As security and aircraft delays increase, US hubs are thinking up innovative ways to cut ground-side airport traffic delays and move passengers between terminals
As US airport congestion reaches or exceeds historical peaks, and as the FAA and others issue repeated warnings of worse to come, airports are striving to improve their own connectivity, by changing design or by speeding passengers between their various terminals. Others have reconfigured their interiors to deal with the problems caused by the need for tighter security requirements and the increasing levels of movement to public areas.
Such projects acknowledge that airports must cope with ever-increasing volumes of travellers at just the same time as they face, for the foreseeable future, the conflicting issue of rising operational constraints in the form of air-traffic delays and security limits. To ease connections, one major hub, Dallas/Forth Worth (DFW)airport is close to completing a state-of-the-art people mover to replace its clunky old train, while at Washington Dulles, long a victim of a difficult design that separates boarding areas from the main terminal, passenger walkways are due to open soon and excavation work for a long-awaited underground railway is progressing.
As delays become a fact of life, other changes are under way at airports. At many, security lanes are being widened and interim, or waiting, parking lots have been added so that greeters and meeters can await a call from the arriving passenger before going to the terminal. Others say they are adding full-service restaurants rather than fast-food-to-go outlets because people are spending more time waiting for their (often delayed) flights.
While the majority of these projects are relatively straightforward, they all have implications for airport layout, design and architecture. Steve van Beek, executive vice-president for policy at the Airports Council International - North America, says: "As the airports wait out the crisis in the airline industry, many are themselves becoming the allocators of groundside capacity."
Skylink people mover
The DFW people mover is an ambitious project that meets a long desire of chief executive Jeff Fegan to update the airport's inter-terminal train. Called Skylink, the new people mover will speed along at up to 65km/h (40mph), replacing a 30-year-old system and cutting a 15min ride between terminals to about 5min. One airport official, Mark Skjervem, says that considerable numbers of customer complaints were about people having trouble making connections because the train was too slow for them. About 60% of the airport's 53 million-plus annual passengers make a connection.
Skylink's nearly eight kilometres of dual guideway lets the train's 64 "cars" (they are tire-mounted buses) move in two directions instead of one. Skylink is on a 15m (50ft)-high guide that gives panoramic views of the airport, but this is more than an aesthetic touch, he says. It helps orient people and remind them of where they are within the airport. The Skylink is integral to an ambitious master plan that will see an entirely new separate international terminal built.
DFW has been a busy hub ever since it opened. By contrast Washington Dulles has only recently begun to see solid expansion, with two decades of peaks and troughs finally giving way to what looks like more sustained growth. Growth has been driven this year by the spring launch of Independence Air - the former Atlantic Coast regional now reborn as a low-cost carrier - together with a strong response from rival airlines. By the summer Dulles had seen aircraft movements rise by around 50%, as it handled an additional 600-800 aircraft daily, propelling it into the big league.
The airport has pushed ahead with plans to link its separate terminal buildings, which are part of the original plan but based on a design that assumed the few passengers who were transferring at Dulles would be willing to ride specially designed buses into the main terminal and then back out to distant satellite terminals if necessary.
Airport operator the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority is pushing ahead by building walkways between the main terminal and one of the satellite terminals for those who prefer to walk than wait for a people mover. It has also committed to a delayed underground system. The authority is doing preliminary work on this in part in response to a public clamour over the widely publicised delays.
Public reaction elsewhere has forced airports to take other steps. At Miami International, for instance, airport officials have worked out a response to a problem that has increasingly plagued hubs that handle international traffic: the visa transit problem.
In mid-2003, the Homeland Security Department suspended international-to-international connections. That forced in-transit passengers, largely making Latin American connections, to make their way through the airport and clear one security checkpoint after arrival only to trek to another checkpoint at the other side of the airport to get to their next flight. At Miami, it can take passengers 2h or more to clear the final security checkpoint, and some people have missed connections and had to stay overnight, airport officials say.
Miami depends on international traffic more than any US airport, with more than 1 million people connecting between international flights each year. Now the airport has opened two in-transit lounges for passengers connecting between overseas flights, with the co-operation of security officials. Although this project did not entail major construction, it did require considerable negotiation between airport and security officials, but came too late for Miami to keep Iberia from downgrading its operations there and instead shifting to direct flying between Spain and Latin America.
At other airports, some changes are an attempt to modify public behaviour in response to the delays. That is because airports face a growing landside problem as drivers jam airport access roads, driveways and parking areas as they wait for passengers whose flights may or may not arrive on time. Los Angeles has removed parking meters and increased parking rates from $24 to $30 a day to pay for new security measures and also to coax more people out of their cars and on to mass transit. The airport has also persuaded rental car companies to do their part, and they voluntarily decreased the number of trips by their shuttle buses into the airport by 14%.
At several airports, waiting areas known as cell phone lots have been built to give motorists meeting passengers a place to park instead of circling around the airport roadway system. At Phoenix, a hub for both America West and for Southwest Airlines, one such lot was set aside earlier this year. Vehicle congestion and interminable circling created traffic jams and raised pollution concerns, says Deborah Ostreicher of Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport in Arizona. Salt Lake City, Tucson and Baltimore/Washington also have similar lots, which are free of charge. This creates its own dilemma in that some airports see it as a revenue loss and others see it as a revenue opportunity. "We may not keep it open forever," Ostreicher says.
Making space
Vehicle circling and shuttle bus crowding are behind another trend, in which airports take the rental car companies out of the airports, and combine them at a single location. This frees terminal space and reduces shuttle bus traffic that would take passengers between the different rental car terminals and the main terminals. Phoenix is working on one such project and Baltimore/Washington has recently completed a combined rental facility. And a consolidated off-airport facility is a part of the ambitious plan to redesign Los Angeles International.
One of the largest consolidated rental car centres will be at Las Vegas McCarran International, which opens a $123 million facility in 2006. When the 4.5Ha (11 acre) facility opens, it will free space within the airport for more baggage carousels, while the various rental car offices that are replaced along the aptly named Rental Car Road will make way for another third terminal - a valuable reallocation of space indeed.
REPORT BY DAVID FIELD IN WASHINGTON
Source: Airline Business
