True Multimodalism for Mitigating Airport Congestion

Abstract

Continuous long-term growth of air transportation has created congestion and aircraft–flight delays at many large airports. In general, the most common long-term measure for managing and mitigating the congestion and delays at these airports has included building new airside and landside infrastructure capacity. Particularly in Europe, an additional measure has implied the transformation of some large airports into multimodal transport nodes, thus enabling other surface transport modes to take over more substantially a portion of the excessive airport demand. This has usually meant inclusion of these airports into conventional rail networks, high-speed rail (HSR) networks, or both. This paper deals with an analysis and assessment of the savings of airline and passenger delays and related costs of substituting comparable HSR services at a large congested airport for some short-haul flights. For such a purpose, the deterministic queuing model for quantifying these savings is developed. The model is applied to a large congested European airport with the use of the what-if scenario approach.

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