Sioux Falls Regional Opens South Dakota’s First Multi-Level Airport Parking Structure

Sometimes there’s nowhere to go but up.

That was literally true at Sioux Falls Regional Airport (FSD), where skyrocketing demand for parking coupled with seemingly insurmountable land-use constraints led to the recent development of the first vertical airport parking structure in South Dakota.

The four-story, 960-space garage that opened at FSD in early October has short-term parking on the ground level and three upper floors for daily and long-term users. A roof over the fourth floor ensures that even vehicles and customers on the top level are protected from the region’s frigid winter snow and stifling summer sunlight.

The $62 million project was entirely financed with local airport funds.

Angled “quick ramps” make it easy to drive from top to bottom, and each floor features digital displays that help direct drivers to levels with available spaces. The garage also includes 22 electric vehicle charging stations spread across multiple levels.

An enclosed glass and steel skybridge allows for temperature-controlled movement between garage and terminal. It conveys travelers to or from the airport’s main entrance by way of a two-story lobby complete with dual escalators, a stairway and an elevator.

Airport Deputy Director Richard King says customers’ rising expectations drove the decision to save for and invest in an alternative to open-air surface parking, which remains the standard at every other airport in the state.

“The community was demanding a better environment, especially with our winter climate,” King explains. “It speaks volumes with the public when you afford them with the opportunity to come back from a January business trip or vacation and their car isn’t covered by 3 feet of snow.”

At a Crossroads

Sioux Falls stands in the southeastern corner of South Dakota near the Iowa and Minnesota state lines; the airport’s catchment area also includes part of northeastern Nebraska. Scheduled service reaches nearly 20 destinations, with traffic evenly balanced among four airlines: Allegiant, American, Delta and United. A fifth, Frontier, maintains a smaller presence.

Last year, nearly two-thirds of FSD’s 1.3 million annual passengers were nearby residents, and most flew for leisure purposes. King notes that air traffic is busy throughout the year, especially during autumn when visitors fly in for pheasant hunting season. Snowbirds typically leave during late winter, while summer is packed with outbound locals taking family vacations. There’s no peak season, per se; business is steady year-round, he adds.

The constant traffic significantly strained FSD’s surface parking lots, and obstacles on all sides prevented expanding the existing facilities horizontally. Rail lines and a diversion canal for the Big Sioux River cut off development options east of the airport. Hangars stand to the north; the airfield lies to the west; and extending surface parking too far south would have penetrated the runway protection zone.

Instead, FSD went vertical by removing roughly 200 short-term surface parking spaces to carve out the footprint for a multistory garage. After construction was complete, the net gain was about 770 parking stalls.

KLJ of Bismarck, ND was the project’s engineering lead. Jake Braunagel, its aviation group leader based in Sioux Falls, says that FSD’s garage was a long time coming for Midwestern travelers. A preliminary parking study was conducted in 2011, though work didn’t move forward for nearly a decade.

“At first, a garage seemed a little far-fetched for the size of airport they were,” Braunagel says. “But even in 2011, they were running into parking constraints and foreseeing those constraints worsening with their steady passenger growth”.

A request for proposals was issued in January 2020 and KLJ was selected that March to handle overall project management and civil site designs. Kimley-Horn was subcontracted for structural design and parking consulting, while two Sioux Falls firms—TSP and Confluence—handled garage architecture and landscape architecture, respectively.

Design was finalized in spring 2022 and construction began that fall led by general contractor Henry Carlson Construction, another Sioux Falls business. At peak, 80 to 100 skilled workers were on the job site.

Concrete and asphalt work was limited to warmer months, but construction was phased so interior tasks could continue during cold, wet periods. The garage was built as a poured-in-place, post-tension structure and the lobbies used precast concrete. The frame of the 80-foot-long steel skybridge was fabricated offsite and transported to the airport via trucks under police escort. It was installed in just one day to minimize surface traffic closures while commercial travel continued.

“The cooperation among all of the entities really made the whole process so smooth,” says Braunagel, whose firm has worked as a consultant to FSD for nearly 15 years.

The Eyes Have It

The airport’s new garage is highly visible to drivers on Minnesota Avenue, a busy north-south arterial that connects U.S. Interstate 90 with downtown Sioux Falls just south of the airport. To capitalize on so many passersby, designers placed a pair of massive wraparound video boards on two separate corners of the garage. These LED displays not only generate advertising revenue but also welcome visitors and promote special events for tourism agencies and other regional stakeholders.

Given the high-profile placement of the garage, it was essentially FSD’s new front door. And the five-member Sioux Falls Regional Airport Authority board consequently had high expectations for its appearance.

“It’s the first view you get—from quite a distance away—of our airport,” King says. “They didn’t want it to look typical. They wanted something that stood out.”

The project team didn’t have to look far to find the right partner to deliver what King calls “that wow factor.”

Large digital displays from Daktronics make the new garage anything but ordinary.

Less than 60 miles north of Sioux Falls is the corporate headquarters of Daktronics, a firm that specializes in designing, engineering and manufacturing digital LED display technology and audio systems. What began in 1968 as a side venture of two South Dakota State University professors who to create jobs and retain talented graduates later evolved into a global powerhouse. Daktronics now has more than 1 million square feet of manufacturing space and its products are used in more than 120 countries.

The airport spent $1.2 million on its two Daktronics displays, each measuring 24-feet tall by 58-feet wide. Although the contract was awarded through a competitive bidding process, working with an in-state vendor came with the added value of bolstering civic pride within the land of Mount Rushmore.

“It’s a good introduction of a worldwide, renowned technology company that’s in our backyard,” King says of Daktronics’ involvement. “We’re proud to have an iconic piece that you can say was built in South Dakota,” adds Jerry Young, the company’s regional sales manager for transportation.

Teaming with project designers early—when they were still planning the garage’s structural steel and electrical equipment—was essential to incorporating the displays, Young notes. Kevin Palmeter, Daktronics’ aviation market manager for North America, adds that FSD’s displays are more noteworthy than most because they wrap around the structure’s corners, which heightens interest among viewers. However, that also makes the installation and programming more complex.

“Whenever a display is viewed from one side, the other, or both sides at the same time, you have to ensure the content still works,” Palmeter says. “There’s some extra nuance there.”

Overall, Daktronics has worked with airports around the world for more than 30 years, dating back to the days of cathode-ray tube displays. As its products evolved over time, so, too, has its approach toward the aviation industry. New positions were created solely to meet growing airport demand for indoor LED displays, as well as outdoor systems such as those in Sioux Falls.

A skybridge connects the new garage to the terminal.

More airports are using dynamic signage along roadways for wayfinding in place of traditional static boards, Young says, noting that Daktronics recently provided an exterior display for a garage at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport (MSP) that measures 35 feet tall and 110 feet in length. In 2023, Daktronics also developed the 42,000-square-foot 8K ultra-high resolution LED displays inside the Jeppesen Terminal at Denver International Airport (DEN).

Palmeter describes digital displays as a “street-to-seat solution” that can inform, guide and entertain travelers from the road all the way to their boarding gate. In particular, he reports more demand for displays at security checkpoints, for wayfinding in concourses, on the back walls at ticketing and along exterior curbsides.

Designed for Efficiency, Safety

The new garage at FSD also features an Automated Parking Guidance System from TKH Security (formerly Park Assist).

Jeff Sparrow, the company’s sales director for North America, contends that for many years, airports across the country were building garages and lots they didn’t actually need. “They still had a lot of availability, but they just didn’t know where those open spaces were,” he explains. “At the same time, customers were getting frustrated because they didn’t know where the open spaces were.”

Now, camera-based guidance systems can track vehicles entering and exiting on each level, and digital boards display real-time updates on where to park. Moreover, the same data can be fed to airport websites and apps.

THK Security has seen significant growth among airport clientele since COVID-19 travel restrictions lifted. According to Sparrow, airports that previously had parking to spare have increasingly seen their lots and garages maxing out due to record volume amid the recent “revenge travel” phenomenon.

“Pre-pandemic, a 10% or 15% surplus was common. Now that isn’t the case,” he says. “Adding guidance systems maximizes the existing (parking) assets.”

Designers at FSD took great care to plan for the safe separation of vehicles and pedestrians, both within the garage and for those crossing the street to enter or exit the terminal, adds Jerry Schwientek, a project manager with Kimley-Horn.

Jaycee Lane, the road that fronts FSD, has limited curb space for unloading. Whenever it became congested, drivers previously had to park across the street and cross traffic on foot. To mitigate such risks and accommodate future growth in commercial operations, the garage’s first floor was designed with a higher clearance so curbing for buses could later be expanded to unload passengers within an enclosed environment and off the street.

Kimley-Horn also designed the structure so it could be easily expanded without significantly affecting FSD’s day-to-day operations. It was built with in-place expansion joints and double columns, and designers sized the foundations to support adjacent future construction to the south or north of the structure, whenever more enclosed parking is needed.

“Sioux Falls had the foresight to understand they would want to expand, and they wanted us to anticipate how that could or would occur,” Schwientek says. “They can literally build right next to (the new garage) and make it look, when it’s finished, like this was one continuous facility.”

Another example of careful planning is found in the garage’s below-ground civil engineering. Initial recommendations called for deep foundations that would have been both costly and extremely noisy to install. Instead, Kimley-Horn used extensive preliminary soils testing, soil improvements and a spread foundation—a simpler approach that also aligned with the capabilities of local contractors. That, in turn, enabled FSD to benefit from more competition when the contract went out for bid, reducing overall construction costs.

“Instead of saying, ‘This is the only subcontractor you can hire for this particular type of specialized foundation work,’ almost any contractor could do an excavation,” Schwientek explains. This method also expedited completion because deep foundations require much more time to build and set.

A Fighting Past and Promising Future

This September, FSD marked its 85th anniversary. Like so many U.S. airports, its history is rife with military connections. The Sioux Falls Municipal Airport opened in 1939 at a cost of $500,000—equivalent to $32 million in today’s dollars. At the start of World War II, it was leased to the U.S. Army as a training facility for radio operators. Over the next five years, the Army Corp of Engineers developed the field’s triangular three-runway configuration that is still in use today.

After the war, the city of Sioux Falls regained control of the airport but leased the southern portion to the South Dakota Air National Guard. It still maintains an F-16 fighter group there.

Adding a roof over the fourth floor protects vehicles and customers from inclement weather

Looking ahead, the airport’s next battle is to win back the business travel that has never fully recovered from the pandemic. Before that can happen, FSD must further expand its infrastructure.

“We’ve continued to grow leisure so well that we’ve exceeded the capabilities of our facilities,” King reports. If fact, FSD hasn’t actively courted local business travelers to swap their Zoom calls for in-person meetings that require flights because that might overwhelm the terminal that is already bursting at the seams.

Currently, the airport has seven jet bridges and six seating areas, all of which have been upgraded in phases over the past 15 years. Plans are now in motion for a $130 million, six-gate concourse addition. Airport leaders are optimistic about breaking ground next spring on what will be FSD’s largest project ever.

“It’s not just budgeting for your next project. It’s budgeting for the project that’s beyond,” King says.

And if the larger terminal brings the added traffic airport leaders expect, FSD could then need—you guessed it—more parking capacity to complement this year’s addition. While there is no timeline yet, forward thinking has served FSD well for decades.

“It’s not a one-and-done,” says Kimley-Horn’s Schwientek. “We thought through future expansions, so when the airport grows, there is a plan.”

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