Originally Posted by
SOBE ER DOC
I'm curious what folks think can be done with PHL without rebuilding the whole thing. Concourse aesthetic renovations and additional concessions have improved things but, at the end of the day, PHL is hampered by concourses not designed for modern air travel, gate holding rooms that are much too small (and now worse due to the "creative" seating in B/C) and a footprint hemmed in by the Delaware River and I-95. Every option to modernize has a price tag in the BILLIONS and there is no way AA or the LCCs that dominate operations are going to foot that bill until they absolutely have to.
The PHL capacity improvement plan proposed about 5 years back has gone nowhere, and likely will never go anywhere. It would have been a 15 year phased project to effectively replace all the terminals with something resembling Atlanta's layout, with repositioned runways, etc. Unsurprisingly, I can't find a trace of that online now.