Greening Airports II: Transforming an Airport into a True Multimodal Transport Node

Abstract

At many large airports, traffic growth has caused an increase of airside and landside congestion and airline and air passenger delays, noise, local emissions of greenhouse gases, and waste. Consequently, transforming such airports into true multimodal transport nodes is considered one of the long term alternatives for mitigating some of these impacts. What does this imply? Airports are, by definition, multimodal transport nodes, which enable air passengers and air cargo to transfer from the airports’ ground access systems/modes to the air transport system/mode, and vice versa, as will be described in more detail in Chap. 7. Under such circumstances, developing such airports into true multimodal transport nodes implies connecting them to ground transport systems/modes, providing similar services to/from them as the air transport system/mode over the specified short- to medium-haul inter-city and inter-airport travel distances (routes). In this respect, air passengers can be transferred at the airport on two levels: (a) firstly, between the airport ground access systems and one of the longer distance transport systems/modes; and (b) secondly, between two inter-city and inter-airport transport systems/modes. By simultaneously providing transport capacities through at least two either competing or complementing modes APT (Air Passenger Transport) and HSR (High-Speed Rail), the airports in question could be considered to operate as true multimodal transport nodes.