INTERMODALISM
Chung-Kyung Sohn, assistant manager of transportation and service management at the airport. That rail services prove popular with international passengers is important given Incheon’s stated goal of becoming a hub for Northeast Asia. At the moment, however, the car remains king at Incheon. The airport calculates that 48% of passengers arrive and depart by a private car or taxi. Buses are another very popular way of travelling to the airport and 35 bus companies operate 128 services to destinations such as Seoul, Busan and outlying regions. Road transport will probably not be seriously challenged by rail until another South Korean rail operator, Korail, begins operating fast Koea Train Express (KTX) trains along the AREX route from 2013, which will cut journey times to Seoul to approximately 36 minutes. Given the high car and bus use at Incheon, parking facilities are important and 3% of Incheon Airport’s revenue comes from parking fees. Two outsourcing companies operate parking lots on behalf of the gateway, but despite that, parking fees are much lower than other airports in Northeast Asia. The reason for this is that as a public company, Koreans expect Incheon to offer a high quality, but also a cheap service, says Charles Kim, the airport’s senior manager for transportation marketing and services. A challenge, he believes Incheon is meeting. “People have high expectations and this has meant constantly increasing the quality of the parking services we provide; a key challenge is to help international passengers find the transport links they are looking for and we employ plenty of staff to help point them in the right direction,” says Kim. An example of efforts to improve its service quality can be found at an underground parking lot within the transportation centre; here Incheon Airport has had the opportunity to apply some innovative technologies to ensure customers never lose track of where they parked their cars.
The lot operates a lights-based parking guidance system; free bays are lit by a green light, which turns red when the bay is occupied.
While this is a system employed at a number of airports, Incheon has added a unique feature – a video car finder system, which takes a snap shot of the bay a customer’s car is in, allowing them to easily locate it once they scan their ticket.
Incheon might be getting ever better connections to Seoul and other locations but what about the transport links at the airport itself?
There are a number of free shuttle bus services
offering transfers between the passenger terminal, the airport’s hotels and its office facilities, but work is currently underway to link these and future sites via a magnetic levitation monorail system.
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Funded by the South Korean Government (69%), Incheon Airport (25%) and Incheon City (6%), and built at a cost of $324 million, the new Maglev train line will run from the transportation centre to the International Business Centre (IBC I) and then on to the planned Fashion Island and Water Park developments. Work on the supporting infrastructure has already begun and the 6.1km monorail should be operational by 2013.
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