Amy Kim

Airports are often assumed to have static predetermined catchment areas, based on administrative boundaries or geographic measures, from which they draw air passenger demands. This has been shown, over decades of study, to be an oversimplification, particularly across large geographic regions where long-distance air passenger “leakage” to larger hub airports is of concern to the smaller local airports losing these passengers. In order to broadly understand the drivers of these airport choices, and the resulting potential implications on emissions and price-based environmental policies, it is important to study air passengers and airports over large areas spanning multiple administrative boundaries, which has had little attention due to data limitations. First, using a dataset of air ticket purchases made by domestic air passengers in a large section of the U.S Midwest, this thesis proposes a utility-based choice model framework to understand the transportation service-based factors observed to influence airport choice probabilities, and thus airport market shares. Spatial plots resulting from these probabilities reveal that market areas and shares increase as airport size (and thus, services) increases. The market areas of small airports diminish towards the direction of surrounding airports whereas those of large airports cross strongly into multiple jurisdictional boundaries in all directions.Next, the environmental implications of passengers’ choices for different airports are assessed by estimating average and marginal emission factors on alternative routes using Modified Breguet Range equations, and determining the relationship between aviation emissions and price-based environmental policies through a supply-and-demand relationship analysis. Findings show emissions factors could be 18% up to 105% higher when passengers choose small or medium airports over large hubs to travel to the same destination. Additionally, emissions on routes from all the aforementioned airport types are inelastic to price.This thesis provides further evidence for the need to coordinate both air and ground transportation planning across jurisdictions and with airport authorities, given the implications for airports, air services and air travel, and environmental considerations. It also shows that price-based environmental policies, although critical for supporting various environmental protection initiatives, have no measurable effectiveness on directly reducing emissions from flying.

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