Shuttle bus to rental car - why is this the way it is, at ATL Atlanta?

July 30, 2019 2:35 PM

When you fly international into ATL, you have to wait outside for a shuttle bus (might be 10 min wait, might be >30min wait like it was for me today). Once on the un-air-conditioned bus, you drive about 15 minutes to the rental car center. It's rough. Who came up with this set-up? Was there a better plan (easier, faster etc) that was just not feasible?

I can't help but wonder, why isn't there a tram for this and why is the rental car place so far from the airport?

Help me come to understand the history behind this painful set-up, which seems worse than other large airports (I know ATL does crazy volume). Bonus question - is this likely to improve in the future?

posted by walkinginsunshine to Travel & Transportation around Atlanta, GA (19 answers total)

I do not have information about the ATL airport specifically, but in general it's probably some combination of:

Trams/rail lines/similar transportation options that use dedicated infrastructure (rails, lines, etc) are significantly more expensive to build than just using a bus on existing roadways. The airport and rental car companies don't have an incentive to pony up for $$$ infrastructure to make transportation easier between the airport and the rental center, because they know you don't have many other options.

The Atlanta Port Authority (or whoever owns the airport) probably owns most/all the buildable land close to the airport. Airports usually try to acquire more property than they know they will need, so there is room to expand. Again, they want to reserve the land close to the airport for uses that the airport needs close by. The fact that it inconveniences customers isn't really their concern-- you're still going to fly, and you're still going to need a rental car.

It's possible that ride-share and (maybe) autonomous vehicles will cause some changes over time, but there is some evidence that those technologies make traffic congestion worse (and undermine transit use, which will mean that costlier options like trams will become even less likely to be funded).
posted by Kpele at 2:47 PM on July 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Baltimore has an air conditioned bus from the airport to the rental car center. It is certainly feasible. The cost of the bus and the rental facility are included in the itemized list of extra charges for the car. The pickup site at the airport is under cover and out of the rain, though not the winter winds.
posted by Midnight Skulker at 2:48 PM on July 30, 2019

You can see this on Google Maps: the Atlanta airport is linear.

Terminals—A—B—C—D—E—Intl

International used to just come to E; F seems new. There are runways north and south of all the concourses, for the entire length. There are parking lots, which are full, taking up all the space to the west between the terminal building and interstate 85.

I’m actually pretty impressed the international terminal at the far end gets its own parking lot and rental car shuttle. I would have assumed you would have to take the tram all the way back to the terminal building.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 2:54 PM on July 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

Land immediately near the terminal is valuable, and there's previously more money to be made dedicating that to other uses. Plus, parking is incredibly land use-intensive. As an essentially captive audience, there's no incentive to have the rental cars closer. What are your other options?
posted by backseatpilot at 3:01 PM on July 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

LAX is getting a "people mover" to remove the need to get on a rental care shuttle, and it is going to cost $4.9B.

While this new tram (not sure why it's specially called a "people mover") isn't just for the rental cars (you'll be able to park, pickup/check your bags, go through security/customs, etc.), it just comes down to the fact that a few buses and the people to drive them are much much cheaper than building a piece of light rail.
posted by sideshow at 3:23 PM on July 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

I find there are few airports that have rental car onsite anymore. Most of these are getting pushed further away off-site into their own "rental car center".

It's unclear to me what part of this that you find to be painful. Is it the wait? The lack of air-conditioning? The distance?

The wait time and lack of a/c are disappointing. Most rental car shuttles I've come across will pull up pretty much as soon as the previous one leaves for its destination. You may sit on it for maybe 10 minutes before they take off.
posted by hydra77 at 3:24 PM on July 30, 2019

Huffy Puffy has it right. ATL is made up of a series of midfield concourses connected by an underground shuttle. Terminal A has a dedicated people mover to the consolidated rental car center (CONRAC). When it was built the plan was to take the shuttle to terminal A and then switch to the people mover. As the other terminals were all midfield no buses were possible. The new international terminal is at the other end of the airport and has ‘landside’ access, so they added a bus as a second way to get to the CONRAC that is probably faster than taking a shuttle all the way across the airport. Adding a second people mover was likely deemed prohibitively expensive, particularly against traffic volumes, as the route is about twice as far as it was from Terminal A. I have no idea why they chose not to air condition the buses.

The good news is that if you want to maximize your AC time I believe you can take the shuttle from the International Terminal back to Terminal A and transfer to the people mover, just like the domestic passengers do, though I’ve never done this.

TL;DR it’s a big airport, the CONRAC is far away from that side of the site and was built before the international terminal
posted by q*ben at 3:28 PM on July 30, 2019 [6 favorites]

NB: People movers are generally “free”, removing resistance to their use. Other terms imply cost and hassle.
posted by tilde at 4:03 PM on July 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think the general pattern is that as airports expand they end up pushing the ancillary services farther away. Bus shuttles have small upfront costs compared with "people movers," so they are the easy choice. I recall the Phoenix airport as being particularly bad.

Be careful what you wish for, though. The alternative is to put the terminals farther apart and then you end up with Heathrow where some connections are a mad dash between remote terminals.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:54 PM on July 30, 2019

Keep in mind, too that rental car centers take up a huge amount of space. Even if it's a multi-story garage, a medium sized airport has *thousands* of cars over all the rental agencies. Most of the cars have a single passenger, and all those arrivals...

What percent of passengers use a rental car? There's everyone coming in on transit, taxis, people who live in town and are flying out...the best way to address both rentals and everyone else is to "single stream" the connection to ticketing and security (and from baggage) by making the rental-car people stream use the same connection as everyone else - surface transport.
posted by notsnot at 5:47 PM on July 30, 2019

Best answer: A lot of posters don't quite get it. Big airports (including ATL) have LOTS of parking immediately adjacent to the terminals that used to host to car rental companies, and the reason why they don't anymore is simple math: the airport can charge $30-$50+ a day per spot to travelers for short-term parking, whereas rental car companies can only afford to pay far less than that per day, because considering utilization rates and rental rates, they aren't averaging more than $50 or $60 in gross revenue per day per required parking spots. This is especially true at places where the rental car demand is biased to business travelers (one and two day rentals) vs. tourists (much longer rentals, enabling the rental car companies to have a lower ratio of parking spots to revenue).

As for a 30 minute wait for an un-air-conditioned bus, no explanation or excuses here.
posted by MattD at 6:26 PM on July 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Because every detail of the ATL airport, and especially the parking areas, were designed by a crack team of lawless malevolent chimpanzees with the specific intent of making our lives a living hell on earth. Who in the ever-loving shitcakes deliberately designs a parking garage where pedestrians have to cross across the path of a car spiraling down the exit ramp?! There are no words.

Chickens with ink-coated feet walking randomly on a large sheet of graph paper could have produced a superior product, of that I am most certain.

Sincerely,
Tragically frequent ATL flier
posted by SinAesthetic at 6:29 PM on July 30, 2019 [14 favorites]

Really? This shuttle bus has no AC? Surely that was just one, busted earlier that day, unfortunate for the OP. I can't believe there could be any un-air-conditioned ground transportation at 21st Century Hartsfield.
posted by Rash at 9:34 PM on July 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

Someone smarter than me could probably go through the Atlanta Airport company’s annual report, budgets etc and find the answer

But I would note that as MattD speculated - (from pg. 23 of the 2018 annual report) revenue from car rental operations is $40m. Revenue from parking is over 3x that at $138m. And the report notes that parking revenue increased by $15.7 million in 2018 due to a parking rate increase that was effective August 2017. Which is a huge increase with no real additional investment required.

Interestingly going back to 2013 reports, rental car operation revenue has increased by about 33% till now and parking revenue has only increased by 10%. Revenue doesn’t equal profitability though. I’m guessing building the consolidated rental car center for $640m in 2009 (about $740m today) has a fairly long pay back period if your revenue is only $40m annually, and makes that facility not nearly as profitable as near terminal parking.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 10:56 PM on July 30, 2019

Hmmm - couldn’t find a source of data but I’d speculate as well that the % of passengers not in transit (e.g. ATL is their actual destination or source) maybe lower at Atlanta than other airports - even maybe other hubs and that may be a driver on the placement of the facility as well. But would be interesting to compare % versus other hubs like PHX, CLT, DEN, IAH, JFK, DFW etc. Many of the hubs can have fairly painful rides to their consolidated rental car facilities (PHX giving you some serious side eye here....).

Stopping now before I end up back on the airliners.net or flyertalk.com forums and can’t escape for months.....(both sites would spin up massive multi-week threads on this topic if you really wanted to go deep on it I’m sure)
posted by inflatablekiwi at 11:24 PM on July 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Back in my traveling days, seemed like rental car lots really started moving offsite after 9/11. Could be a coincidence though as obviously the onsite lots are valuable property.
posted by LoveHam at 3:58 AM on July 31, 2019

SinAesthetic, true story: I have designed an airport parking garage. We based the design around “feed from the back” speed ramps that segregated auto and pedestrian traffic. We had to spend weeks justifying this decision, even though it was safer, cheaper, and more efficient, because it wasn’t “what was done” at other airports (eg, ATL, LAX), which all have helical ramps at the front aisle. It’s marginally more simple of a traffic path, so I’m chalking this up to civil engineers biased towards the car over the pedestrian. But it’s also just blindly copying what has been done over actually considering a design.
posted by q*ben at 6:13 AM on July 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

I travel frequently to ATL along with colleagues that fly in internationally and the bus-to-rental-cars nonsense is the stuff of legend. We all hate it with a passion and have hated it for a decade, during which a phantom "people mover" was promised and has yet to materialize.

Colleagues have missed international flights home because it can take almost 2 hours to get from the car rental to the damn terminal if the buses mysteriously stop coming round. Which they do. Routinely.

Short answer: it costs money to build an automated connecting mode of transportation and ATL is enough of a hub/destination that it doesn't matter that the current system sucks ass, people will fly in anyway so they will drag it on as long as they can.
posted by lydhre at 11:59 AM on July 31, 2019

I think the FLL newer garage is feed from the back (not sure about the older one).

Never flown into ATL, though through it a lot.

The other reason behind “people mover” nomenclature, I suspect, is to segregate it from transportation options of “train to city” and “bus to city”. MIA now has an intermodal center you get to by people mover that gets you to County busses, Tri-Rail heavy rail, MetroRail raised light rail, and car rentals.
posted by tilde at 12:52 PM on July 31, 2019