Birmingham behaves like a bigger airport than it is

There is a curious gap between how much of England is closer to this airport than to any other and how many of those people habitually use it. A great many travellers in the Midlands and the northern Home Counties default to Heathrow out of habit, route availability or the assumption that a bigger airport must be better, and they spend two or three hours of ground time each way buying that assumption.

Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, the whole of the West Midlands, much of Shropshire and a good part of the East Midlands. For any of those, Birmingham is the airport and the drive is short. It is also a genuine alternative to Heathrow for anyone in the northern Home Counties who is willing to look at it.

The consequence for ground work is a lot of medium-length runs: forty minutes to an hour, ending at a house, a hotel or a factory rather than a city centre.

The airport sits directly beside one of the largest exhibition venues in the country, and that relationship shapes its traffic more than anything about its route network does. Trade fairs and conferences arrive in waves, filling hotels for twenty miles around and putting a large number of people through the terminal in a narrow window, all of them heading for the same handful of destinations.

The exhibition site next door generates a particular kind of traffic, and the ground segment for it is unusual: large numbers of people arriving inside the same window, all going to the same handful of places. Event days there are a parking exercise as much as a driving one.

It also means the airport is used to corporate work, which shows in how the terminal handles a car that has to wait.