Progressive Curb Pricing Is the Airport Industry's Next Move--and Everyone's Watching for the Next DFW

Margot Zuckerman

4 hours ago

7 min read

Walk the arrivals level at almost any major U.S. airport at 6 p.m. and you'll see the same scene: a wall of stopped vehicles, hazards blinking, drivers craning their necks for a passenger who's still at baggage claim. An officer shouts, “you can’t stop here!”

What may not be obvious to the average traveler is, the curb isn't jammed only because too many cars arrive. It's jammed because there are too many cars that stay.

There’s a significant gap between what a brief stay at an airport curb costs–increasing congestion, poor customer experience, and safety hazards for airport customers and employees alike–and what airports actually charge–typically, zero dollars.

As I’ve heard from conference sessions throughout this year, including at this Summer’s International Parking and Mobility Institute’s conference (IPMI), there is one clear answer taking shape: dwell-time based dynamic curb pricing, charging for the airport's most valuable few hundred feet of pavement based on one key driver of congestion–time at the curb. During the conference, I sat in on a session titled "Revenue Optimization Across Parking and Ground Transportation.” The panel was about revenue across ground transportation broadly, but the panelists quickly focused in on the curb. They highlighted how the curb is the last major airport asset still priced as if time isn’t money. But that's about to change.

Which airport will be next?

I heard the same refrain from airports of every size: who's going to do it next? Who’s going to take the leap? The appetite clearly exists in a way it didn’t even 12 months ago. However, what's missing is the nerve to go second. Changing policy that touches every person who drives onto your property is hard, and most airports would rather be the fast second: watch a peer take the leap, prove it works, then follow. In North America, so far only Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW) is doing dwell-based curb pricing.

Conviction is only part of it, though. Another component is having the operational tools to do this well--to price the curb in a way that actually serves passengers, drivers, and employees. Our pitch is simple: it's time for another airport to leap ahead. And to do so successfully starts with understanding how the curb is utilized today.

You can't price a curb if you can't measure it

Most airports can't just turn curb pricing on, and one “classic” way to time people’s curb use includes gated entry and exits, which makes congestion worse.

Starting with the math for those who are curious if a part of this time measurement puzzle can be done manually (hint: not recommended). A 2024 report by the Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) puts a single enforcement officer's reach at 400 to 800 linear feet of curb. One airport in that study ran 15 officers across two levels at peak just to cover 7,500 feet. No airport is going to staff its way to a curb that meters every vehicle by the minute--the headcount doesn't pencil, and enforcement staff people standing in the lane can’t also collect usable data.

The mechanics are simple enough. Progressive curb pricing is a usage-based model in which the fee to use an airport's curb or roadway rises with how long a vehicle stays. For example, a 90-second drop-off could be free, while camping in the lane during a peak arrival bank could be charged as the most expensive parking spot at the entire airport. The goal is to fairly price the curb to incentivize customers to use it appropriately and then keep moving.

What DFW does today

Dallas Fort Worth is the reference point everyone names. DFW is the only U.S. airport that charges every vehicle entering its property, and it prices that access by time. A typical pick-up or drop-off, roughly 8 to 30 minutes on property, runs about $2. Staying between 30 minutes and two hours costs around $3. Drivers using the airport roads as a shortcut pay a steeper pass-through rate designed to keep non-airport traffic off International Parkway.

DFW normalized an idea most U.S. airports thought radical. With no way to build its way out of congestion, DFW took the leap. Now, time on airport property is a priced commodity, and a savvy way to manage a single, constrained roadway.

Europe has been doing this for years

Another reason North American airport leaders are leaning in now is because this is already a well-traveled road overseas.

Heathrow introduced a terminal drop-off charge in 2021, now £7, using barrierless automatic number-plate recognition (i.e., no gates, no booths). Since launch, public transport's share of trips to the airport has risen from 41% to 46%, which Heathrow's own filings translate to roughly 1.7 million fewer vehicle visits a year. Plate-read accuracy runs above 98% and payment compliance above 95%, significantly higher than most manual enforcement regimes manage.

Budapest also runs a camera-based system with a free dwell window and escalating fees. In April 2025, it tightened the policy to one free entry per day explicitly to reduce vehicle traffic around the terminals. Athens, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Amsterdam, and Barcelona have similar programs: curb access as a priced, managed product is mainstream in Europe.

Moreover, one clear European signal to watch is a reversal of strategy in how multiple European/UK airports have implemented time-based curbside pricing. In early 2025, Manchester, Stansted, and East Midlands removed the physical barriers from their drop-off zones and replaced them with barrierless cameras, because the barriers themselves were contributing to congestion.

So, to achieve a pain-free curb, airports must carefully choose how they implement dwell-time based pricing.

You can't price a curb you can't measure

Most airports can't just turn curb pricing on, and one “classic” way to time people’s curb use includes gated entry and exits, which makes congestion worse.

Moreover, there may be cars officers never see. Cars that recirculate, in addition to those more clearly blocking traffic, are problematic: at some airports, the ACRP has clocked roughly half of arrivals-curb traffic as vehicles looping past for a passenger who isn't out yet--about 50% at Baltimore/Washington, 43% at San Francisco, 30% at Seattle-Tacoma. Manual enforcement can help move the car it's standing next to but can't price the dwell time of the dozen circling behind it.

Unfortunately, physical gates and payment booths amplify the challenge at hand. A gate risks turning a flowing curb into a queue, and gate failures threaten larger incidents. That's the trap the UK airports walked into and then climbed back out of: the enforcement hardware became the bottleneck.

Advances in computer vision, however, are one reason dynamic pricing is suddenly practical rather than aspirational. The ACRP is direct about it: radar, LiDAR, license-plate recognition, and video processing can "accurately track the volumes, paths, and stopping locations of individual vehicles," monitor dwell times, and flag violators--reducing the number of officers to required to move along cars, letting them do more important activities.

Moreover, the research notes that pickup dwell averaging three minutes can realistically be pushed toward 90 seconds through enforcement--exactly the minutes dynamic pricing is built to reclaim. Automotus has seen this firsthand through its deployment at SMF 73% reduction in dwell-time violations through automated curb management, just in a few months!

That same report anticipated camera-and-analytics systems that classify each vehicle, meter its curb use, and "introduce variable pricing" arriving at U.S. airports by 2024. It’s 2026, so about time!

AI-powered LPR cameras used with strategic workflows have also been shown to reduce dwell times and associated congestion.

And for those who are budget conscious–the cost of an automated curb management system may ultimately be a rounding error against the cost of pouring more curb.

Pricing works best when it comes with better service

Most airports assume that pricing the curb too challenging politically: nobody wants to be the airport that charges grandma for waiting a few minutes for her grandkids. The answer to that worry is to pair time-based pricing with the kind of service the old curb could never offer.

Sacramento International Airport (SMF) is a useful preview. Its program is built on automated enforcement rather than pricing, but it runs on the same measurement layer, with eight AI-powered cameras watching Terminal A's curb, no gates, no added staffing. When the system went live, about 40% of passenger vehicles were exceeding the dwell limit; within two months that share had fallen by roughly 73%. The drivers who already do the right thing--pull in, drop off, pull out--never felt a thing. The pressure landed only on the small share of heavy users that camp in the lane, which is the behavior that disproportionality backs up everyone else.

What surprised SMF most was the effect on its people. Officers who used to stand at the curb writing citations by hand were freed for other work, and when they are at the curb, their role flipped from punitive to helpful: telling a driver they're already in the system and they're there to help them avoid a fee, rather than lead with physically writing a ticket. That's a much different exchange from the shouting-officer scene we started with. It also depicts a version of curb pricing worth building, where the technology that meters the curb is the same thing that makes the experience better.

The window is now

As Automotus CEO Jordan Justus and former head of DDOT Gabe Klein recently wrote in an op-ed published in Streetsblog, today's curb chaos is only a preview of what’s to come. Beyond the human-caused challenges we face today, the autonomous version is coming. an AV with no driver to shoo along has every incentive to sit at the curb until its passenger materializes, unless the curb is instrumented and priced to say otherwise. Airports that stand up curb measurement now will have the pricing rails, the data, and the operational muscle in place before AV fleets arrive at scale. The ones that wait will be retrofitting under pressure

The appetite at IPMI is the leading edge of a shift that's already proven in Dallas and across Europe. The next DFW won't be the airport with the biggest budget. It'll be the one that puts the measurement layer down first--quietly, without a gate in sight--and lets the curb start pricing itself.

Margot Zuckerman is Director of Growth & Strategy at Automotus, which provides automated curb management for cities and airports to improve compliance, congestion, and customer and employee experience through computer vision-powered automated ground transportation management.