Changes are coming to the area around the entrance to Charlotte Douglas International Airport. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, wonders if they’re the changes the airport needs most right now.
It makes perfect sense that the folks who run Charlotte Douglas International Airport want to develop hotels and shops around the airport entrance on Wilkinson Boulevard.
That way, at least people will have something to look at as they sit in the traffic jams.
Airport officials are hoping to develop around 90 acres the airport owns around its main entrance. In an announcement last week, they called it the Destination District. But to me, the timing felt a little off. That’s because we’re just a few weeks removed from a double dose of brutal traffic at the airport over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday seasons.
There were a couple of days where heading to the airport felt like crossing the Oregon Trail. You better have packed some provisions. On some days lines backed up from the arrival/departure area all the way to the airport entrance and out onto Wilkinson. My wife went to pick up her sister one day and saw passengers who had apparently given up on their rides. They were trudging to the entrance on foot in a downpour.
Getting to the airport two hours early doesn’t help much if it takes you an hour to get to the front door.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the airport tweaked its system — adding some staff, rerouting some buses, that sort of thing. It didn’t seem to help a whole lot.
The problem is the bottleneck getting to the pickup and dropoff areas.
Right now, Charlotte Douglas has one way in and one way out — the arrival and departure areas split off onto different levels, but only at the very end.
It seems to me that, if the airport is going to put a big chunk of money anywhere, it should be toward adding space so that picking up and dropping off passengers is less of a hassle.
Look, the airport experience is fraught enough. Even at a good airport — and I think Charlotte Douglas is a really good airport, overall — there’s always the anxiety of getting through the TSA line, schlepping to the gate, then wondering if your flight is going to be late or overbooked. On the best days it can give you a headache. But if you can’t even get to the front door on time, that headache can upgrade to a migraine pretty fast.
Also, I wonder if the whole hotels and shops thing will resolve itself eventually. Wilkinson Boulevard is already redeveloping as we speak. Surely the development is headed out toward the airport. And at some point, maybe 25 years down the road, there might even be a light rail line, which has been a huge magnet for Charlotte’s growth. The hotels and shops might fall right into the airport’s lap if they’re patient.
But I can tell you who’s not going to be patient between now and then — the folks stuck in airport traffic with a flight to catch. They are the airport’s main customers. And they deserve to be taken care of first.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section at wfae.org. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org
