Evaluation of taxi services provision on airport terminals curbside for picking up passengers

Abstract

Executive Summary: Airport terminals curbsides are the critical interfaces between stand- ing vehicles, moving vehicles and pedestrians, acting as the capacity buffer between the road delivery system and the airport terminal building. Their design and capacity are essential to the successful performance of any airport infrastructure and, therefore, impact the quality of passenger experience. The current solution at Portela Airport for taxi service provision on the passengers arrival curbside consists on a set of two parallel lanes next to the door of the airport terminal, with four spots (two in each lane) for taxis to stop and pick up passengers. Its design turns the service of taxis in the same lane strongly linked, leading to the occurrence of blocking effects among taxis, which also reduces the utility of expanding the number of stop areas. A new solution for taxi service provision was recently proposed by Globalvia. The new service configuration consists of a “spine” parking design for 8 taxis at arrivals, and another one at departures with an identical geometry but for private cars. In both cases, the proposed solution consists of a strip parallel to traffic routes, with parking positions arranged at 45 degrees with respect to the road, aligned parallel to each other. Thus, the vehicles coming from the adjacent track, either being taxis (at airport arrivals) or private vehicles (at airport departures), after stopping, follow a route that is dedicated exclusively to them, creating a traffic flow independent of others, thus minimizing the points of conflict between vehicles. The aim of this work is to study and analyze the viability of the new proposal, comparing its capacity and performance with the solution currently implemented at Portela Airport.