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Chapter 6 | Air services in regional communities6.3 Selected socio-demographic distributionsbased on projections of passengermovements at regional airportsIn this section, passenger movements at 170 regional airports in 2005 were projectedout to 2016 using the extrapolative methods described in Chapter 5. It was found that37 regional airports exhibit marginal changes in the trend of passenger movements,84 regional airports exhibit positive trends in passenger movements, 46 regionalairports exhibited a negative trend in passenger movements and three regionalairports do not have sufficient data for projections.The projected results were used as an indicative direction of the future passengertrend of an airport. They were divided into two groups: regional airports withprojected positive trends and those with projected negative trends in passengermovements. The corresponding UC/Ls and population for each group were extractedusing spatial analysis as described in Chapter 4. Again, the assumed access distanceof 40 km radius to small and rural airports and the assumed access distance of 120 kmradius to large and medium airports were used in the analysis.DemographyIt is observed that 88.8 per cent of the population (Table 6.10) from 1144 UC/Ls(Table 6.11) lived within the assumed access distance to at least one airport withprojected positive trend in passenger movements. The remaining 11 per cent of thepopulation (Table 6.10) who lived within the assumed access distance to airport(s)with projected negative trends in passenger movements were scattered over 233UC/Ls. Of these 233 UC/Ls, 178 UC/Ls were in a population size of less than 2000(0.81 per cent of all population in UC/Ls). Overall, Table 6.11 shows that the numberof UC/Ls located within the assumed distance to airports with negative projectedpassenger movements increases as the population size decreases.Table 6.10 Distribution of population in UC/Ls based on projected passengermovements at regional airportsDistribution of population (per cent)Population size Projected positive trend Projected negative trend TotalLess than 2000 3.58 0.81 4.392000–19 999 8.57 1.94 10.5120 000–99 999 8.94 1.31 10.25100 000+ 67.72 7.13 74.85Total 88.80 11.20 100.00Source: BITRE time series estimates.171