New parking ramp, pedestrian skybridge keep travelers moving in Sioux Falls

A year and a half after construction began, a new $62 million parking ramp and skywalk opened for passengers at Sioux Falls Regional Airport in October 2024. The airport-funded project was initiated due to the facility’s growing passenger numbers and limited parking space.

The project was a long time coming. Jake Braunagel, aviation group leader at KLJ Engineering, said the airport authority started talking about the need for parking lot expansion back in 2011.

“They were starting to run out of space where they could expand with just a surface parking lot,” he said. “And they pretty much built their last expansion right before we started the parking garage in the fall of 2022. The airport’s been just growing like crazy, as far as passengers coming through there, and eventually, they ran out of space to park.”

The four-story garage holds 960 parking spaces and has a covered rooftop shielding the top level from inclement weather. The project includes architectural elements like LED screens and a pedestrian bridge on the second level. The first level is designated for short-term parking.

Henry Carlson Construction was the contractor on the project, and TSP, Inc. was the architect.

“We did a lot of parking lot reconfiguration so that we could make this ramp and then still allow the parking lots to operate during the construction of the ramp, which was a big thing, because this thing is, like centered on the terminal’s front door across the street, so being able to keep people parking there was a big piece of the puzzle,” Braunagel said.

About 200 short-term surface parking spaces were removed to create the footprint for the four-story garage. The net gain was 770 parking stalls.

“One thing that the airport authority board really didn’t want to have is a chunk of concrete blocking the terminal and be the first thing you see, so it’s pretty unique in that there is quite a bit of architecture to it and different things to try to make it look nice compared to your standard, just slab parking garage. They did put two big wrap-around LED screens on the two corners of the parking garage that face Minnesota Avenue, which is a pretty busy street that leads straight through downtown from the airport,” he said.

The LED displays are 58 feet wide and 24 feet high. They generate advertising revenue for the airport, welcome visitors and promote special events. The displays were made by Daktronics, a South Dakota company located about 60 miles away in Brookings. Braunagel said there were many South Dakota subcontractors used on the project. A large structural engineering firm, Kimley-Horn, with offices around Minneapolis, was used for some of the cast-in-place concrete work.

The parking garage was built so it can be expanded on two sides in the future if additional parking stalls are needed. A camera-based guidance system is used in the structure that can track vehicles entering and exiting each level and has a digital display board to give real-time updates on which levels have available parking stalls.

The first level has a higher clearance than typical parking garages to allow for buses to come through and unload passengers when the terminal’s curb space is too busy. That allowed the pedestrian skywalk to be raised up higher and allow clearance for trucks.

Installing the skywalk was a unique process. After it was built in one piece off-site, it was transported to the airport with a police escort along major highways in Sioux Falls and set in place by crane in one day.

“That was a pretty wild day, because we had to shut down the road in front of the terminal. We had to do some big detours. They kept the airport open and detoured people actually through the parking garage floor level while we’re setting that skywalk.

“There’s a four-story, basically vertical circulation building attached to the parking garage that’s climate-controlled. On the opposite side, we expanded the terminal out and just up the two stories to accept the skywalk. There’s escalators and elevators in there to take people back down to the first story,” Braunagel said. “Those vertical circulation areas have a lot of different architectural features and murals and stuff like that that are related to South Dakota and Sioux Falls, and the falls and things of that nature.”

Braunagel said the response from the public has been overwhelmingly positive.

“Everybody that I’ve talked to is super-thrilled with it. The garage was pretty much full throughout the winter, packed full,” he said. “They’ve gotten lots of positive feedback. I think throughout the community, everybody seems to have supported it and thinks it’s a great thing for the airport to have, and I honestly don’t think I’ve heard anything really negative about it.”