With the CTA and drop off zone now complete it is worth taking stock of the improvements.
With the removal of a temporary passenger route many passengers now have to cross the drop off lane twice rather than not at all. As can be seen in this photo most passengers are still using the now closed pedestrian crossing rather than its replacement.
One of the consequences of the new CTA design is that all vehicles passing through the tunnel, whether they are delivery lorries, buses, coaches or staff and visitors for LLA HQ and easyland have to take the long route through the pay barriers by the multi story car park to leave the CTA. This adds large volumes of traffic that are exempt from paying drop off charges.
The photo below shows 3 coaches that didn’t move for a good 3 minutes as the ring road was blocked with stationary traffic trying to get into the drop off zone even though the zone in the foreground appears to be empty. The reason for this emptiness is that any car stopping in the drop off zone away from the kerb brings the whole CTA to a standstill. This means that at peak times it is now taking up to 20 minutes for shuttle buses to get to the station due to further queues at the pay barriers. It is ironic that before the improvements shuttle buses only queued to get into the airport but now they also have to queue to leave the airport.
It is a fact though that queuing traffic is happening less often and the queues are much shorter but dismissing last year when the drop off zone was only part built queuing times as opposed to queuing length isn’t much different from before the work started on the CTA. One could argue that the £14 million spent on the CTA has failed to increase its capacity to handle 18 million passengers.
