Passenger Level of Service and Spatial Planning for Airport Terminals (2011)

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4Planning and designing airports to serve passengers and ever-evolving operational needs is challenging. It is even more challenging to achieve the correct balance of using limited cap- ital investment resources while developing facility designs that provide the design flexibility to accommodate as yet unimag- ined operational requirements to fulfill safety and security mea- sures, as well as to serve the needs of communities and their passengers. Aviation planners, architects, and engineers, as well as airport owners and airlines (referred herein collectively as aviation stakeholders), currently rely on level-of-service (LOS) standards that were developed in the early 1970s by the Inter- national Air Transport Association (IATA) to help them make important development decisions. Within the last decade, given the diversity of passengers and airline service products, aviation stakeholders continually speculate regarding the adequacy, validity, and robustness of these various standards. As a re- sult, the Transportation Research Board proposed Project 03-05, “Passenger Space Allocation Guidelines for Planning and Design of North American Airport Terminals,” for sponsorship by the Airport Cooperative Research Program. This report presents the findings of research regarding the basis of North American passengers’ perceptions of airport LOS and offers guidance for airport development. The in- tended audience includes airport and airline management and other aviation stakeholders. A Brief Historical Perspective of Air Passenger Level of Service In 1971, John J. Fruin published Pedestrian Planning and Design (2), which documents the results of his research on pedestrian behavior on urban sidewalks and in transit sta- tions. The guidance on pedestrian behavior includes both standing/waiting behavior (space requirements) and walking behavior (on walkways, stairs, and elevators). The guidance includes square-foot-per-pedestrian requirements as they stand or wait in areas such as railway platforms. The guidance is presented in a framework similar to traffic engineering studies that associate letter grades (A through F; where A is excellent and F is poor) with square feet per passenger. Initial efforts to develop formulaic design guidance on air passenger LOS can be traced to Transport Canada in 1977 (3). In their “Level of Service Requirements for Passenger Processing Areas in Airport Terminals,” Transport Canada developed LOS requirements for each passenger processing area in the airport terminal. Review of the paper indicates that the space ranges were based on data collected at a limited number of Canadian airports. In 1978, the Airport Associations Coordinating Council (AACC), the precursor to today’s Airports Council Inter- national (ACI), and IATA initiated a study on airport capacity that resulted in the first edition of the Guidelines for Airport Capacity/Demand Management (4), which contained a tabular presentation of LOS guidelines by airport processing area. This guidance was incorporated into IATA’s Airport Development Reference Manual (1) and remained unchanged through the 8th edition. In the 9th edition (published in 2004), new infor- mation regarding the formulation of the standards is provided; however, the LOS ranges remained largely unchanged. The view that passenger space drives passenger LOS percep- tion was questioned in 1991, when Seneviratne and Martel published a paper entitled “Variables Influencing Perfor- mance of Air Terminal Buildings” (5) that concluded, based on passenger intercept studies, that different variables drive passenger perceptions in each air terminal area. For example, “information” was found to be the most important variable affecting passenger perception of circulation areas; “availabil- ity of seats,” as distinct from the space to accommodate those seats, was found to be the most important variable affecting passenger perception of waiting areas; and “waiting time” was found to be the most important variable affecting passenger perception of terminal processing areas. In a finding that C H A P T E R 1 Background

foreshadowed this study’s findings, in every terminal ele- ment studied, less than 10% of passengers cited “availabil- ity of space” as a variable that influenced their perception of air terminal performance. In that paper, the authors’ ref- erence research conducted in 1975 by Brink and Maddison (6) regarding quantitative and qualitative factors that influence performance—specifically that these variables can be divided into physical and psychological comfort variables. Another intriguing finding by Seneviratne and Martel is that there is no significant difference between the ranking of business and leisure passengers. Several of this paper’s findings are supported by the Seneviratne and Martel paper’s research conclusions. In 1994, Seneviratne and Martel continued their research with “Criteria for Evaluating Quality of Service in Air Termi- nals” (7), premised on the conclusion that passenger density and the six-level scheme to rate terminal subsystem perfor- mance were inadequate. In 2001, Caves and Pickard (8) presented “The Satisfaction of Human Needs in Airport Passenger Terminals,” concluding that after the need for safety, the most important categories that passengers need in order to feel at ease are time and the elimination of unknowns. Their work highlights the impor- tance of good wayfinding to meeting both of these needs, again supported by this research. The project team also looked outside the aviation industry to find research on physical planning standards that influence patron perception of LOS. Much research exists that consid- ers service quality, but in airports most aspects of service qual- ity are controlled by airlines or federal agencies, not airports. However, the literature search identified one paper relevant to the hotel industry that discussed how physical planning standards influenced patron perception of LOS. In 1995, Martin related research in “An Importance/Performance Analysis of Service Providers’ Perception of Quality Service in the Hotel Industry” (9). The research references work done by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry in 1986 that found that service quality as perceived by customers involves five dimen- sions: tangibles (physical facilities, equipment, and appear- ance of personnel), responsiveness, assurance (knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey confidence), empathy (degree of caring), and reliability (promised ser- vice is performed dependably). Based on a questionnaire for management and employees, the work showed that although differences exist between management’s and employees’ per- ceptions of what is important and acceptable to customers, both groups failed to accurately perceive customers’ opin- ions regarding service. The paper notes that quality service is not simply doing things well, but rather that it is necessary to understand what is important to the customer and then do those things well. Research Approach Discovering What Passengers Really Think A critical aspect of the success of the project was to dis- cover what truly does influence a passenger’s perception of LOS. To help uncover the drivers for passenger perception, the TransSolutions team chose to use traditional quantitative measures associated with time and space (to attempt to quan- tify passengers’ perceptions of LOS), complemented by non- traditional qualitative measures to add insight to compiled data. Ethnographic research is also called in situ (situational) or in-context research. It is a methodology used to uncover and understand passenger behavior. The process uses methods employed by cultural anthropology to interactively observe passengers in actual situations and to understand—and later predict—passenger reactions. Ethnographic research reveals passenger attitudes, motivations, expectations, and psychology. It thereby offers a reality check in terms of understanding pas- sengers. The unique benefit of ethnographic research to this effort is the discovery process: uncovering passenger motiva- tions and concerns otherwise unknown. A full ethnographic research effort would involve selecting passengers before their trip day; accompanying them from their home or other starting point to the airport, through every stage of the process; and accompanying them onto the aircraft. The effort could also continue with accompanying the pas- sengers through their arrival processing at their destination airports until they exit the terminals. A person trained in ethnography will be able to draw out the necessary informa- tion without affecting the passengers’ behavior. Project constraints did not support a full ethnographic re- search effort. Therefore, in response to project constraints, to be less obtrusive with the passenger processes, and to syn- chronize collection of quantitative process data with qualitative perception data, the TransSolutions team conceived a hybrid approach, combining ethnographic techniques with passenger intercepts. Passengers were questioned in the observed facili- ties during the data collection periods in order to capture per- ceptions during the same time periods that quantitative data were being recorded. Research Objectives and Approach Evolve Research proceeded based on a project plan selected and approved by the ACRP Project Panel. However, as the proj- ect progressed, the initial research approach changed at two important junctures. The first consequential change involved the timing of the In- terim Report. As initially conceived, the study Interim Report was to be published upon conclusion of the literature search, 5

the airport planning survey, and preparation of the data collec- tion plan. However, given the timing of the contract award, this schedule would have resulted in airport performance data being collected during the slower winter travel season. The TransSolutions team requested and received a no-cost exten- sion to the study schedule to facilitate data collection during the summer—the typical period used as the basis for airport planning. This change also supported completion of a test data collection at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) during the busy spring-break travel period. Data collected dur- ing this period were analyzed and reported to the Project Panel as part of the Interim Report. Analysis of the test data collection led to the second conse- quential change in the research study. The test data collection was conducted at DFW Terminals C and D. These two termi- nals were selected because, although they both serve the same air carrier, the physical features of the two terminals are signifi- cantly different. Terminal C was built in 1973 and, regardless of expansion through the years, the corridors are narrow, the passenger waiting areas are confined, and the ceilings are low. In contrast, Terminal D opened in 2005 and has wide cor- ridors, spacious passenger waiting areas, and high ceilings. Theoretically, the contrast between these two terminals should provide a fertile opportunity to discern gradations in passen- ger perception of LOS based on space per passenger. Completion of the data analysis showed no difference between passengers’ perception of LOS based on differences in the quantity of space provided in the same processing area in each terminal. This finding contradicted the prevailing view that passengers’ perception of higher levels of service was based on less-dense concentrations of passengers (i.e., larger areas per passenger) in each processing area. As a result of this finding, the TransSolutions team, with the permission of the ACRP Project Panel, changed the data collection plan by reducing the total number of airports studied to provide a larger data collec- tion budget per airport. The objective was to ensure that sam- ple sizes of both quantitative (time and space observations) and qualitative (LOS perception observations and interviews) data would support conclusive study findings. The research continued with collecting data at six more airports. Sample airports had diversity in size, air carrier type, and facility configuration. The findings of the research, rec- ommendations for further study, and proposed guidelines for LOS planning are provided in subsequent chapters. 6