If your airport is Heathrow, it can be straightforward to get there on public transport. At Heathrow there are locally and nationally-funded transport infrastructures like the London Underground and the Elizabeth line, as well as strong bus and coach provision. At Heathrow the challenge is making a choice between all of the different ways you can get there depending upon your travelling circumstances. For this reason, Heathrow have been investing in their journey planner and all of the data infrastructures that lie behind it, so that the traveller can make an informed choice. TransportAPI work in partnership with Heathrow to maintain and enhance this infrastructure through our Managed services, and the user experience for public transport information at the airport has been progressively enhanced. As a consequence Heathrow now report that their public transport modal share is at 45%.
If by contrast your airport is Bristol then your public transport options are currently focused on bus and coach by virtue of the airport’s geographic situation and the funding environment. TransportAPI will be delivering live bus departure information to the screens at the new £60m Bristol Airport Public Transport Interchange when it opens next month. This will help to drive further success such as the news that Bristol Airport’s FirstBus Airport Flyer service carried more than 1 million travellers in 2024, including 17% of staff travelling to work. There is a growing need to support and encourage public transport options to airports like Bristol with regional catchments as there are many travellers without access to cars, and the number of young people with driving licences continues to fall in the UK.
Airports are also being regulated to reduce their carbon emissions through the government’s Jet Zero Taskforce to help implement the national carbon budget, and over 20 UK airports have now signed up to the Airport Carbon Accreditation (ACA) initiative by Airports Council International. The ACA initiative offers 7 levels of accreditation for the three scopes of emissions viz. Scope 1- airport operations, Scope 2- electricity grid power, and Scope 3 emissions by partners serving the airport, which includes surface access by car and public transport. Edinburgh Airport reported in 2021 that 95% of its overall emissions were in the Scope 3 category, and this indicates how important it is to drive modal shift from car to public transport use to meet the objectives to which most British airports are committed by the ACA initiative.
Although all airports aim to reduce Scope 3 emissions and many have taken steps to improve public transport in their surface access strategies, it is still rare to find live travel information on websites and in airport apps. In a survey carried out this month of 30 British airports we found that only three have bus real-time information (RTI), and only 10 have journey planners on their websites/apps. Our experience is that airports can benefit from hosting their own journey planner to anchor public transport arrivals and departures at the right stops and entrances, rather than directing customers to the centre of the runway! In many cases airport websites direct customers to operator and council websites taking several clicks to reach static and sometimes stale information.
TransportAPI has deep experience of working with airports to deliver journey planning and bus/ coach/ train RTI that is good enough to drive behaviour change. We ensure that the information stays correct and up-to-date through our Managed services, which can integrate with website and app content management systems provided by companies such as Azinc. Get in touch with us to explore the addition of public transport information directly on your site and accelerate your modal shift and Scope 3 carbon emissions reduction.