APPENDIX F

Summary of Project Workshops

About the Workshops

The stakeholder working group created for ACRP Project 10-33, “Incorporating Emerging Transportation and Ground Access Technologies at Airports,” met virtually between November 2022 and March 2023. The sessions brought together over 30 participants working for or involved with various stakeholders, including airport operators, air carriers, ground mobility providers, and regional planning organizations. The working group met for four separate workshops to discuss interim findings and guidelines from the ACRP Project 10-33 research team as well as specific emerging issues related to emerging technologies. The goals of the workshops were the following:

• Bringing together the stakeholders of airport access.
• Sharing information on both legacy and emerging modes and technologies.
• Discussing the interim findings and guidelines of ACRP Project 10-33.
• Ensuring that ACRP Project 10-33 deliverables address the needs of the practitioners.

Key Implementation Challenges

Lessons Learned from Existing Ground Access

• Potential challenges and areas of interest in implementing multimodality at airports include the following:
  • – Level of service of existing ground mobility facilities is not always consistent with passenger expectations and modern standards when it comes to customer experience.
  • – Lack of space at legacy airports to incorporate new modes of transportation, which highlights the question of where to strategically place new ground mobility facilities.
  • – Ground access is time-sensitive. Unreliable mass transit can lead to passengers missing their flights and airport employees arriving late at work. Uncertainty on arrival time translates into lower mass transit utilization.
  • – Mass transit is not always running 24 hours, which creates issues for early morning and late-night flights and shifts.
• Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is served by a light rail transit (LRT) line; however, only 6 percent of passengers take the LRT to the airport. Factors explaining this low adoption rate are the long walking distance from the LRT station to the check-in area (about ¼ mile), as well as the modest coverage of SEA’s catchment area by the main Sound Transit Link line. A dramatic expansion of the LRT network in the Puget Sound is underway.
• Coordination between cruise ships and the airport to allow passengers to remotely check luggage as they disembark the ships, with their bags transferred to the airport.

Lessons Learned from Large Public Events

• Dedicated lanes provide efficient solutions to prioritize public transit and HOVs in congested areas.
• Issues and solutions which have been identified for large public events accessed via airports include the following:
  • – Using a recent Superbowl event as an example of a large temporary event, airlines adjusted schedules to spread out the departure load after the game.
  • – Airports implemented remote baggage check to spread out passengers, which decreased the accumulation of crowds.
• The following are case examples from the Olympic Games:
  • – During the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, large investments in transportation corridors enhanced community mobility and received continued ridership past this large, one-time event.
  • – The 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, Japan, provided an opportunity to test emerging mobility technologies, such as automated vehicles on dedicated roads in the Olympic Village.
  • – Similar testing is expected to take place during the next Olympics in Paris (2024) and Los Angeles (2028), including urban air mobility from large-hub airports to downtown facilities.

Concerns with Connected and Automated Vehicles

• Significant investments in advanced (Level 3+) CAV technologies struggle to translate into practical realization. Incidents in the field during real-life commercial trials show there is still a lot of work before these vehicles become ready for broader implementation.
• The development of the future AV ecosystem will be subject to many different forces, with sometimes conflicting or diverging interests.
• Concepts of operation, such as traffic management, and rules of operation for individual vehicles are still unclear. They shall be clarified before moving forward with implementation.
• CAVs are being developed and tested in other countries as well. There are lessons to be learned from these non-U.S. efforts, including on the implementation and regulatory aspects.

Landside Operations Management

• Developing the right procedures in the event of an emergency is important. An example of successful incident management across stakeholders is the Blue Line accident at ORD station with coordinated, fast response from both Chicago Transit Authority and Chicago Department of Aviation. Coordinated or integrated operations management with emerging operators should take inspiration from these success stories and best practices already in place.
• Communication and coordination with law enforcement, which governs different jurisdictions between the airport and mass transit stations, is necessary. This includes emergency planning, regular coordination, and real-time channels available to handle incidents in the field.
• Landside operations stakeholders need to communicate and understand each other’s priorities and culture. Airport Collaborative Decision-Making (ACDM) is a framework of excellence in the airport setting for developing such mutual understanding and for fostering collaboration (Le Bris et al. 2021).
• Integrated airport operations centers (APOCs) can benefit from the presence of landside operators and ground access partners. However, these stakeholders might not see the relevance of having designated representatives at the APOC. Virtual APOC features enabling remote participation in the landside ACDM process can be an intermediate solution.

• Communication among the landside stakeholders may be difficult to fit into the ACDM framework initially as they are not used to this process and might not rely on the same key performance indicators. Education will be even more important to explain the benefits of such a collaborative process than to explain the “airside” ACDM implementation.
• An example of such difficulty is a recent Sandbox project with FTA to coordinate traffic signals by installing cameras on buses for traffic management and dedicated lane enforcement purposes. Large and small bus operators did not have the same initial interest in contributing to this initiative. Smaller operators did not see the value for their activities. Furthermore, a tailored list of tools and resources for smaller operators needed to be created.

Urban Air Mobility for Airport Access

• Vertiports can be developed on a relatively small site. They can also be combined with ground transportation facilities (e.g., rooftop of a ground transportation center or parking garage).
• Electric VTOL aircraft have high power requirements. The electric power aspect of UAM accommodation should not be neglected. Strategies to address this need should be part of a broader approach to the “electrification of everything” including (ground) electric vehicles.
• LAX previously had a “landside” helipad located on top of a parking garage at the heart of the central terminal area (CTA). It provided convenient access to the terminals and was an early example of the integration of VTOL operations at a large-hub airport.
• Scalability and flexibility should be incorporated into the planning and design of rooftop vertiports in order to scale up or down the UAM component, depending on the effective demand levels that will be met and evolution of the demand across time.

Potential Strategies and Mitigation

Development of Ground Access Strategies

• Develop mechanisms to gather data from operators and vehicles.
• Commit to an ongoing program to monitor the performance of the system and develop measures of performance for the airport ground access system.
• Data sharing and collaboration are needed at the metropolitan and/or regional levels for monitoring traffic, managing resources efficiently, and also enabling true mobility on demand.
• Document travel time, travel cost, and greenhouse gas emissions for the different modes of travel.

Accommodating Connected and Automated Vehicles

• Driverless vehicles may be mostly part of large commercial fleets, thus not individually owned by final users. License agreements with IOOs as well as the development of specific communication channels and SOPs to address real-time situations will be keys to ensure successful implementation at airports.
• Set a time limit to remedy situations before cities/airport operators can call towing systems. Airports can require CAV operators to designate tow operators in case of vehicles being stopped on airport roadways.
• Driverless car operations highlight the question of 24-hour communication between airports and fleet companies. It is important to open such channels early on to ensure the safety of personnel (e.g., towing companies) and the general public around vehicles that might react unpredictably.

Managing the Airport to Encourage Higher Occupancy and Mass Transit Use

• Identify and remove barriers that prevent or discourage passengers from choosing higher occupancy and mass transit modes.
• Create an airport transit application or MaaS/MOD application that provides passengers with crucial information, such as the best time to travel to an airport via private car, light rail, bus, or any other modes of transportation available.
• Develop curbside pricing policies to dynamically charge for the use of the infrastructure and recover costs based on real utilization. Connected vehicles will create new opportunities to thoroughly and accurately measure such utilization.