Quote:
Originally Posted by Vlajos
^ There is no need for Gary airport. Sounds like a big fail.
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Spot on.. Draw a radius around Gary Airport. The closer you get the less affluent, mobile and likely the residents are to fly. Conversely the farther away the more you overlap with areas that are near Midway or Chi Downtown. Look at any demographic map on this board and the development is Downtown or on the Orange and Blue lines, with the exception of Hyde Park, Combined with the lower auto ownership and the abundance of destination and departure choices offered MDW and ORD and the expansion of ORD it just doesn't look good for GRY, and that radius holds true in all directions. Is Gary going to draw consumers from the South Bend market, or Indy. no way. Also Chicago collar county growth is heavily skewed to SW Will county which will default to MDW. And Lake County IL already uses Milw Mitchell as an alternate.
Finally the very discussion we are having on the Ohare express just points out how far GRY has to go to get any kind of transit access... MDW has the orange line and a huge bus transit connection, Ohare has the blue line and the NCS Metra and a bus system and remote parking people mover, and Milw has an Amtrak station that resident of the North Shore and Chicago can access 10 rides a day each way.
Gary airport future is as a cargo airport, they have already acknowledged that. Any pax airline service will be heavily subsidized.