Airport Terminal Signs: Use of Advance Guide Signs to Speed Search Times

Airports are becoming increasingly busy. Congestion along the roadways to and from airports is increasing correspondingly. In this context, airport ground signage plays an especially critical role in driver satisfaction and safety. Perhaps most essential is the signage that tells drivers the terminal at which their airline either departs or arrives. Airlines leaving from a given terminal are typically listed as a group on a single terminal sign. In the not-so-distant past, the number of airlines was relatively small. Drivers could easily scan the list of airlines on a terminal sign in a few seconds. However, the number of airlines leaving from many airports has dramatically increased in the last 25 years. Thus, the number of airlines listed on a given terminal sign has had to increase as well. At some airports, there can be as many as 20 airline names on a terminal sign. This makes searching for a particular airline difficult without multiple, short glances. In some cases, drivers simply do not have enough time to scan the entire terminal sign. This creates driver frustration and, perhaps indirectly, leads to incidents. In other cases, drivers can spend much longer than they should with their eyes on the terminal sign and not on the road. This creates potential safety problems. The effectiveness is evaluated of an advance information sign that can reduce the search time by as much as 50 percent, both when the target airline is present and when it is absent on a given terminal sign. Applications to other signage are discussed.