Originally Posted by
Sharklet_321
I for one want to see SOU developed to its full potential as it will benefit the entire region. If you look at the likes of BRS they are now handling 9million passengers a year. Yet between them BOH & SOU struggle to get a combined 2.8m. The population of BRS is much smaller than the SOU/PMTH and BMTH populations combined - so what the hell is going on?!
Southampton/Portsmouth/Bournemouth combined populations should be compared wth 'Greater Bristol' which includes cities and towns such as Bath and Weston-super-Mare. Furthermore, because of its physical location at the intersetion of two major motorways (M4 and M5) and a similar rail 'cross-roads' (London, South Coast, South West, Midlands/North, South Wales) the city region is easily accessible from most parts of the country, albeit once in the city area itself the traffic can be horrendous and the airport is poorly connected.
BRS attracts significant numbers of customers from South Wales, Devon/Cornwall and parts of the Thames Valley, which was one of the considerations that Barbara Cassani mentioned in her book when her airline Go set up its second base and chose BRS. That said, around 40% of BRS's annual passenger numbers begin or end their journey in the 'Greater Bristol' area, roughly analogous to the area covered by the short-lived county of Avon.
The South West and the Bristol area in particular still 'loses' several million passenger journeys to the London airports (mainly LHR) each year.
Having said all this, I agree that the South Coast airports should be handling considerably more passengers than is currently the case, having regard to the size and make-up of the cities and towns within the Southampton/Portsmouth conurbation. They are under-performing when compared to somewhere like BRS which might be thought to be punching above its weight at a physically constrained site with poor surface connectivity.
The Eurostat concept of larger urban zones is sometimes a more realistic guide to city region population sizes than municipal populations.