part of the metro area. There's an Amtrak stop at the airport, too, which lets you get there from downtown Chicago pretty easily. Even I've flown in and out of it, and I live in downtown Chicago. Obviously some of their traffic is for Milwaukee, but then again some of San Jose's and Riverside's traffic is for San Jose and Riverside totally apart from LA and SF, too.

One could even make an argument for South Bend, since the South Shore train leaves from under Millennium Park in Chicago and terminates right at the end of the departure gates at the South Bend airport. So from Downtown Chicago, you can actually take trains with no connections to four airports - O'Hare, Midway, Milwaukee, and South Bend. Five, if you count Gary, although that takes a little more work.

If high speed rail is built connecting Chicago with Milwaukee and other citites, would Milwaukee then become a third regional airport for the Chicago region? Depending on where a passenger was leaving from, it would only take about 45 min to reach Milwaukee, certainly more convenient than accessing O'Hare when the highways are congested. This seems like a much better option than the ridiculous proposal to build a major airport at Peatone.

I also remember reading that Gary's airport is served by commuter rail.

[Capsule F]

Can we determine single airports?

[plinko]

Originally Posted by Cirrus

Just for kicks and giggles, here's the list ranked by total (not just O&D). I cut the list off at the 10 million line. And again, Boston would be a little higher with Providence and Manchester, and (apparently) Tampa with whatever PIE is.

New York	 51,883,694
Atlanta	         43,008,154
Chicago	         39,281,585
LA Area		 38,092,034
Miami	         31,262,044
Dallas/Ft.Worth  31,149,065
DC Area		 29,917,661
SF Area		 26,179,300
Denver	         24,337,554
Houston	         23,606,848
Las Vegas        20,224,090
Phoenix	         18,968,897
Orlando          18,211,975
Charlotte        17,215,648
Minneapolis      16,173,119
Detroit	         15,715,346
Philadelphia     14,878,298
Seattle	         14,787,443
Boston	         12,068,312

Total what? LAX alone serves 68M pax a year. What is this a measure of?