Surprised that the public transport figure for Manchester-Ringway is so low considering that there are so many rail destinations available to/from the airport station.
I'm not surprised. Manchester area is the place in the UK that is the most like America. The huge Trafford Centre is almost a blueprint of an American mall and the only way to reach it is by car. The Manchester Airport website isn't like the Southend website, with an easy link to the current train timetable. MAG plc has just released a CSR report, and the only thing mentioned about public transport is that the Metrolink will arrive in 2016. To get enough parking space for cars at MAN, they had to reduce the apron area. The result is a reduced capasity for diversions.
I have traveled regularly to MAN the last 8 years and never has public transport been a viable option for me. I have always been a regular customer at AVIS and in three weeks I'm again at the upper level of the multi storey car parking.
This is not comparing like with like.
I don't aree with you there. All three top performers are among the top 20 European airports (only LHR and LGW are larger than the threesome in UK). To make it even worse for these three, the population density is significantly lower compared with London.
- Greater London population density = 12,773/sq mi
- Greater Manchester population density = 5,220/sq mi
- Oslo metro population density = 420/sq mi
- Canton of Zurich population density = 2,100/sq mi
- Copenhagen metro population density = 1,650/sq mi
The city with the lowest metro population of the three, Canton of Zurich with 1.371 million citizens, has almost an identical population number with Merseyside (1.365 million), but there is a significant difference - Merseyside is over 2.5 times more dense than Zurich. It's all down to urban planning, or more correctly for Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham - the lack of planning.