Also, as I was looking up sources for that post, I ran into the RDU Airport Authority’s Dropbox folder with full, official, finalized copies of the Vision 2040 plan. I briefly skimmed through it (the PDF is nearly 1,900 pages long so of course I only skimmed through parts of it), and realized the airport master plan has some public transit-friendly, space-efficient designs hidden in the details.
Here’s the splashiest example:
And here’s that figure, where the hypothetical automated people mover alignment is the dashed orange line!
This does NOT mean that RDU will have direct people-mover/light rail service. It just means that RDU, as of 2017, has carved out an option so that, if anyone ever builds something like that, this plan won’t get in the way.
What’s more realistic and better-defined is better bus service to the airport -and starting in its second chapter, this report acknowledges that too. It mentions how BRT (or at least, frequent bus) service to the airport could be possible in the future, and aims to rely on those as parking becomes more scarce around the airport in the future. To make non-driving airport trips more attractive, they proposed “Ground Transportation Centers” in front of each terminal so that buses/BRT, hotel shuttles etc. have spaces of their own.
Here’s where those buses and shuttles could run (blue arrows) as well as car traffic (green with white, dashed lines) based on two maps of the center of the airport I stitched together.
I doubt that engineering and design details (e.g. would Terminal 1 bus passengers cross the road on foot, or use the existing semi-underground passageway?) will be figured out before these specific projects start getting developed. But the one clear thing here is that, with the location of the consolidated rental car (CONRAC) facility in the right side of the above map, bus riders would get to take an exclusive shortcut to move between terminals faster than cars!