Enhancing Airport Access with Emerging Mobility (2025)
Chapter: Summary
SUMMARY
Enhancing Airport Access with Emerging Mobility
Background
Emerging transportation and ground access technologies are increasing the complexity of landside activity at airports. Innovative automotive technologies, such as electric vehicles and connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), will affect all components of an airport’s landside facilities—roadways, curbsides, parking, rental cars, and ground transportation centers. Social expectations and mode choice preferences are also changing, with a renewed interest in mass transit and rural public transportation availability given public concerns about affordability, accessibility, land use, safety, and sustainability. Other modes and technologies that impact airport access, such as micromobility and advanced air and water mobility, are also on the horizon.
Airports need to consider these trends and modes in their landside facility planning efforts and consider potential impacts to operations and business models. Decision-makers and practitioners must have a robust understanding of the potential implementation timeline, adoption rate, and facility impacts for each of these technologies. Therefore, research was needed to answer the following questions:
- How much curb space will CAVs require?
- Will dwell times be higher or lower than those of existing modes?
- Should the operations of these technologies and modes be separated from existing landside activities?
- Will airports see significant shifts in mode shares that result in overused or underused facilities?
- Can any adoption barriers to emerging technologies be identified? If so, what are some potential mitigation efforts that can be taken to proactively address such barriers?
- What are anticipated revenue impacts and opportunities?
This research report aims to help airports of all types and sizes plan for the near- and long-term integration of emerging, intermodal, and multimodal ground access technologies to enhance landside operations and the customer experience of passenger-terminal facilities. The research was conducted from April 2022 to December 2023 under ACRP Project 10-33, “Incorporating Emerging Transportation and Ground Access Technologies at Airports.” The report was developed to provide accessible findings and guidelines. An electronic toolkit featuring summary sheets, visual contents, and tools for informing decision-making processes was also developed to supplement the report. This toolkit can be found on the National Academies Press website (nap.nationalacademies.org) by searching for ACRP Research Report 269: Enhancing Airport Access with Emerging Mobility.
Who Is the Audience for the Guide and Toolkit?
The guide and toolkit are intended to be used by stakeholders of airport access who are looking for the following:
- General information on emerging transportation modes and technologies,
- Perspectives on the future of airport access,
- Analyses of key influencers and user expectations,
- Technical resources and analyses for planning and design,
- Guidelines on practical implementation,
- A summary of the potential impact of these modes and technologies, and
- An overview of implications for freight access and intra-airport mobility.
This report will be helpful to airport operators, consultancy firms, metropolitan and regional planning organizations, mobility service providers, parking garage operators, rental car companies, state departments of transportation, telecommunication companies, and transit authorities, as well as nontraditional stakeholders such as energy providers, utility companies, and the federal and state bodies regulating these industries.
How to Use the Guide and the Toolkit
The guide examines emerging transportation modes and technologies for airport access, suggests strategies for addressing current issues and leveraging existing modes, and provides extensive guidelines for landside planning and design.
Chapters 1 to 3 introduce airport practitioners to important concepts and issues regarding airport access. These chapters offer perspectives on how the emergence of new transportation modes and technologies could reshape the journey to and from airports and how transportation planners and decision-makers can implement services that are efficient and widely accessible.
Chapter 4 provides an inventory of the transportation modes and technologies that are relevant to airport access. All modes and technologies are introduced together and categorized by the type of media or track used for moving and controlling the motion of the vehicles, the technology involved, and the degree of automation. Each mode is presented with key definitions and characteristics. Typical performance figures are provided, along with information on each mode’s potential implementation timeline and uses at airports.
Chapters 5 and 6 investigate the emergence of CAVs and their potential impact on the airport landside. Chapter 5 describes the specificities of CAVs and their implications for roadway traffic and operations, and Chapter 6 provides an assessment of their impact on the airport landside.
Chapter 7 focuses on planning aspects, connecting airport access considerations to strategic development, airport master planning, and metropolitan and regional transportation planning. The chapter revisits tools developed under previous CRP projects, and it proposes new guidelines to foster collaboration between the stakeholders of ground transportation planning.
Chapter 8 summarizes facility requirements for each mode or group of modes. It describes overall infrastructure requirements and integration into the airport setting. While the chapter is not a go-to manual for planning and design for these modes and technologies, it provides an overview of physical implications and highlights key elements that airport project and program managers should keep in mind, especially during planning and coordination.
Chapter 8 provides extensive references to specialized technical documents that can provide further information as needed.
Chapters 9 to 11 explore various aspects of implementation and operations. Chapter 9 provides a brief overview of sustainability and environmental impacts of integrating emerging technologies into airport ground access, with resources referenced throughout for readers to obtain additional information. Chapter 10 offers an in-depth analysis of some of the implementation and funding challenges across emerging modes of ground access, focusing on airport-specific issues. Chapter 11 examines the operational aspects of the future of airport access, with suggestions for how aviation facilities can prepare for changes from organizational, risk management, and resource management standpoints.
Chapter 12 considers the implications of new modes and technologies for airport freight access. The chapter identifies use cases and outlines key trends in air cargo and freight activities that influence landside demand, such as e-commerce. It investigates the potential of aerial and ground mobility innovations to change the way freight is moved to and from airports—for both baseline and niche applications—and change the role of aviation facilities in cargo supply chains. The chapter also explains why some intermodal connections with air freight are unlikely to succeed.
Chapter 13 analyzes the relevance of various technologies for intra-airport mobility presented earlier in the report. This chapter explores different types of intra-airport mobility, within both secure and nonsecure areas, and suitable technologies based on travel time and distance. A breakdown of their feasibility and benefits is offered to support airport planners’ decision-making.
This report also includes Appendices A to F:
- Appendix A reviews various airport case examples in the United States and abroad.
- Appendix B explores mobility solutions in non-aviation settings, providing relevant lessons from transportation facilities, resorts, campuses, industrial parks, and urban mobility applications, among others.
- Appendix C supplements Chapter 6 with guidelines for accounting for CAVs in airport landside traffic–flow simulations.
- Appendix D presents select legal and regulatory issues in airport ground transportation that could be impacted by some of the emerging trends discussed in this report.
- Appendix E summarizes the airport survey on airport access conducted during the early steps of the research project.
- Appendix F provides the main takeaways from the stakeholder working group created for the project.
Accompanying this report is an electronic toolkit that features interactive contents, spreadsheets and reference sheets, a searchable glossary of terms, a list of abbreviations, and an electronic library with further reading and resources.
