Solving Airport Congestion through Curb Pricing

No one likes sitting in traffic, especially when you have a flight to catch.

With increased airport visitors and continued use of personal cars in cities across the country, major airports are grappling with congested roadways. Much like city streets and highways, congestion at airports can degrade the passenger experience by making them late for flights and compounding the already stressful conditions related to travel.

Lyft has been a leader in developing and deploying innovative technology solutions that reduce congestion and enhance the user experience at airports. These solutions include:

Lyft’s Rematch feature.

• Rematch: Enables drivers to receive new airport ride requests as soon as they drop off their rider at the terminal. Rematch allows one rideshare vehicle to do the work of two, which reduces the total number of vehicles operating in the terminal. After implementing Rematch at Seattle-Tacoma (SEA) International Airport, the number of “deadhead” trips decreased by 48%, passenger waiting time was reduced by 37%, 30k fewer miles were driven annually, and GHG emissions were reduced by 250 metric tons of carbon. Lyft recently won an environmental excellence award for this effort.
• Predispatch: An algorithm that anticipates rider demand at airports and matches drivers to riders en route. Predispatch enhances the airport experience by reducing passenger wait times at the curb and driver wait times in airport staging lots.

Lyft continues to drive innovation and efficiency at airports with new products and operational strategies.

Lyft’s holistic approach to efficiency at airports.

• Staging lot optimization: Most drivers doing airport pick-ups are dispatched from an airport staging lot. Increasing the size of the lot and moving it closer to the terminals reduces wait times and impacts on surrounding neighborhoods.
• Increased Shared rides: Increasing the number of parties in each rideshare vehicle reduces the number of cars in the terminal.
• Introducing Transit: Riders in cities across the country can see transit information right in the Lyft app, enabling them to choose public transportation as their way of getting to the airport if that works best.
• Enhanced wayfinding: Improving wayfinding to and from rideshare pick-up and drop-off locations improves the user experience in airports.
• Implement Fast Matching: Riders and drivers are matched instantly at the terminal curb using a code in the Lyft app. This allows riders and drivers to match seamlessly, which improves curb throughput and reduces cancellations and terminal congestion.
• Implement Curb Pricing: Pricing programs — often referred to as congestion pricing, congestion charging, or road tolling — charge a fee to vehicles entering congested areas. Pricing has been used to mitigate congestion in cities around the world — and Lyft is a proponent of universal congestion pricing programs. At airports, charging more for premium curb space could help spread traffic across various terminal curbs and reduce congestion for all users.

However, the use of pricing at airports is very limited. An opportunity now exists to begin testing pricing access to the most premium curb space at airports with high demand, significant congestion, and limited means to expand their roadway infrastructure. Airports are excellent laboratories to test new transportation technologies and strategies. They struggle with many of the same issues impacting cities, but they are largely self-contained and control their roadway infrastructure. With all of these solutions, we believe there is an opportunity to help reduce congestion at airports through implementing comprehensive curb pricing.

The Problem

While airport congestion is a result of a number of factors, soaring passenger growth, personal vehicles, and underinvestment in roadway and curbside capacity are the primary contributing factors.

Between 2015 and 2018, airport passenger volumes have increased 15% at San Francisco (SFO), 17% at Los Angeles (LAX), and 22% at Boston Logan (BOS). And while airports continue adding gates to accommodate additional flights and upgrading terminals and amenities to improve the passenger experience, investment in roadway or terminal curb capacity has been severely lacking over the past two decades.

Airport officials are looking for solutions, and we are eager to collaborate on finding the best ones. With rideshare, many have been able to rely on Lyft and services like it to share rides to the airport, leave their car at home, and choose more sustainable options. But at the same time, many airports have tried to grapple with congestion by leveraging underutilized parking facilities or building new facilities and relocating rideshare operations there. Unfortunately, this only focuses on one mode of transportation and loses sight of the big picture.

Moving ridesharing away from the terminal curb to a remote location will mostly lead travelers to shift to another ground transportation mode with more convenient access, such as a curbside drop-off or pick-up by friends or family, or a taxi, limousine, or on-demand shuttle. If rides by friends and family simply replace rideshare trips at the curb, then terminal congestion remains the same. This result would offset many airports’ stated goals of increasing use of transit and high occupancy vehicles.

In addition, relocating rideshare makes it difficult to effectively deploy Rematch and other innovative solutions. Rematch works best when rideshare drop-offs and pick-ups are located on the same level.

So what’s the solution? For many airports, curb pricing would allow for premium access to the terminal curbside and efficiently manage terminal congestion — generating additional revenue for the airport and providing the most equitable solution across ground transportation modes. Here’s how it works.

Curb Pricing at Airports

We believe curb pricing can be a useful strategy for managing traffic congestion and the demand for premium curb space at airports. Many airports already charge ground transportation providers trip fees to operate on airport property. Trip fees may be charged to providers for each drop-off and/or pick-up that occurs at an airport. But the key to this working is having variable pricing, based on how close to the airport curb you want to be picked up.

As a meaningful first step, airports could focus curb pricing on commercial ground transportation providers. Airports could charge higher fees for more convenient pick-up locations at the terminal curb and lower fees for less convenient locations and amenities at remote garages or surface lots. Airports can set these fees at levels that achieve the desired traffic balance between the curb and garage and meet their overall operations targets. Travelers who are time sensitive and less cost-conscious would likely opt for a more convenient curbside pickup with a higher fee, while someone else, like a leisure traveler or travelers looking for a more affordable option would likely opt for a garage and the longer walk associated with this location. It’s important to note, in order for this structure to work effectively, there needs to be consistency with fees, location of operations and amenities across ground transportation providers.

The figure below shows how an airport could implement curb pricing to manage access to premium and economy pick-up/drop-off zones. In this example, all pick-ups and drop-offs occur on the same level to enable the use of other technologies such as Rematch. Passengers would need to weigh the trade-offs between the higher cost but greater convenience and shorter walk times.

Proposed curb design and pricing scheme at SFO.

As an example, the curb pricing program could include:

• $10 fee for all drop-offs and pick-ups in the “premium curbside zone”, charged to standard / premium rideshare vehicles, taxis, limos, and other commercial ground transportation providers.
• $1 fee for all drop-offs and pick-ups in the “economy garage zone”, charged to standard / premium / shared rideshare vehicles, taxis, limos, and other commercial ground transportation providers.
• Private vehicles would use the innermost curb for drop-offs and pick-ups. But the infrastructure would be in place to charge all vehicles at a later time.

While commercial vehicles would be a reasonable starting point, airports should extend these fees to include all vehicle trips doing a pick-up or drop-off at the airport — including trips made by personal vehicles, which is the primary cause of congestion at an airport. Airports could also allow the fee levels to vary dynamically with terminal traffic conditions. Technology exists today to efficiently charge everyone entering airport property: automated license plate readers (ALPR), toll tag transponders, or smartphone apps. The same pricing mechanisms that charge higher prices for access to premium curbside space and lower fees for parking garages or other remote areas could be charged to all users who access the airport.

San Francisco International Airport (SFO) Pilot

SFO launched a limited curb pricing pilot in March 2019 to test if a $3 discount would be effective at diverting rideshare pick-ups to Level 5 of the parking garage. Pick-ups at the terminal curb were charged a $5 fee, while pick-ups on L5 were charged a $2 fee. SFO’s goal was to divert approximately 45% of all rideshare trips from the curb to the garage. SFO estimated this was the number of rideshare trips that needed to divert to improve congestion along the terminal curbs. Shared rides, which were relocated to L5 last summer, represented roughly 14% of trips at the start of the pilot. Therefore, the pilot needed to show it could shift another 30% of standard rideshare trips. At the end of the pilot, the $3 discount ultimately diverted almost 10% of standard rideshare trips in the first month before tapering off.

While the pilot did not achieve SFO’s desired target, it did show that a modest $3 discount can incentivize 10% of rideshare trips to shift to a less congested pick-up location. A larger discount promoted over a longer time period would yield higher diversion rates. For SFO, charging $10 or more for premium curbside pick-up and $2 for the garage may create enough of an incentive to divert 45% or more of rideshare trips to the garage. Unfortunately, SFO stopped the pilot after just three months and moved all rideshare pickup operations to L5, which has created additional problems. Now is the opportunity to push curb pricing programs further and test the benefits of larger discounts.

Looking Ahead

Lyft partners closely with airports to efficiently plan and operate pick-up and drop-off zones on airport property. We propose deepening these relationships and launching additional measures to tackle congestion such as Fast Matching and curb pricing. A path forward includes:

1. Implement Rematch and Predispatch, or optimize their deployment if already in use
2. Optimize staging lot location and design
3. Implement a Fast Matching pilot and measure its effectiveness
4. Establish curb pricing pilot objectives
5. Identify the study area locations that will be priced and the technology infrastructure required for collecting road charges
6. Develop pricing scenarios
7. Collaborate on performance metrics and reporting
8. Plan for the expansion of curb pricing
9. Launch a curb pricing pilot.

Congestion at airports has a negative impact on everyone — and with airport travelers expected to increase in the coming years — we need holistic, effective solutions now. We acknowledge that tackling the congestion problem will be a major challenge, but one in which we are excited to partner with airport officials to take on through strategic and collaborative planning and technology solutions. We’re here to help.