Intermodal Passenger Facility Planning and Decision-Making for Seamless Travel (2024)
Chapter: 9 Conclusion
CHAPTER 9
Conclusion
Each intermodal passenger facility is unique. The planning and decision-making process should reflect the facility’s uniqueness as well as its relationship to the local context, its surrounding environment, and the broader community. At the same time, the intermodal passenger facility’s main function is to serve people undertaking a journey. By prioritizing the experience of the customer (regardless of income, ability, or spoken language), planners, owners, and providers can better adapt to changing trends and make informed decisions. Efforts to advance the complete trip concept, expand MaaS to include all modes of transportation, emphasize effective governance, broaden partnerships, and better manage facility pickup and drop-off can all lead to improved facility operations and an enhanced user experience.
Key Takeaways
The following are additional key takeaways from the research effort that are intended to serve as high-level themes and for future consideration.
Collaborate Early and Often
Intermodal passenger facility planners, owners, and modal providers need to regularly collaborate with each other and with external stakeholders. This ongoing need begins with governance and continues with partnerships. Owners, providers, and other partners should always be considering the customer’s travel experience traveling to, within, and from the entire facility instead of just considering the customer as using only one mode of travel. Collaboration also includes forming and maintaining strong partnerships with external stakeholders to address non-transportation matters that can affect a facility, such as coordinating responses to extreme weather events or working to address the housing crisis.
Identify Ways to Streamline Intermodal Passenger Facility Projects
Intermodal passenger facility projects take many years to implement. As projects advance, construction costs continue to escalate, changes to the climate may accelerate, and plans developed today may be obsolete at project completion. More research may be needed on streamlining intermodal passenger facility projects to ensure that they address current needs and are affordable.
Plan with Flexibility in Mind and Adapt Accordingly
Even with shorter implementation time frames, intermodal travel will continue to evolve and emerging technologies will continue to change travel behavior. Planning with flexibility and
adaptability means assuming that decisions made today will need to be revised in the future. This means working to avoid being constrained by decisions that will be hard to reverse.
Collect Data More Often and Share It More Broadly
Facility owners and modal providers need to regularly collect data that measure usage patterns and then use these data to improve facility operations and the user experience. This means regularly conducting passenger surveys, measuring how people enter and exit a facility, investing in automated systems to collect data, and sharing the data, including through open sources and in ways that are agnostic to the individual mode or the technology used.
