Effectiveness Measures for Airport Departure Curbs

In airport curb design, one of the most difficult problems is to measure quantitatively, the effectiveness of the curb in front of the terminal building. A methodology has been developed which measures the performance of the departures curb only. The method consists of a curb traffic distribution model in the form of a negative exponential function. Output from this model acts as input to two measures of effectiveness: (1)Walking disutility; and (2)curb utilization. The model was calibrated and tested with data from Toronto and Montreal. The methodology proved to be very versatile and was applied to evaluating the effectiveness of an existing curb, measuring the interaction of terminal layout and curb performance, estimation of critical future traffic loading, and aiding in the design of new airport curbsides.