Convience Store Airports how about Churches?

I found an article on the Japan Times the other day about Airport woes. Tokyo has two major airports and Osaka has three. There is another airport north of Tokyo in Ibaraki by a few hours but it is in the middle of nowhere. There is no train service nor is there public transportation and it is 30 min from the capital Mita. In Ibaraki prefecture they have spent 268 million on an airport which no one will use. Read the article. This smacks familiar of the Kansai fiasco with Osaka building an international airport which wasn't the problem but they did it right next to the Itami airport which already had routes and service but not international. They could have gone to another farther away location. Then two years ago Kobe builds an airport just a few miles away. So from the sixth floor of the Kansai airport you can see all three airports. Ibaraki is just a few hours away from Narita and Haneda. So I was thinking is Japan taking the 7-11 convenience store mentality to the max here and trying it out with airports? In the US is seems the church can get into this mentality as well. The airports are now struggling financially to stay afloat and more thins out the customer base. Do we do this with ministries and churches?

HERE IS THE ARTICLE:

Friday, Dec. 5, 2008

Airport with no customers ready to open
Ibaraki touts facility as tool for long-term growth, critics say it's just another in long line of construction boondoggles

By CHRIS COOPER and BRADLEY K. MARTIN
Bloomberg

The $268 million Ibaraki Airport is on schedule to open for business in March 2010. The hard part will be persuading an airline to fly there.

Just in case: A guard patrols the entrance to the Air Self-Defense Force's Hyakuri Air Base in Omitama, Ibaraki Prefecture, in October. Work is under way to convert part of the base for civilian use as Ibaraki Airport. BLOOMBERG PHOTO

The government and Ibaraki Prefecture, home to 3 million people, are paying for the airport, which will be part of the Air Self-Defense Force's Hyakuri Air Base in Omitama, won't have train services and is a half-hour drive from Ibaraki's capital, Mito.

Japan Airlines Corp. and All Nippon Airways Co., which operate 90 percent of flights in the country, don't plan to use it.

As the global credit crunch drives Japan into its first recession since 2001, the country is building roads and airports that have helped make it the world's most indebted major economy. Critics say many of the projects have little economic value beyond the building industry.

"The government is squeezing health-care and other social programs and then spending billions and trillions of yen on useless construction projects," said Stephen Church, an economist at securities researcher JapanInvest in Tokyo. "Ibaraki is just a small example of that."

Japan has borrowed money every year since 1965 to finance its budget, saddling each household with the equivalent of ¥17 million in debt. The spending has pushed the government's debt to the highest among the Group of Seven economies — 170 percent of annual gross domestic product last year, compared with 63 percent in the United States, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Ibaraki's airfield will open just as Japan's biggest international airport, Narita, an hour's drive to the south, completes an expansion. Tokyo's Haneda airport, the world's fourth-busiest, is set to open a new runway the same year.

"We're not planning any flights from Ibaraki Airport," JAL President Haruka Nishimatsu said Tuesday. "It's out of the question."

His company and ANA have cut unprofitable regional routes and slashed profit forecasts this year as higher jet-fuel prices and a global economic slowdown led to fewer passengers.

JAL recorded its biggest decline in international passengers in five years in September, while ANA flew fewer people overseas for a seventh straight month.

"We don't think of the airport as a 'Field of Dreams,' " Ibaraki Gov. Masaru Hashimoto said in an interview, referring to the movie starring Kevin Costner about an Iowa farmer who builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield.

The film's theme, "Build it and they will come," mirrors the governor's argument that investors won't appear unless infrastructure is in place. "We want the airport to add to the long-term economic growth of the region," he said.

Ibaraki isn't the first Japanese airport to have to battle for planes. Kansai International Airport opened in 1994 in southern Osaka Prefecture as an alternative to Itami airport to the north. While international flights operate from Kansai, domestic flights still use Itami. Another airport, in neighboring Kobe, opened two years ago.

"The problem with Osaka is obvious from the sixth floor of the hotel at Kansai airport," said Mark Schwab, vice president for the Pacific region at UAL Corp.'s United Airlines. "With the naked eye, I can see three airports."

United has slashed its service from Kansai to one daily flight to San Francisco, from five international flights.

Other projects haven't produced promised benefits. JapanInvest's Church pointed out that a ¥253 billion reclamation project that closed off part of Isahaya Bay in Nagasaki Prefecture with a 6.4-km seawall, completed in 1997, is a "complete white elephant."

The project was designed to create farmland even as the number of farmers in Japan fell and local fishermen opposed it.

"There's no coordination in terms of demand for projects," said Akane Enatsu, who analyzes Japanese regional government spending at Nikko Citigroup Ltd. in Tokyo. "Japanese infrastructure projects have too optimistic projections and then can't satisfy them."

In Ibaraki, local officials hope landing fees about 30 percent lower than those at Narita will lure low-cost carriers. Still, no airline has decided to use Ibaraki Airport, said Mitsuru Iso, a local government manager responsible for promoting the airport.