Originally Posted by
narvik
Interesting to read of (some) US airports' being crowded. I wonder if time-of-day makes a difference?
Yes, it does.
Hubs are scheduled in banks. During each bank, flights come in, passengers, baggage, and freight is moves to their next flight, and flights depart.
When flights were reduced due to COVID, they still need to have all of the connecting options in the bank so that people and freight can get to where it needs to go so you aren't significantly reducing the size of each bank, you're reducing the number of banks per day. A hub may have gone from 7 banks to 2 banks per day leaving large blocks of time between banks where the terminals are nearly empty.