Atlanta to Miami area flights No. 3 in traffic

By Kelly Yamanouchi

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The air travel corridor between Atlanta and the greater Miami area is now the third busiest in the nation, and the corridor from Atlanta to the New York area is not far behind at fifth, according to a report from the Brookings Institution.

More than 5 million passengers travel between Atlanta and the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach area each year, based on annualized data for March 2009. That’s up 1.7 percent from a year earlier, despite an overall drop in air travel.

Miami’s role as an international gateway to Latin America and other regions and Atlanta’s status as a major inland connecting hub contribute to the heavy travel.

About 4.5 million passengers travel between Atlanta and the New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island area annually, the report said. But traffic in that corridor is down 4.7 percent from a year earlier.

The busiest air travel corridor is between the Miami and New York areas, with more than 8.7 million passengers, down 6.2 percent from a year earlier.

The Brookings report includes local and connecting passengers. John Kennedy, a spokesman for Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, said airport figures show New York and Washington as the top destinations for local passengers in 2008, with the Miami area third.

The Brookings report also found that travelers can get to more metropolitan areas nonstop from Atlanta than from any other metro area. Atlanta, with the world’s busiest airport dominated by Delta Air Lines’ hub, has 145 such connections.

The report said tracking travel trends along corridors between metropolitan areas can help policymakers better prioritize national investments. For example, said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings and co-author of the report, the federal government should look at aviation statistics — such as traffic on short flights in heavily traveled corridors — when deciding where to invest in rail.

For the year through June, U.S. airlines’ passenger traffic fell 8.9 percent from a year ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Delta’s passenger traffic declined 5.2 percent in September compared with a year earlier.

The declines in traffic have eased delays. But when growth returns, delays also are likely to grow, and the biggest airports suffer the most.

Atlanta was sixth from the bottom for on-time arrivals among the 26 metropolitan areas in the Brookings report. The New York area had the worst performance, while Salt Lake City did best.