A comparative study of airport connectivity in China, Europe and US: which network provides the best service to passengers?

摘要

This paper investigates the connectivity of the airport networks in China, Europe and US. Our aim is to analyze which network is most beneficial to final passengers in terms of travel time and which of the network features lead to such a result. The networks considered have different characteristics: the US airport network has been liberalized earlier and both the European and American network have recently seen a sharp increase in the number of point to point routes mainly due to low cost carriers, which overlap with the traditional airline networks. China has the least developed network in terms of number of airports and number of routes. A time-dependent minimum path approach is employed to calculate the minimum travel time between each pair of airports in the three networks, inclusive of flight times and waiting times in intermediate airports. We evaluate each fastest indirect connection in terms of circuitry times and routing factors to consider the effect of the hubs’ locations. Then we assess the temporal coordination of flights by calculating the average waiting times in intermediate airports. Our results show that fastest connections do not differ much in terms of routing factors and circuitry times. Even if the European network has the greater number of direct flights per airport, when connections require intermediate airports, their average waiting times exceed those of the American and Chinese Network.