Most airport identifiers are forgettable. Some are iconic, like the neon creation that that trumpets LAX in SoCal colors, the winged Spirit of Flight sculpture that graces the entrance to Dallas Love Field, or Atlanta’s towering clock that stands in the airport atrium. Now, the entrance to Seattle/Tacoma International has a new landmark, one evocative of the e-enabled, high-tech nature of Seattle itself.
It’s a clock tower, and it’s in the median of the north roadway entrance. It’s fitted with stainless steel fins, once of which houses an LED clock display. The rakish fixture incorporates green crystalline photovoltaic panels into the fins. Those panels power LED lights inside the tower, lights that change color with the temperature. You know it’s cold when the tower’s blue, green when things are temperate, and yellow when its hot. Intuitive.
Like the setting of Seattle itself, this assembly isn’t just sitting out there divorced from its surroundings. There are flowering vines and evergreen shrubs around, and they too are illuminated by LEDs.
That’s the entrance. If you’re driving out of the airport here’s artwork with alternating green and blue LEDs.
It’s stuff like this that cuts through the tedious travail of air travel and makes it magic, that reminds us we’re about to buckle ourselves into aluminum tube and be hurled into the heavens. Sure, airports are public utilities, but – at their best – they can also be transformative.
If Seattle/Tacoma International is aesthetically ascendant these days, it’s also taking care of more mundane matters. Sea-Tac’s consolidated Rental Car Facility is between 80 and 85 percent complete.
The five-floor, $419-million affair is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2012. Sea-Tac says it will be able to take care of some 12,000 to 14,000 rental cars on peak days. Here’s essentially what will happen when the change clicks in: instead of being handled in the airport’s parking garage, car rentals will be moved to a remote location. Shuttle busses will transport you from the terminal to the consolidated facility, where all car rental companies will be under one roof. The busses that take you there will run on comparatively environmentally-friendly compressed natural gas, or CNG.
Instead of each car rental company operating their own shuttle, the bus operations too will be consolidated. That takes more vehicles off the roadways around the terminal and cuts ground congestion.
Another bonus: by moving car rentals out of the garage Sea-Tac will open up two floors of parking, some 3,200 extra spaces in all.
Seattle/Tacoma’s RAC is located on a 23-acre site next to the airport. It’s bounded by International Boulevard, State Route (SR) 518and South 160th St. To ease access there will be a direct connection to SR-518.
Seattle/Tacoma International is not alone in consolidating car rentals. The trend’s taken hold over past decade-and-a-half. Other airports that do it this way include Dallas/Fort Worth, Bush Houston Intercontinental, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International. Phoenix Sky Harbor, and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
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Story by Jerry Chandler
(Image: prayitno)
