Quote:
Originally Posted by PTSA
I think Portland Oregon has 65 gates. Eighty gates is a good number to look at. You may not build them to their full extent right away but you will have the capability in place. There is a lot of space in Texas last time I was there.
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Austin
-already- has the capacity to add gates to give it a maximum of 112, as well as a third parallel runway. Austin doesn't need get rid of what we already have just so we can build another airport miles away from the city center.
Quote:
Originally Posted by PTSA
You are creating demand by combining the demand from two airports too close to each other into one.
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That may work in Dallas/Fort Worth, but those two cities are only 30 miles apart, whereas SAT/AUS are about 70 miles apart.
A large chunk of the existing flights from SAT and AUS go to other nearby cities like Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Harlingen, etc. Traffic on those flights already dropped after 9/11 due to the increased times needed to go through security. Although some of that short-haul traffic has recovered, none of those short-haul city-pairs to/from AUS/SAT have fully recovered to the levels they were before 9/11.
If the two cities were to build a joint airport halfway between the two, even more of that short haul traffic would drop. Why would someone from SAT want to drive 45 min to an hour just to
get to the airport and still have to arrive at least an hour early, just to take a 40 minute flight to Houston or Dallas? Might as well drive the whole way.
And what about all the convention business San Antonio gets? I've always heard that one of the many reasons
San Antonio is popular as a convention city is because its' airport is close to downtown, which makes it convenient.
What convention attendee is going to want to fly into San Marcos and have to take a 45 minute (at least) shuttle ride down I-35 just to get to the city. An airport much farther away from each city's downtown is not going to help either city's convention business.
Of course, I'm sure the folks in San Marcos/New Braunfels would love it and benefit financially from it.
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