European Connectivity: the Role Played by Small Airports

摘要

The objective of this work is to evaluate the role played by small airports in European connectivity. We aim to estimate the connectivity loss for the population caused by closing airports with traffic lower than 2 and 1 million passengers per year. They represent 3/4 and 2/3 respectively of all operating European airports. We apply a methodology based on computing the quickest travel time necessary to connect each origin municipality to any destination in Europe and to the main intercontinental destinations. It includes three components: i) the travel time by road and train to access the departure airport, ii) the travel time by flight from the departure airport to the destination airport, including waiting times in intermediate airports when no direct flight is available, and iii) the travel time by road and train from the destination airport to the final municipality of destination. For each of over 75,000 municipalities in Europe we calculate the average travel time to reach any other municipality in two cases: i) including all airports operating in Europe and ii) considering only airports offering more than 1 and 2 million seats per year. Preliminary results show that, with the exception of the Scandinavian countries, the average loss of connectivity is small on a country level. However, that average is unevenly distributed: several regions in France, Spain and Italy sustain a very significant increase in the average travel time by up to 40%.