Biking to Airports is nice

Jacob Ford
2024-05-28

Biking to Airports, it’s great!

For those of you who aren’t aware, Toronto has two airports: Pearson, a huge, international hub that is 25 minute express train from downtown; and a smaller, more regionally focused ‘City of Toronto’ airport called Billy Bishop. Billy-B, as no one I’m aware calls it, is located right off the waterfront in the middle of the city; you could probably hit the CN Tower with a 7 iron. It must be the most urban-located airport in North America, unless I’m missing some evil villain’s secret jet strip in Queens.

A major benefit of this type of locale for an airport is that it allows faithful customers to use multiple means of transit. I used to work in Transportation Planning in the Triangle area in North Carolina. The Raleigh-Durham (RDU) airport sits right in between, well, Raleigh and Durham (Chapel Hill you exist too, I didn’t forget). BUT, there is no easy transit (or bike lanes) from either city to the airport; even the bus lines are convoluted and push environmentally or budget minded customers to car-share or park-n-ride or whatever the hell a kiss-n-ride is. Not having transit lines extend to airport access for major cities is insane but also tremendously difficult to accomplish in the U.S. due to the way transit is funded and the lack of political will to make it happen at times, but also because of the way cities are designed.

So after we moved to Toronto, I had my eyes on the day I would finally fly out of Silly Billy Airport, as we live close enough that I could hop on a city bike, and cruise over! The ride over, in short, was glorious. The views from the Billy Bishop airport are also fantastic, the waiting area, for all three or so gates available, felt more like a nicer university than I went to library.

The trip over prompted some questions: is Billy Bishop the most accessible via bike compared to other major US and Canadian airports. My completely impartial and non-competitive hypothesis is that it offers access via bike to the greatest number of people, both in absolute and relative terms to the city’s population. To answer this, I started pulling isochrone (more on this below) and census data. For this analysis, I’m using mb_isochrone function from the mapboxapi package, very user friendly and effective. Their ‘profile’ methods of transportation include driving, walking, cycling, and driving in traffic. A transit map would require different packages, but would be a good follow up to this!

The Competitors

From the American Delegation:

From the Canadian Delegation:

Isochrone Madness

Transportation Modeling 101: Isochrones: a travel distance map, taking into account existing networks. Usually measured in time, it uses aggregated and average travel distance (sometimes by time of day, AM vs PM) to plot out how far one could travel from a given point. These ink-blot looking items on the below map represent a 60 minute isochrone from each of the major airports we consider. You may have to zoom in to see these. For example, if you’ve been to the Denver airport, you may have asked yourself: “why did they build this airport in Kansas?” Then the shape of the isochrone may not be entirely surprising, given the airport’s location. Alternatively, DCA looks a bit more intuitive, given it is amazingly close to downtown DC.

For the analysis below, we’ll consider isochrones at 30, 45, and 60 minute intervals, meaning we’ll look at how far on average one could bike from the airport in 30, 45, or 60 minutes.

What you’ll notice is that most airports are placed relatively far from the city they serve. This is sensible given the space these facilities require for safe operations and storage. The below graph shows the total area covered by each of the three isochrone sets. At first, it seems my hypothesis is ruined; not only is Silly Billy among the lowest in total area covered, but it’s not even better than Pearson (which doesn’t exactly make sense if you live here). Atlanta’s and DFA cover the most amount of area at the 60 minute mark, which may be true, but I’ve spent very little time at those airports and didn’t particularly notice a lot of bikers. The scaries are starting to set in for my hypothesis.

However, it does track that Denver’s airport is the lowest, given it is located approximately 15 light years from downtown Denver and likely does not have bike lanes to/fro that many people would be able to take.

Show me the People

Who cares about area coverage? Well you should have, but not anymore! Let’s translate those isochrones into how many people are covered within those areas. We’ll use public US and Canadian census data to overlay loaded tracts with populations, then do a simple geospatial overlay to translate how many people are within the isochrone. This will show:

  1. How many people are able to bike to airports in a given X minute interval
  2. Give a better comparison metric between airports that take into account the concentration and distribution of actual humans, instead of area.

The results are below: For the 60 minute definition, Silly Billy is not number 1… but it’s number 2! JFK leads the way, which fine, whatever, likely makes sense there are 4x as many people in NYC than Toronto. BUT! I will claim a modicum of vindication given over 500k people live within a 30 minute bike ride to Silly Billy, and over 1.5 million live within an hour bike ride.

However, under the 45 and 30 minute definitions, the Billy Bishop airport is the most accessible by bike in to the greatest number of people of all the airports considered. This suggests that a significant number of people live within that 45 max biking isochrone of Billy Bishop, representing the dense Toronto downtown core, but when compared to JFK, the 60 minute isochrone is able to pull in more people given the sheer size of NYC. It seems like for those of us who are not donning their speedo like cycling jerseys and biking up to an hour with luggage but are rather willing to bike up to 30-45 miinutes to to get to the airport, Silly Billy is the best option.

Conclusion

Biking to the airport is freeing, gets your body loose before you’re crammed into an aisle seat, is a carbon-free means of transit, is significantly cheaper than car-sharing or parking fees, and is overall awesome! If you ever get the chance to do it, do it!