How the Busiest Airports Are Designed to Control Traveler Flow | WSJ Pro Perfected
How the Busiest Airports Are Designed to Control Traveler Flow | WSJ Pro Perfected
Record travel this holiday season means more delays and cancellations, but a well-designed airport can ease the flow of millions. Seamless passenger flow reduces confusion, makes airports more money and helps prevent delays. But how can check-in, going through security and dealing with TSA and terminal configuration be best optimized?
WSJ asked an architect to break down how airports can be built to better manage crowds.
Chapters:
0:00 Impact of increased travel
0:40 Landside: checking in
2:37 Going through security
4:38 Airside
5:38 Terminal configuration
7:04 Arrival areas
Pro Perfected
Experts in engineering and design break down a ubiquitous problem, examining how the world is built and what can make it better.
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I have to say I do like the more open retail like spaces in an airport. It calms me because It feels more like a mall Im casually strolling through over the extremely long anxiety inducing airport corridors.
Newark’s newest terminal A appears to follow most (if not all) of his design considerations. It makes a lot more sense to me now.
I’ll pay a bit more attention next time i go through there.
I can see all these design choices in New Delhi airport
This dude is smart
Interesting thoughtfulness.
I personally enjoy spending an hour or two just looking for a place to sit at any bar or restaurant in an airport. It really adds to the awesome experience of commercial flying.
Best airports I’ve been to are definitely Changi and Dubai.
To me it just seems like airports are turning into the new malls 😂
Price gauging is crazy at airports…$6 dollars for a bottle of water 😂
I hadn’t flown in over 10 years, and this year (2024) when I flew, all of the U.S. domestic airports that I went through (SFO, ORD, DEN, BWI) were a lot more delightful than the what I remembered from my other past airport experiences. Not perfect, but overall the experiences just felt better. Glad to see this video show the thought processes of what’s going into the remodels of these places.
I wish someone would have called this guy for the new design of Salt Lake City. Enter in baggage claim, up to check-in and back down to security. Flow off and on escalators and speed walks cross others. Pisses me off everytime I step in the place. What a design failure.
KYC… TSA… all useless systems created by the deep state to torture people.
I don’t buy it. He gave away his trickster moment when he laughed and explained it was all about shopping.
Caring about retail revenue and trying to entice people into buying things is gross
They definitely succeeded in the case of the new LaGuardia. It’s absolutely beautiful, especially considering how it used to be! Its one of my favorites to travel thru now!!
It’s not said outright, but the commercialisation of the space is also working against an efficient idea of travel. Walking through perfume stinking duty free zones is not a "traveller’s delight", especially if your destined walk is prolonged considerably.
The incredibly terrible new Berlin airport works as an antithesis to this video. Brutalist straight concrete slabs that invite strong headwinds and very dark, impersonal spaces, having to shift between buildings by going outside when arriving from abroad, and an otherwise bafflingly confusing layout getting to public transport makes this airport seem extremely random. I’ve flown into or changed planes in Berlin probably a dozen times and I vividly hate this airport every single time.
Seems like this all boils down to psy ops to get flyers to spend more at airport retail.
Really awesome. I would love if I could redesign our hospital and department. Utilize our medical knowledge and integrate not only the patient satisfaction and calming components to architecture
This gentleman needs to fix Chicago O’Hare (ORD) and the worst airport I know throughout the world is Toronto Pearson (YYZ) because of total chaos incompetency, a disgrace to Canada!
The best way to make people spend in an airport is to make it affordable, either special sizes, editions or prices.
If I can buy 200g of Haribo gummi bears for €1.5 in the supermarket outside the airport, why would I buy the same identical bag for €6 inside the terminal.
Everything at airports are designed to be cash-grabs and not for efficiency, sadly.
Relying on people’s intuition is hilarious. Airports are literal purgatory.
There’s no better way to make travelers HATE an airport than to force them to walk through a maze of rip-off retail. There are airports about which the ONLY thing I remember is that they forced me to walk farther than necessary, through shops. I will pay more for a ticket to avoid transferring through those airports.
Is this architect wearing a watch on each wrist?!😆
Most International major Airports use those very similar layouts. When I was at Lisbon Portugals airport I noticed these layouts shown in this video.
Explain how Aluminum Planes can slice through a concrete and steel Building?
Explain how ‘Office Fires’ can collapse a building into Dust ?
I firmly believe no one needs to be inside an airport without a valid same day ticket. Put the security outside the checkin and offer no access until everyone passes through security. Then they can check in and proceed.
Kansas City’s new airport took KMCI from worst to first.
I HATE being constantly manipulated to walk around shops, and forced to wait in busy areas of shops by manufactured delays in reporting gate numbers. This increases stress. It is clear, even from this video, that the goal is not primarily to get people onto planes, it’s to get them to shop more. It’s vulgar.
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Yes! Being able to see ahead is so much better
I found the airports in the US to be so much more complex and confusing than airports in the other countries. I have travelled through Atlanta and it’s just bad.
While a very informative Video, it was also, in my mind very PLANE
…. I’ll see myself out now
Admittedly, Manila Airports aren’t the best… but it follows these design guidelines.
I think we need to start thinking about turning airports inside out. By that I mean instead of funneling everybody to a congested central point in the middle of the airport, move the passenger operations to the perimeter of the airport. Think about how many planes you could park all around the outer edge of an airport. It could almost be like a pass-thru loading dock from the old days. A truck pulled up on one side, a plane pulled up on the other, and a fork lift moved the freight directly from one to the other. With passengers, you’d reduce each loading area to the number of people one plane can hold. Rather than the tens of thousands at a central point that have to sort themselves out among the myriad of flights parked behind the central terminals. It would also get rid of the car traffic bottleneck every airport experiences at it’s main entrance.
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just do whatever Changi does
This expert is already reducing my stress 😅
so this is the guy to blame for why I have to walk through endless duty free shops at airports.. when all I want to do is get home
ORD is the only airport I’ve been in that made me pull up a map on my phone to get to my gate. Really irked me.
Airport experience has a huge impact on travel
I adore airports like schiphol in Amsterdam or or the one in Singapore making me actually looking forward to go there
Meanwhile I try and avoid airports like Manchester or Luton like the plague
This was so interesting! Thank you
Signages in Honkong International airport are quite confusing. And the airport layout are not helping either.
Korean shipbuilding and automobiles ‘cheered’ for the King dollar;
This strangely reminds me ALOT of video game design. Very interesting!
We agree. We love the layout of LaGuardia airport arrival area coming from Toronto in July 2024. It was really memorable.
Intuitive Wayfinding
The international arrivals at SEA-TAC is really memorable and grand. Great video!
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If you give a mouse a check in time
Whoever built US airports even in 2024, need to learn from Asian airports. So go back to school and take a decade off and learn from Asian airports. Nothing beats Asisn airports.