How to facilitate the movement of passengers by introducing baggage collection systems for travel from North Shields to Newcastle International Airport

Abstract

This paper reviews current systems that either transport baggage or have the potential to transport baggage, as well as proposed systems, before modelling some of them in a modal choice model to examine how effective they would be if implemented. It was hoped that the introduction of a baggage collection system would increase the number of passengers using public transport which would be good for the environment. The specific location of the study was Tyne and Wear and a journey from North Shields to Newcastle International Airport was chosen for the analysis. The system proposed is compared to an existing systems known as InPost and Virgin Bag Magic. It was found that for the average passenger in North Shields, a system based on the way InPost operates would offer the greatest utility. However, with the introduction of a new utility equation that could analyse mixed-mode travel, a baggage collection hub based in Newcastle upon Tyne city centre offered a more significant number of users provided that the cost of the system was either covered in the travel ticket or provided by the airport or airline free of charge. This dedicated baggage collection system would be much more expensive to introduce compared to the InPost system as the infrastructure to run the InPost system is already in place, however, the ridership of the newly proposed system would be much larger therefore it could potentially recoup the development costs.