Atlanta will soon revamp the airport’s South Domestic Terminal parking lot: CEG

The city of Atlanta, Georgia, is moving forward with a plan to redevelop aging parking lots at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport’s Domestic Terminal, with work beginning this spring, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported.

The airport is seeking Atlanta City Council approval for a contract with the Holder-Austin-Moody-Bryson joint venture group, based in College Park, Georgia, to build the terminal’s south parking deck across from Delta Air Lines checkpoint. – entry and baggage claim areas.

The initial $3 million contract is for pre-construction services for the South Bridge project, which is due for completion in 2026, but replacing the entire airport parking decks is expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, said noted the newspaper on March 3.

The renovation is the latest airport construction effort likely to cause detours and disruption for travelers to Hartsfield-Jackson. Airport officials are planning a communications campaign in the coming weeks to educate travelers on how they can navigate around the construction.

City documents indicate that the south parking lot is over 40 years old, and studies and inspections have determined that it needs to be replaced.

An initial one-year project starting in May will shore up the existing south bridge to last the next three to five years, according to the airport. Subsequently, a similar overhaul will be carried out on the North Bridge. Shoring the bridges will allow them to continue to be partially used before they are eventually demolished in stages.

“We had to do this in phases to allow continued access to airport parking,” Michael Smith, Hartsfield-Jackson’s senior assistant general manager, told the Journal-Constitution.

The airport will eventually embark on a massive, multi-year project to demolish the north and south parking decks and replace them – part of the airport’s $6 billion expansion and modernization plan to prepare future growth in passenger traffic. The airport has built two new remote parking bridges – the ATL Select parking shuttle lot at 1800 Sullivan Road and the ATL West Bridge, both connected to the domestic terminal via free SkyTrain service – to expand and replace parking options. parking lot while the north and south bridges are under construction.

However, the remote grounds are not as convenient for travelers as the North and South Daily and Hourly Bridges which are a short walk from the terminal.

Parking, a key source of airport revenue

Hartsfield-Jackson dithered on building the parking lot, the Atlanta news source said, due to changes in consumer habits. The original plan was to replace the old bridges with new ones that would double the size from four tiers to eight and come with an estimated price tag of $550 million to $750 million in 2014 dollars.

With the growing popularity of Uber and Lyft car services among passengers, the demand for airport parking has decreased, reducing one of the establishment’s main sources of revenue.

The prospect of self-driving cars has raised the possibility that parking demand could decline further in the coming years. The result of this led to the project being delayed and scaled back, with airport officials saying they wanted to replace the old structures with new bridges of the same size. And, in February 2020, even before the pandemic caused a sharp drop in air travel, then-airport manager John Selden told the Journal-Constitution that Hartsfield’s parking revenue- Jackson had fallen even more and that the airport would rethink parking. bridge reconstruction plan, including the possibility of renovating the current bridges to extend their use.

All told, Balram Bheodari, the current Atlanta airport manager, decided to execute the latest plan to consolidate the existing parking decks and rebuild them, despite competition from alternatives.

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