TOWARDS SEAMLESS PASSENGER TRANSPORT: PERFORMANCE OF INTERMODAL APPROACHES

Abstract

The growing demand for mobility in general and for air transport in particular puts increasing pressure on today’s transportation providers. Supplying sufficient capacity, hence alleviating potential congestion of the entire system, and ensuring seamless and efficient operation of the overall transport system are two of the main challenges for the future. The integration of transport modes along the entire passenger journey can help to streamline the current system and, thus, increase existing capacities as well as passenger comfort level. Today, there are already some approaches in place that interlink different transport modes by providing single ticketing, or specially dedicated interchange platforms. Four such intermodal transport models are assessed within this paper. For this purpose, a set of key performance indicators is developed and applied to evaluate the intermodal transport performance of each concept. Aspects such as journey time and costs as well as baggage through-handling are considered and data for each concept acquired. Based on the evaluation, the AIRail concept is ranked highest since it best meets the criteria of a seamless passenger journey. However, the results show that there is potential for improvement within each investigated concept.