Pittsburgh Will Hold on To Its Parking

Ah, Pittsburgh. What a sad story. What was once a very large hub for US Airways has become only a spoke in its route network. The airline only flies to three cities that aren't hubs - Raleigh, St. Louis, and Hartford - and that's all with regional carriers. At it's peak, the airline had over 500 daily departures from the airport, and the number today is less than 10% of that. Sad.

This, naturally, poses challenges for the airport because it has all of this extra capacity. In fact, large chunks of terminal space have been closed off, simply because no one's there to use the space.

But here's an issue - when the airport was a gem in the US Airways network it had to grow, and in 1992 a brand new terminal opened. And today that construction represents the majority of the airport's $435 million debt.

So the powers that be at the airport were thinking of ways to dump the debt quickly. Doing so would lower their costs, obviously, and the airport could pass that along to the airlines. That would hopefully result in maintained or enhanced service, since Pittsburgh's costs are very high relative to other airports.

One idea - sell off the parking operation to a third party. But the airport has decided that's not the way to go. Even the most optimistic assumptions don't have the sale being able to cover all of the debt. Plus the airport would still be on the hook for maintaining the facilities, and there would be no parking revenue to cover those costs. And as I've written here before, parking is a very big non-airline revenue source for airports.

So what to do? The airport says it has found ways to improve parking revenues by a few million per year, and it should be debt-free in eight years, which should hopefully bring its costs down for airlines.

You can read more here at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.