Luton and District Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise

Getting there

Transport of passengers and staff to and from the Airport is a major challenge: there is no direct rail access to the terminal and restricted space for road access. The proportion of passengers travelling by car is much higher than at the three major airports in the south east.

Airports are required by Government to produce Surface Access Strategies (ASAS) with the sole aim of encouraging more passengers and staff to travel to and from airports by public transport. They should provide important input to the local planning process.

Luton’s Surface Access Strategy (2009) is almost devoid of analysis, relies on dubious measures of travel modes used, adopts no benchmarks against which Luton’s performance can be judged and makes no clear commitments which are likely to achieve the unchallenging targets which it adopts.

The outlook is not encouraging:

• the new access road completed (at taxpayers’ expense) early in 2009 together with the completion of the M1 widening works has made car travel to the Airport more attractive, at least until the economy revives;
• the new road used the land which had been reserved for a dedicated public transport link to the central area and the dedicated busway (formerly Translink) planned for the Luton-Dunstable conurbation has been cut back so that it will not even extend from the Town Centre to the Airport Parkway Station; and
• a charge for the bus running between the Parkway Station and the terminal was introduced in 2008.

Without effective action to encourage the use of public transport to the Airport, passengers and staff coming by car will continue to clog up the main artery to east Luton.

Traffic queuing to reach the Airport at 06:15 on Tuesday 12th July 2011