Intermodality and passenger transport

International audienceThis paper originates from a study performed for Eurocontrol in 2004, with a view to investigate the role of intermodality in relation to the airport of the future: "The airport of the future : Central link of intermodal transport?". In a broad sense, intermodal transport can be viewed as the transport of goods and passengers by the use of several coordinated transport modes. In the first section of this paper, we study the different forms of intermodality and define more precisely what are the forms relevant to (intermodality with) air travel. We also address the issue of financing intermodal infrastructure, and of incentives for signing agreements on the part of operators. We turn next to the issue of the future of intermodality. The main difficulty appearing when analyzing intermodality lies in the large number of factors impacting its development and in their complex mutual influences. Determining how intermodality could develop requires to decompose the analysis in several steps. In part two, we identify factors directly or indirectly influencing the development of airport intermodality and perform a qualitative analysis showing the factors' complex relationships. This analysis will then be used in part three for building and analyzing different scenarios of intermodality evolution at airport. Finally, in part four, those scenarios will be applied to Portugal and France, which constitute today polar cases of transport network development in Europe