Despite living in Istanbul for many many years, I have no idea what this mythical "centre" is that you refer to? Eventually there will be road and rail connections to the airport, while some roads may be completed in late October, rail will not happen for at least a few years. The problem is that while they are building several metro lines, these will take time and due to Istanbul's topography they are not really far reaching, meaning that while one can take you to a general area, you tend to find that most people still require a second or third conveyance to get to where they are going. Furthermore due to the topography of the city, having a train going to the "centre" such as Taksim, Micideyekoy or wherever only has limited usefulness as quite frankly quite a lot of people have no interest in going to these places. When they are open, this will mean that someone will land at the new IST, have to travel up to 1.7 km to get their bags, exit customs and leave the airport and get to the station, often by foot, wait up to 15 or 30 minutes for a train that will take them to Mecidiyekoy on the European side, and then find an alternative form of transportation to take them somewhere else on the European side, which could take anywhere from 5 minutes assuming they live next to the station, to 2 hours depending where they are on the European side. Asian side is a whole other calculation.

What I find disingenuous about much of this are the economic numbers. I am not even talking about whether they are real or not, I am talking about the "transfer numbers" that are ignored. They say it will employ 100,000 people. It may do so one day, however what does that mean? Economic impact? I mean TK Turkish Airlines has about 30,000 employees, not are all based in Istanbul (some are in other parts of Turkey, others around the World, I mean they have about 120 in the US, and about 300 in Germany) but let's say its 22,000 or so? The other Turkish Airlines combined have about 10,000 employees, again around Turkey (and to a lesser extent abroad), but in the case of Pegasus most are not at IST) most are at SAW, so we are talking maybe another 3,000 tops. I would posit that all other carriers at IST have less than 2,000 combined. There are probably another 10,000 third party workers air and landside, including pretty much everything within the airport perimeter. So are they saying that the amount of employees will QUADRUPLE at the new airport? I doubt it. They are talking about economic impact and using dark arts such as hotels that will be built, taxi drivers, truck drivers and who knows what else...............but all these people ALSO exist at the new airport. So of in stage one they were to absolutely increase their pax numbers to the 90 million capacity, they would be increasing the amount of people employed by 3 or 4x??!! for a 30-40% gain in pax? That is nonsensical. They could be including all those low paid construction workers (31,000-35,000 depending on news source), but when its built, they are done, so that cannot be it (or should not be, unless they plan on drawing out the expansion of the airport in later stages, to keep the numbers up, but that is still not "straight". 6% of the economy? How exactly does that work? Based on ticket sales? Cargo value? They are talking about a 2 Trillion dollar plus economy when this is done, so the airport will be worth $120 Billion per year??!! No one is questioning any of this.