The Transit Every Airport Needs | Airport Rail Links

you get off the plane groggy sore you feel gross you just want the travel experience to be over you drudge through the airport get your bag go through customs and then you walk out and realize you actually need to get into the city a row of taxis awaits you you look at the cars and ask yourself do you really want to get into a beat up car and play roulette with the traffic situation while deciding if you want to make small talk with the driver you look up Airport Express you let out a quick breath and head for the trains things are going to be much easier from here I like airport Transit so much that it's been a bit of an in-joke among the RM Transit Community please build a train to the airport or whatnot but airport Transit is just really uniquely interesting because airports are For Better or For Worse huge Transportation hubs and I really don't think we should seed them to cars people usually don't travel from City to city with their car and Tow and so tourists all the way up to business Travelers are natural converts to local public transit but then again how do you best serve them I recently proclaimed online that I think airport expresses are kind of the best way for transit to serve airports but why is that when I think about airports that are fantastically well connected to their cities I tend to think about cities like Hong Kong Delhi Oslo and yes Toronto all cities which have Airport Express Rail lines to get out of the way airport Transit isn't just for travelers or tourists even though airports do have a lot of them and I think providing good transit to the airport not only makes traveling through your city more competitive and attractive but it also helps your local economy and just leaves a good first impression of your City to visitors at the same time though airports are major centralized employers from security to customs to baggage handlers to operations people and flight Crews a lot of people need to get to airports every single day and good transit to an airport is an excellent way of trying to reduce their outsized ghg emissions a lot of which do come from Transportation just getting to the airport of course that's also about grabbing the low-hanging fruit that is extremely centralized employment which can be hard to come by in a lot of cities with Suburban strip malls and suburbia in general but almost always exists at airports so why do I think airport Expresses in particular are so good well first what is an airport express I think people tend to typically jump towards something like the Heathrow Express I mean Express is in the name right well actually in my opinion the Heathrow Express is a bit of a tourist trap the surface is frequent and it's definitely fast but it's not all that well connected the only regular non-airport stop is Paddington and while Paddington is fairly well connected especially with the Elizabeth line now being open it isn't in central London and thus very few people can only exclusively rely on the Heathrow Express and it's not cheap I think the better model for an airport express line looks like a hybrid between the Hong Kong airport express and Toronto's Union Pearson Express I think it's important here to remember we shouldn't really be equating Express with non-stop as you see in London an Express should just generally be a faster train that doesn't mean it can't stop when it's convenient for example I think Stockholm's Orlando Express is great but at only 18 minutes to go from the airport to Stockholm City Center I think it could probably actually afford to be a little bit slower and make a few more connections what makes the aforementioned Services good is a a few things for one you have a fast and consistent connection to the central business district or districts of the respective City in Toronto not only is the train faster than taking a car for a lot of trips but it's also way way cheaper there's also way more consistency because again you don't have to deal with highway traffic which is a nice Peace of Mind especially after getting off the long flight another element that helps a lot is that airport expresses are designed for airport Travelers so they have a lot of amenities that can be incredibly useful like say luggage racks that can be an issue with a lot of traditional Services even at airports that are really well connected to Transit because you kind of have to awkwardly carry your suitcase and you might even be standing on a fairly long train journey with it Hong Kong and Delhi who was heavily influenced by Hong Kong both take this a step further as well as a few other cities out there by letting you check in your baggage at the downtown station bags are then out of your hands and sent on their way and so you can actually enjoy your day in the city without your luggage and it's just helpful because that means that all of people's big luggage is stowed away separately from the passenger compartment so people aren't wrangling with large suitcases as they're trying to sit down Toronto's up Express is sort of a unique example in showing how airport expresses can be a good way to introduce new features or enhancements to your Transit Network because an airport express line typically doesn't have all that many stations it can be easy to bring them all up to a nicer standard for example before it was common on Toronto's regional rail network the up Express stations and yes it is up Express I'm going to call it that all had nice canopies and digital wayfinding the terminal Stations of the line even provide platform screen doors which doesn't exist on any train system currently in North America much less a line where trains run over Mainline rail tracks another great point someone brought up to me in a recent discussion is that a lot of good airport rail links often have a train sitting in the station so when you actually show up even if you have to wait a bit for the trained the part you can get your seat right away now one issue Toronto did face was trying to price it to Airport Express as high as London and Hong Kong at around 30 dollars per trip when it first started that was a big problem and ridership was really low and while Hong Kong and London's ridership have definitely fared better I think it's a general lesson that Transit is a public good and probably shouldn't be priced as a luxury service it could be priced a little bit higher than a standard ticket to account for the fact that airport Travelers typically have a little bit more pocket change but airport workers for example should definitely get a discounted pass so that they can conveniently use it on a regular basis having fairly low and reasonable fares is also important because groups can become a real issue if you have super high fares with even just two people at a thirty dollar fare an airport express line might actually not be as attractive as just getting a cab maybe the Cab's a bit slower but you can go straight to your destination and this can look even worse if you're traveling with a family and need to buy five tickets now like all transit and Air Port Rail Link should be frequent and this is especially important for an airport Rail Link because the last thing you want to do after you've waited at baggage claim waited at customs and weighed it however many other places is wait for your train so having trains come every 15 minutes at a minimum but ideally more like every 10 minutes is an important way to provide an actually competitive Transit service along with frequency comes connectivity I think part of the reason why some airport expresses Heathrow Express for example come off as just being for luxury business Travelers is that they're not all that well connected so they might be a great option if you're going to the city center though Heathrow Express might actually not be that but they aren't always really well connected with the rest of the city and this is why it's great to have a few stops along your Airport Express service that connect to major transportation nodes so that even if people do have to transfer they can get too much of the city without a problem Hong Kong does this pretty well but I think Toronto might even be able to do it better in the future because it's likely that every single up Express a stop will have a major connecting rail line to it which will mean that almost the entire city is accessible with a single transfer which is great now another way you can provide great connections is something the fly to get in Oslo and the Narita Express in Tokyo do and that's providing some trains which actually go through the city center and travel to other destinations you can still operate a fast and frequent service to the city center but there's no reason you can't continue those trains onwards to other destinations the Narita Express trains actually split apart and go to different destinations so you have direct trips to multiple different Central Business districts within Tokyo now to be perfectly clear there's no perfect Transit line and there is no perfect Airport Express the Delhi Airport Express for example is really good service but one of its downfalls is that it's an entire line dedicated solely to Airport Express trains the advantage of the Hong Kong and Toronto model is that both recognizing that Airport Express trains are usually only a couple per hour provides additional capacity for local services in line and in Toronto that's the kitchen Regional Rail Line this means that local passengers going to other destinations along the same general Corridor as the airport express also benefit in a lot of cases the actual Airport Express is just a small add-on to an existing valuable rail Transit line now another feature that a lot of Airport Express Services don't have nearly enough of is 24-hour service of all of the destinations I can imagine airports are one of the most 24 hours delayed flights sometimes come in really late and early flights sometimes require you to get to the airport before the trains are running and so even just providing a train every half hour or hour overnight would be a big win for a lot of these systems it's also definitely possible because a lot of these systems as I mentioned before have loads of track capacity to provide for some additional local service another opportunity that we really shouldn't Miss as much is connecting people into the broader Transit ecosystem within the city for example a great idea would be to have Airport Express Services provide a free free local Transit trip as part of them so that when you get to the city center if your hotel or other destination isn't nearby you can use your Airport Express ticket to hop on the Metro a bus or a tram to actually get there now you might say why not buses and I'm totally with you I think any airport should have a great bus transit service ultimately Transit is complementary and more Transit is almost always a better thing buses can be a great option for providing connectivity from the airport to areas surrounding it and even within the airport campus the recent Airport Express Services tend to be a good thing is that not only are they typically more comfortable than buses and likely can also go faster but they're also higher capacity it's a similar case for tram and Metro there are always going to be cases where one technology makes more sense than another based on local circumstances for example the ram in Montreal and the candle line in Vancouver both provide really compelling connections to the airports because the airports aren't all that far from the city center and so even with a local metro style service people can get from downtown to the the airport in less than half an hour albeit maybe a little less comfortably than on a dedicated Airport Service that being said in a lot of cases metros provide more capacity than an airport needs in fact both the REM and the Canada Lions serve the airports on branches at the same time in a lot of cities where the airports aren't nearly as close to the city center a Metro is just going to be too slow to be competitive with other modes to get to the airport and if you're a regular metro rider it can be a bit annoying if space on your train or a delay is caused by an infrequent traveler who comes on with a large suitcase another common solution we see around the world for Transit links to airports are automated people movers from the airport itself to some adjacent rail line from Phoenix Sky Harbor to Newark to LAX again remembering that I always think more connectivity is better than less connectivity the reason I don't love these Solutions is that it requires transfers as a default now yes sometimes even within an airport you'll have to use an airport people mover just to get to baggage claim but if we can avoid having people to make lots of transfers with their suitcases that's good and the reality is very few if any automated people movers are providing convenient cross-platform transfers from airport people mover to Mainline train or Metro or tram and so I just generally think they should be avoided when a direct connection is an option now the ultimate solution for connecting an airport to the broader Transit network is probably the Amsterdam skipple solution which is to just have a major rail line travel right under the airport this solution is great because airport Travelers have access to local trains all the way up to High-Speed Rail and Amsterdam also has lots of great bus services connecting it to airport the issue with the solution is it's again kind of context dependent you might not have a major rail line that goes anywhere near your airport and while like Stockholm or Oslo you could build an airport Rail Link that could be used by Mainline trains potentially it's often very costly to build a major Mainline Railway if it's primarily for serving the airport another reality is that for a lot of cities the airport's kind of in the middle of nowhere so that the planes don't bother local residents and in places like Vancouver and Hong Kong the airport is literally surrounded by water and so it doesn't always make sense to build a major rail line to it so while the Amsterdam solution is great it's just not going to work fantastically in every single case of course as I keep saying there is no perfect Transit solution and every city is different and thus requires different solutions the best solution is probably more Transit but if you can only choose one form of Transit airport expresses are pretty compelling thanks for watching [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: RMTransit

Views: 110,068

Keywords: transit, transportation, rail, railway, railfan, public transit, public transport, public transportation, train, subway, metro, underground, rail transport, urban planning

Id: 4YeVZVluQWI

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022