The demand for parking at the airport has declined with the rise of Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing services, Atlanta airport officials say.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is shelving plans to demolish and rebuild its parking decks at the domestic terminal.
The airport developed plans several years ago to double the size of the Terminal South and Terminal North decks, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
But airport officials eventually down-scaled those plans.
Airport parking revenue had begun to decline in 2019, Hartsfield-Jackson General Manager John Selden said at the time.
Last week, Selden told he told an Atlanta City Council committee that revenue has continued to decrease. Airport car rentals also have declined, he said.
“People are just not parking,” he said.
The decline in demand for airport parking has prompted airport officials to look at maintaining the existing parking decks instead of rebuilding them. Officials are considering “renovating them to possibly get another 10 or 15 years out of them,” Selden said.
“We’re going to extend the life of the ones we have,” he said.
That plan could also be a money-saver. The original plan would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, which “the business case just doesn’t support,” Selden said.
Passenger traffic at Hartsfield-Jackson, which bills itself as the world’s busiest airport, rose to 110.5 million passengers in 2019, Selden said.
It fell short of the 111 million passengers originally expected due to the grounding of the Boeing 737 Max jet, he said.
