DFW Airport
The Dallas Fort Worth International airport is one of the busiest airports in the world serving about 64 million passengers a year. With 6.8 million people in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metroplex, many have to drive to the airports arrival/departure terminals which can cause confusion to someone is not a frequent DFW driver. People often get confused when trying to navigate their way through the airport’s terminals because of the terminal’s infrastructure design.
As a Dallas native that is frequently at the DFW airport, whenever trying to determine which departure gate to park or get dropped off at always is a struggle. Upon entering the airport, you are met with signs directing you to which gate the respective airlines fly into. This portion of the design is good, however, when getting into the terminal drivers are met with a feeling of disarrangement. Trying to determine the gate number where the flight you are expected to go to is very unorganized. Drivers are expected to driver in circles around the parking lots, only being given three lanes, one for arrivals, one for departures, and a middle lane. Typically, each terminal is divided into 4 gate stopping points (arrival/departure) that extends above or below the parking lot, but the confusing part is deciding which gate to go to. If a driver is coming out of the parking lot or just entering the terminal, they are expected to get on the far left or far right side in about 100ft, through ongoing traffic. This task is extremely difficult, especially since the arrivals and departures do not always correspond. For example, in a few gates you can go to arrivals for gates 1–5 and then departures for gates 1- 6. This just causes confusion for drivers in the airport. Furthermore, with many shuttles and other confused drivers, trying to get through the traffic in such a short distance causes many drivers to have to loop around the entire terminal before being given the opportunity to access the gate they need.
The design of the terminals at the airport are efficient in the sense of making sure the there is a constant flow of traffic, and providing efficient on and off ramps, it’s just confusing. The circular design of the terminals allows for drivers to continue driving in a loop instead of having to drive out of the airport and back to the terminal. Engineers recognized the confusion caused by the design of infrastructure and felt this would help when drivers got confused or missed their ramp. It is possible that when designing the terminals engineers were faced constraints too. Though Dallas is a flat area known for having a lot of open space, the airport seems cramped and this would make sense for why the terminals are circular to save space with left exits. However, this confusion could be eliminated by removing the loop around the terminal and create direct access from the interstate going through the airport using right exits. By doing this, people would not drive in circles trying to figure out which gate to go to but would be able to exit accordingly like the typical exit on the interstate. This would increase efficiency and eliminate confusion on the road.
