Megaproject Series: New Brunswick International Airport
The sum is greater than the parts
Do you ever see news stories about some government-backed project and think, ‘wow, that’s a dumb idea'? Me too (I’m not saying which). Its made wonder if I could come up with better uses for a few hundred million dollars of sweet sweet government funding.
That being said, here’s my first shot at Megaprojects1. I’ve been spending time in New Brunswick recently. It’s interesting from a population perspective, because it has three roughly similar sized cities in Moncton (172k pop.), Fredericton (116k) and Saint Jean (135k). They are also all in southern New Brunswick, forming a triangle.
There are surely upsides of having several smaller important cities, but one clear downside is air travel. Airports and airlines rely on scale to make it feasible to fill planes. Unfortunately for New Brunswickers, their options are very limited and mostly redundant. Each of the 3 cities has daily flights to Montreal and Toronto, but other destinations are scarce or niche (like seasonal flights to the Caribbean or Mexico). Even pre-COVID, the 3 airports only handled about 25 flights a day each.
Combined, the 75 flights represent half the flights Halifax’s airport saw - even though Halifax’s population (480k) isn’t much larger than the 3 cities combined (420k). Its possible that working together could give a regional airport the critical mass needed for more destinations.
None of these cities is going to leap ahead to Halifax’s size, so I think its worth considering how to work together. My proposal would be a new big airport, somewhere near Sussex, NB, that could pool passengers from all three cities to offer more flights to more places.
Now, the hour+ drive would be a significant pain for locals, especially if it only had domestic flights to Toronto or Montreal that each city already provides. But it’s not just locals who could use the airport. I’ve written before about how Halifax could look to become a transatlantic hub, but the argument fits this airport better.
The basic pitch is that Americans all along the east coast need to fly over New Brunswick anyway (which minimizes the lost time on a stopover), and having an airport there could be an relatively efficient way of offering a lot of flight options (i.e. with flights from 4 U.S. to 4 EU cities and a stop in NB to allow passengers to mix, you would offer 16 potential flight combinations). These flights would be new additions to the existing domestic flights, and since a lot of the passengers would be there on layover - the hour+ drive to the nearest city is irrelevant to them!
Meanwhile, New Brunswickers would get a real airport with more options to fly internationally, and an airport that could reasonably benefit all 3 major cities in the province. And generally, I’m skeptical of economic development pitches. They often claim dubious (always positive) knock-on effects. But I think transportation is different. Even in a bad scenario where the airport can’t charge enough fees and the airlines need subsidies to run flights, literally bringing folks to New Brunswick (and bringing New Brunswickers abroad) must have some unanticipated benefits.
FWIW, I’m not claiming these are going to be original ideas, but I’ll try to make my own case for them
Deny,
This could work if a major carrier like Delta saw a need for this and the other airlines saw this as a better refueling site than Gander.