8 ms·

Airport Trains Suck. Will REM Too?

20 points by luu 10y ago

nickzoic 10y ago
Sydney's works fine. London's too, not the special one the regular tube one. Also Tokyo Narita and Schipol. What they've all got in common is that they're well connected to a good public transport system.
- jpau 10y ago
  Sydney's is great. I don't mind paying the $34 return like I do in Melbourne.
- Garlef 10y ago
  Same goes for Bangkok.
  - Grue3 10y ago
    Bangkok Airport Express was closed down in 2014 due to low ridership. [1] The non-express line also serves the suburbs so it doesn't count. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Rail_Link_%28Bangkok%29#Express_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Rail_Link_%28Bangkok%2...
    - djcapelis 10y ago
      The SFO airport BART line serves the suburbs too and it counts just fine. Airport connections come in a bunch of different varieties. I agree that Bangkok's is definitely one that's faced challenges though!
markbao 10y ago
I had no idea that airport train ridership was so low – I suppose that explains their generally elevated prices. Even NYC's JFK AirTrain only carried an average of about 18,000 paid passengers per day in 2014, which seems low to me (though that also translates to about $32 million annual revenue, which might be sustainable.)
- helper 10y ago
  18,000 passengers per day is 6,570,000 passengers annually which is about 12% of the total 54M passengers at JFK. 12% doesn't seem all that low to me.
- IIAOPSW 10y ago
  It doesn't help that airtrain only gets you as far as those 2 stops at the end of the A train or Jamaica terminal for the LIRR. Even after your 4.50 ride on airtrain you still have another hour or so into Manhattan. If they had followed the original proposal and built it as a connector JFK -> LGA -> Penn station (or some other central location) I bet ridership would be way up.
  - markbao 10y ago
    Right. I don't know the specifics but I'd guess it was a hard sell to add another rail line in a crowded area when the A/LIRR already went to Penn.
jpatokal 10y ago
The utility of an airport train is pretty much directly correlated to a) how good the network it's connected to, and b) how slow/expensive the alternatives are. For example, everybody uses the airport trains in Tokyo, because Tokyo's train network is awesome, and the trains are both faster and cheaper than taking a taxi. The Tokyo Monorail, which is only one of two links to one of Tokyo's two main airports, has a ridership of over 300,000 pax/day. By comparison, DFW's airport link gets under 2,000 pax/day -- in large part because the total ridership of the entire DART light rail network is barely 100,000 pax/day!
- aninhumer 10y ago
  And the Tokyo Monorail isn't even that well connected, relatively speaking. It doesn't go to any major stations, and only interchanges with one other line before terminating at a smaller station on the orbital Yamanote line. (Although there are apparently plans to extend it to Tokyo station eventually.)
mrbabbage 10y ago
related reading: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/quick-note-a-hypothesis-about-airport-connectors/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/quic... there's a lot of linked reading on airport connectors' rather bizarre propensity to attract huge amounts of capital spending relative to their eventual ridership numbers.
Animats 10y ago
It's surprising how well SFO is doing with its BART extension. Incidentally, the article missed Cleveland Hopkins Airport (CLE). Like SFO, CLE simply has a transit line that ends at the airport, not a special connection. Those seem to be more successful than short-distance shuttles that make a connection to the big system. Oakland has a shuttle between a BART station and the airport. It's cable-hauled, strangely for a 3.7 mile system. As usual, Asia is way ahead in transit. Tokyo Haneda has had a monorail for years. Incheon now has a maglev. Shanghai, of course, has the really fast maglev to the airport.
- MaxGabriel 10y ago
  I haven't been to the Oakland airport before, but they opened a BART line to the Coliseum station in Oakland from the OAK airport in 2014. I don't think they offer the shuttle anymore, based off their website.
  - djcapelis 10y ago
    It's a cable hauled shuttle train. It is integrated with the rest of the BART system, but you do have to switch to a completely separate train that uses separate tech, so it's fair to call it a shuttle. But you're totally right that it's not a shuttle bus anymore, those are gone now. :)
- amluto 10y ago
  SFO BART is, in my opinion, a shockingly poorly operated line, at least for people who live on the peninsula. Suppose I want to go from Palo Alto to SFO. I can take the Caltrain and get to Millbrae very quickly. Check. Then I can fantasize that someone would dig a very expensive tunnel from the Millbrae station to SFO and either run a train every 5-10 minutes to SFO or run one train to SFO for each Caltrain that stops at Millbrae. Amazingly, my fantasy is half realized. That tunnel exists, is electrified, is well-maintained, and it's called the BART. For reasons that probably make sense in the minds of the mess of uncooperative local transit agencies, the train doesn't run before 9 pm on weekdays, and they steadfastly refuse to make the timing work well for Caltrain riders. On weekdays before 9, I can still use the train, but there's an extra pointless transfer, and they still refuse to make the schedule workable. So building the thing is only part of the battle. The transit agencies still need to make sure that the schedules and, in particular, time spent sitting around waiting for transfers, doesn't slow it down to the point of unusability.
Scoundreller 10y ago
One thing I appreciate is that the express bus to Montreal's airport is the 747 bus. I've never taken it, and I already know what it is. I bet I could ask anyone in the city "How do I get on the 747 bus?" and they'll know what I'm asking for.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  I think that numbering convention for airport buses is fairly common. Leeds Bradford Airport near me has the 737, 747 and 757. (And for some reason, the 967.) And I'm sure I've seen similar elsewhere.
  - david-given 10y ago
    Glasgow, Dublin, Heathrow have them too.
    - Scoundreller 10y ago
      Toronto is 192. Who knows why?
djcapelis 10y ago
This analysis is flawed as it is based off passenger numbers that include passengers transferring through the airport. This is why ATL seems so low. The reality is that ATL's passenger numbers includes a huge fraction of people transferring from one flight to another, (much more than other airports) none of which are ever going to take a train, because those passengers have no need to leave the airport. Conversely, many of the airports with relatively high ridership probably have a greater fraction of passengers terminating or originating their trips there. The analysis really needs to look at the passenger numbers for trips originated/terminated. Not the passengers merely boarding planes there.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- zymhan 10y ago
  Yeah, I was surprised to see Atlanta on there too. Comparing hubs like ATL and JFK and ORD to desinations like PDX and Montreal is not a fair analysis.
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  Yep, most of the airports compared have a much higher rate of transfers than Montreal. People rarely transfer in Montreal. Toronto is a much bigger hub. This is the second click-bait titled article from this author on the topic. It seems more like an exercise in stats, with very little actual context.
- Programmatic 10y ago
  Indeed. That was the first thing that caught my eye in the graph since I enjoy using the MARTA system in ATL when I go there and it's pretty busy. It didn't pass the sniff test when I saw that. I did some quick digging. The term to google to get local traffic without connecting passenger info is "origin and destination", and it looks like O&D is about a third of the overall traffic[0] since there are ~45m total enplaned annually and of that ~15m enplaned from origin. Doubling the enplaned number to get the enplaned and deplaned number would be about 82k daily average. With 10k daily metro riders, 12% ridership seems pretty good. [0]: "ATL is anchored by a large, local traffic base with 15 million O&D enplaned passengers for fiscal year (FY) 2014." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fitch-upgrades-atlanta-ga-passenger-205500804.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fitch-upgrades-atlanta-ga-pas...
__mp 10y ago
For airport trains to be effective they need to be connected to public transport. Otherwise these trains will not be used. For reference: I checked on the Swiss Rail Network operator page and there are 18 transit options to get from the main station in Zürich to the airport (https://i.imgur.com/GJTC0F3.png https://i.imgur.com/GJTC0F3.png ). Some of these connections are trams and take a while longer. There is even a direct train to get from Zürich Airport to Geneva Airport. It takes 3 hours and 9 minutes which is about the same as taking the plane with checked-in luggage. Also here's a simulation of the timetable of the rail network: http://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/ http://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/
- crdb 10y ago
  Having done ZRH-GVA many, many more times than I care to count in both directions, may I recommend the plane. The flight itself is REALLY quick and very scenic, even (especially?) at night with the moonlit snowy mountains [1], which are to your side, not under you (try to look south), and the stars. You're barely getting used to being in flight and they are already handing over the little chocolate and asking you to fasten your seat belt. Both ZRH and GVA (especially GVA) are ultra fast airports where check-in and security are a breeze (I recommend the mobile boarding pass) and there is fairly little walking. You can definitely door-to-door it in much less on the plane even with checked-in luggage (unless it's substantially changed in the last 3-4 years). Price wise I used to fly that route for 30-40 CHF, very competitive. It was sometimes cheaper to fly to London via ZRH than direct from GVA. Meanwhile, whilst there are a few direct trains, most have a stop in the middle to change trains (from memory: Bern? maybe Biel or something that starts with L) and you have to carry your bags back out and stand in the cold for a few minutes and stress about whether you're on the right platform. Also, the bag space in second class is quite limited. On the plus side, you avoid taking trains to/from the airports, or getting frustrated with Switzerland's low speed limits on the highway. I'm surprised the OP uses North American cities as examples of airport connectors. Hong Kong, Tokyo (NRT) and Shanghai to cite three big international destinations have great airport connectors which make sense considering the distances at play. I've always wondered why planners don't send their team to visit the top 10-20 airports in the world to check what the competition is doing. Singapore is an example of the airport being close enough that you might as well take a taxi and a rapid transit to the "centre" (what is the centre, anyway - CBD, Orchard? there are a lot of hubs) makes less sense. Montreal's situation looks more like Singapore's than Tokyo's. London is an example of where the extremely expensive airport connector (Heathrow Express) ends up somewhere with nothing except cheap hotels and slow connections, which is why they're finally getting round to building Crossrail, which goes from the Heathrow terminals all the way to all the major hubs (including the City and Canary Wharf, great news for those who have to fly transatlantic). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hvWN3jOvvM&t=1m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hvWN3jOvvM&t=1m20s
tcj_phx 10y ago
Phoenix's sky train connects to the east economy parking lot, before continuing to the light rail. Wikipedia says it's being extended to the rental car center on the west side of the airport. When this is finished, they won't need to run busses anymore. It's perfectly useful, especially for people who park at the airport's economy lot. But the graph on this page makes Phoenix's train seem useless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHX_Sky_Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHX_Sky_Train (When Terminal 4 was designed/built in the late-80's, they left space for a people-mover-tunnel. When they came back 20 years later to build the people-mover, they realized there wasn't enough space for the tunnel. They built an elevated people mover instead. This is/was the only/first airport train to go over an active taxiway.)
coldtea 10y ago
>Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of taking a metro home from the airport. I think most people would love that too, which is why everyone is so excited about it. But even if everyone will use it at some point or another, most only go to the airport once or twice a year. Thus, on any given day, not many people will use it. And that means low ridership. And how is that a problem for the person writing the post? Other than tax-wise, which can easily be solved with a ticket price?
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  Not to mention that for tourists visiting Montreal, the current situation is rather pathetic (basically take a taxi that will get stuck in traffic, or try to figure out where to buy a bus ticket).

20 points by luu 10y ago

Sydney's works fine. London's too, not the special one the regular tube one. Also Tokyo Narita and Schipol. What they've all got in common is that they're well connected to a good public transport system.

jpau 10y ago
Sydney's is great. I don't mind paying the $34 return like I do in Melbourne.
Garlef 10y ago
Same goes for Bangkok.
- Grue3 10y ago
  Bangkok Airport Express was closed down in 2014 due to low ridership. [1] The non-express line also serves the suburbs so it doesn't count. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Rail_Link_%28Bangkok%29#Express_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airport_Rail_Link_%28Bangkok%2...
  - djcapelis 10y ago
    The SFO airport BART line serves the suburbs too and it counts just fine. Airport connections come in a bunch of different varieties. I agree that Bangkok's is definitely one that's faced challenges though!

markbao 10y ago

I had no idea that airport train ridership was so low – I suppose that explains their generally elevated prices. Even NYC's JFK AirTrain only carried an average of about 18,000 paid passengers per day in 2014, which seems low to me (though that also translates to about $32 million annual revenue, which might be sustainable.)

helper 10y ago
18,000 passengers per day is 6,570,000 passengers annually which is about 12% of the total 54M passengers at JFK. 12% doesn't seem all that low to me.
IIAOPSW 10y ago
It doesn't help that airtrain only gets you as far as those 2 stops at the end of the A train or Jamaica terminal for the LIRR. Even after your 4.50 ride on airtrain you still have another hour or so into Manhattan. If they had followed the original proposal and built it as a connector JFK -> LGA -> Penn station (or some other central location) I bet ridership would be way up.
- markbao 10y ago
  Right. I don't know the specifics but I'd guess it was a hard sell to add another rail line in a crowded area when the A/LIRR already went to Penn.

jpatokal 10y ago

The utility of an airport train is pretty much directly correlated to a) how good the network it's connected to, and b) how slow/expensive the alternatives are. For example, everybody uses the airport trains in Tokyo, because Tokyo's train network is awesome, and the trains are both faster and cheaper than taking a taxi. The Tokyo Monorail, which is only one of two links to one of Tokyo's two main airports, has a ridership of over 300,000 pax/day. By comparison, DFW's airport link gets under 2,000 pax/day -- in large part because the total ridership of the entire DART light rail network is barely 100,000 pax/day!

aninhumer 10y ago
And the Tokyo Monorail isn't even that well connected, relatively speaking. It doesn't go to any major stations, and only interchanges with one other line before terminating at a smaller station on the orbital Yamanote line. (Although there are apparently plans to extend it to Tokyo station eventually.)

mrbabbage 10y ago

related reading: https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/quick-note-a-hypothesis-about-airport-connectors/ https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/quic... there's a lot of linked reading on airport connectors' rather bizarre propensity to attract huge amounts of capital spending relative to their eventual ridership numbers.

Animats 10y ago

It's surprising how well SFO is doing with its BART extension. Incidentally, the article missed Cleveland Hopkins Airport (CLE). Like SFO, CLE simply has a transit line that ends at the airport, not a special connection. Those seem to be more successful than short-distance shuttles that make a connection to the big system. Oakland has a shuttle between a BART station and the airport. It's cable-hauled, strangely for a 3.7 mile system. As usual, Asia is way ahead in transit. Tokyo Haneda has had a monorail for years. Incheon now has a maglev. Shanghai, of course, has the really fast maglev to the airport.

MaxGabriel 10y ago
I haven't been to the Oakland airport before, but they opened a BART line to the Coliseum station in Oakland from the OAK airport in 2014. I don't think they offer the shuttle anymore, based off their website.
- djcapelis 10y ago
  It's a cable hauled shuttle train. It is integrated with the rest of the BART system, but you do have to switch to a completely separate train that uses separate tech, so it's fair to call it a shuttle. But you're totally right that it's not a shuttle bus anymore, those are gone now. :)
amluto 10y ago
SFO BART is, in my opinion, a shockingly poorly operated line, at least for people who live on the peninsula. Suppose I want to go from Palo Alto to SFO. I can take the Caltrain and get to Millbrae very quickly. Check. Then I can fantasize that someone would dig a very expensive tunnel from the Millbrae station to SFO and either run a train every 5-10 minutes to SFO or run one train to SFO for each Caltrain that stops at Millbrae. Amazingly, my fantasy is half realized. That tunnel exists, is electrified, is well-maintained, and it's called the BART. For reasons that probably make sense in the minds of the mess of uncooperative local transit agencies, the train doesn't run before 9 pm on weekdays, and they steadfastly refuse to make the timing work well for Caltrain riders. On weekdays before 9, I can still use the train, but there's an extra pointless transfer, and they still refuse to make the schedule workable. So building the thing is only part of the battle. The transit agencies still need to make sure that the schedules and, in particular, time spent sitting around waiting for transfers, doesn't slow it down to the point of unusability.

Scoundreller 10y ago

One thing I appreciate is that the express bus to Montreal's airport is the 747 bus. I've never taken it, and I already know what it is. I bet I could ask anyone in the city "How do I get on the 747 bus?" and they'll know what I'm asking for.

aninhumer 10y ago
I think that numbering convention for airport buses is fairly common. Leeds Bradford Airport near me has the 737, 747 and 757. (And for some reason, the 967.) And I'm sure I've seen similar elsewhere.
- david-given 10y ago
  Glasgow, Dublin, Heathrow have them too.
  - Scoundreller 10y ago
    Toronto is 192. Who knows why?

djcapelis 10y ago

This analysis is flawed as it is based off passenger numbers that include passengers transferring through the airport. This is why ATL seems so low. The reality is that ATL's passenger numbers includes a huge fraction of people transferring from one flight to another, (much more than other airports) none of which are ever going to take a train, because those passengers have no need to leave the airport. Conversely, many of the airports with relatively high ridership probably have a greater fraction of passengers terminating or originating their trips there. The analysis really needs to look at the passenger numbers for trips originated/terminated. Not the passengers merely boarding planes there.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
zymhan 10y ago
Yeah, I was surprised to see Atlanta on there too. Comparing hubs like ATL and JFK and ORD to desinations like PDX and Montreal is not a fair analysis.
mgbmtl 10y ago
Yep, most of the airports compared have a much higher rate of transfers than Montreal. People rarely transfer in Montreal. Toronto is a much bigger hub. This is the second click-bait titled article from this author on the topic. It seems more like an exercise in stats, with very little actual context.
Programmatic 10y ago
Indeed. That was the first thing that caught my eye in the graph since I enjoy using the MARTA system in ATL when I go there and it's pretty busy. It didn't pass the sniff test when I saw that. I did some quick digging. The term to google to get local traffic without connecting passenger info is "origin and destination", and it looks like O&D is about a third of the overall traffic[0] since there are ~45m total enplaned annually and of that ~15m enplaned from origin. Doubling the enplaned number to get the enplaned and deplaned number would be about 82k daily average. With 10k daily metro riders, 12% ridership seems pretty good. [0]: "ATL is anchored by a large, local traffic base with 15 million O&D enplaned passengers for fiscal year (FY) 2014." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fitch-upgrades-atlanta-ga-passenger-205500804.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fitch-upgrades-atlanta-ga-pas...

__mp 10y ago

For airport trains to be effective they need to be connected to public transport. Otherwise these trains will not be used. For reference: I checked on the Swiss Rail Network operator page and there are 18 transit options to get from the main station in Zürich to the airport (https://i.imgur.com/GJTC0F3.png https://i.imgur.com/GJTC0F3.png ). Some of these connections are trams and take a while longer. There is even a direct train to get from Zürich Airport to Geneva Airport. It takes 3 hours and 9 minutes which is about the same as taking the plane with checked-in luggage. Also here's a simulation of the timetable of the rail network: http://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/ http://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/

crdb 10y ago
Having done ZRH-GVA many, many more times than I care to count in both directions, may I recommend the plane. The flight itself is REALLY quick and very scenic, even (especially?) at night with the moonlit snowy mountains [1], which are to your side, not under you (try to look south), and the stars. You're barely getting used to being in flight and they are already handing over the little chocolate and asking you to fasten your seat belt. Both ZRH and GVA (especially GVA) are ultra fast airports where check-in and security are a breeze (I recommend the mobile boarding pass) and there is fairly little walking. You can definitely door-to-door it in much less on the plane even with checked-in luggage (unless it's substantially changed in the last 3-4 years). Price wise I used to fly that route for 30-40 CHF, very competitive. It was sometimes cheaper to fly to London via ZRH than direct from GVA. Meanwhile, whilst there are a few direct trains, most have a stop in the middle to change trains (from memory: Bern? maybe Biel or something that starts with L) and you have to carry your bags back out and stand in the cold for a few minutes and stress about whether you're on the right platform. Also, the bag space in second class is quite limited. On the plus side, you avoid taking trains to/from the airports, or getting frustrated with Switzerland's low speed limits on the highway. I'm surprised the OP uses North American cities as examples of airport connectors. Hong Kong, Tokyo (NRT) and Shanghai to cite three big international destinations have great airport connectors which make sense considering the distances at play. I've always wondered why planners don't send their team to visit the top 10-20 airports in the world to check what the competition is doing. Singapore is an example of the airport being close enough that you might as well take a taxi and a rapid transit to the "centre" (what is the centre, anyway - CBD, Orchard? there are a lot of hubs) makes less sense. Montreal's situation looks more like Singapore's than Tokyo's. London is an example of where the extremely expensive airport connector (Heathrow Express) ends up somewhere with nothing except cheap hotels and slow connections, which is why they're finally getting round to building Crossrail, which goes from the Heathrow terminals all the way to all the major hubs (including the City and Canary Wharf, great news for those who have to fly transatlantic). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hvWN3jOvvM&t=1m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hvWN3jOvvM&t=1m20s

tcj_phx 10y ago

Phoenix's sky train connects to the east economy parking lot, before continuing to the light rail. Wikipedia says it's being extended to the rental car center on the west side of the airport. When this is finished, they won't need to run busses anymore. It's perfectly useful, especially for people who park at the airport's economy lot. But the graph on this page makes Phoenix's train seem useless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHX_Sky_Train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHX_Sky_Train (When Terminal 4 was designed/built in the late-80's, they left space for a people-mover-tunnel. When they came back 20 years later to build the people-mover, they realized there wasn't enough space for the tunnel. They built an elevated people mover instead. This is/was the only/first airport train to go over an active taxiway.)

coldtea 10y ago

>Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of taking a metro home from the airport. I think most people would love that too, which is why everyone is so excited about it. But even if everyone will use it at some point or another, most only go to the airport once or twice a year. Thus, on any given day, not many people will use it. And that means low ridership. And how is that a problem for the person writing the post? Other than tax-wise, which can easily be solved with a ticket price?

mgbmtl 10y ago
Not to mention that for tourists visiting Montreal, the current situation is rather pathetic (basically take a taxi that will get stuck in traffic, or try to figure out where to buy a bus ticket).