Western Sydney Airport (WSI) Discussion

[dajop]

Avalon has Geelong! Less than 30 minutes away.

Yes it does. But I think the number of people in Melbourne Metropolitan Area that are close to AVV than to MEL, is very small due to the relative location of the two airports (one SW of Melbourne, the other NW). It's only a few suburbs in the City of Wyndham (Werribee, Point Cook, Wyndham Vale, part of Hoppers Crossing) that are closer to AVV. Probably 300K in Geelong/Surf Coast/Bellarine and another 100K or so in the City of Wyndham. For Western Sydney it's over million. An equivalent location for WSI in Melbourne would be somewhere out Pakenham/Cranbourne way - the opposite side of the city to MEL.

 

[RooFlyer]

The issue woukd be if there is enough business in the WSI to merit airlines using it and whether any reduced flight costs plus time and cost to travel to Sydney merit passengers using WSI.
PS MEL is nominally about 30 minutes by car from the CBD.

you are still arguing from the point of view of the airport now. It’s probably going to be be one or two decades before it reaches its potential.

The new Airport will attract new infrastructure and businesses, not just service whatever happens to be there now.

But from the first flight, WSI will have an advantage over SYD that SYD will never overcome. WSI curfew free. When you talk about distance from WSI to the CBD, how about when a plane can’t land because of curfew and it goes back to Brisbane or Melbourne?

 

[33kft]

and another 100K or so in the City of Wyndham

Ha, there's almost 70K alone in Point Cook. There's about 350K people in Wyndham today, about the same number in Geelong, so probably 700K in the surrounding regions, but then there's Hobson's Bay and up through the inner west, so the catchment area is > 1m, not sure what the actual figure is but it's not 400K as you're suggesting.

Yes there would be a line at the border of Wyndham Council where there's no longer closer proximity to Avalon than Tullamarine, but having done both of those drives many times, there is about 2/3 of the day where the drive would be faster to Avalon despite the extra distance. If there were more services there, I'd dispute the suggestion that many in the west would necessarily choose to go to Tulla when you consider the benefits in terms of travel time and parking.

Hell, they could pretty easily have airport rail there if that were a priority, but obviously it isn't because it's severely underutilised.

 

[dajop]

Ha, there's almost 70K alone in Point Cook. There's about 350K people in Wyndham today, about the same number in Geelong, so probably 700K in the surrounding regions, but then there's Hobson's Bay and up through the inner west, so the catchment area is > 1m, not sure what the actual figure is but it's not 400K as you're suggesting

Sure, the overall potential catchment area could be that big, but in terms of convenience - I was more looking at the population that is closer to AVV than MEL, which isn't that significant.

A big chunk of the City of Wyndham is either actually closer to MEL (such as Williams Landing, Truganina) or more or less the same distance (such as Hoppers, Tarneit, Point Cook) and MEL has the advantage in destinations and frequencies. Werribee and Wyndham Vale are however definitely closer to AVV.

In summary, what I'm really saying it's big disadvantage is that it doesn't really have a compelling enough time advantage over MEL for basically the entire Melbourne metro area (it does for Geelong though, they should just give it the code GEX and rename it Geelong/Surf Coast Airport). WSI probably won't have that same problem as there are chunks of Sydney were it will take a lot longer to get to SYD than WSI.

As an aside shame there isn't at least a shuttle from Lara to the airport though, trains run stop there every 20 mins for a big part of the day.

 

[JU581]

The other thing to remember is that a lot of global airlines have multiple waves at their hubs. At the moment we get access to 1 or 2 out of 4. SYD’s curfew means EK and QR cannot schedule a 2am or 3am departure for example. Also WSI would enable late arrivals from Perth which now cannot be done with the latest departure from PER being around 4pm.