The neighborhood streets outside Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport are mostly quiet during the day, with few people on the sidewalks. Sometimes the only noise you can hear is the sound of leaves rustling on the trees.

Inside the airport, things are rather different. On an average day more than 250,000 travelers pass through its terminals on nearly 2,500 flights. The sound on the air is a cacophony of announcements, beeping luggage carts and chattering voices. There are people everywhere –so many people, that according to a new analysis of airport capacity, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL) ranks as the most crowded airport in America.

To determine the rankings of America’s Most Crowded Airports, we looked at the twenty largest airports in the U.S. in terms of 2012 passenger traffic, and then compared that traffic to each airport’s available terminal space and gates. The final ranking is based on an equal weighting of passengers per square foot and passengers per gate. (We looked at both because square feet of terminal space per passenger can be deceptive if taken on its own; there might be a huge airport that forces all its passengers down into just a few gates, so it would still be crowded, despite the high square footage.)

Click here to view the full ranking of America’s Most Crowded Airports

Hartsfield–Jackson counts as America’s most crowded because it funnels a huge amount of traffic –95,462,867 passengers in 2012, according to preliminary data from the non-profit trade group Airports Council International–through 6.8 million square feet of terminal space and 203 gates. In contrast, the least crowded major airport on our list, Florida’s Miami International, only has 40% of Hartsfield-Jackson’s traffic, but it has 7.5 million square feet of terminal space; Miami has only 127 gates, but that’s still a far higher ratio of people to gates.

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