6 ms·

U.S. Airports No Longer Have to Build Their Own Terrible Trains

56 points by elsewhen 6y ago

eatbitseveryday 6y ago
What happens with the existing ones? We already have many large airports, and this article seems to imply new airports don’t have to do this.
- jacurtis 6y ago
  The new law simply removes the requirement for airports to manage their own internal transportation. So it leaves the possibility for public transit to connect riders directly to terminals, which was previously not allowed. This doesn't force airports to use Public Transportation or restrict them from doing what they are already doing. The fact that most large airports where this would apply are already built to use the system the way it is, seems to me that it is unlikely we will see any change for at least a few decades. This change is a significant overhaul of the organization and layout of an airport. Airports aren't changing that often and new ones don't pop up very often. Likewise, I am not sure the demand for the change is really there to pressure airports to change. From the airport user's perspective, the only change is that they could now take public transportation directly to the terminal that their plane is at. This is different than the current system where you get off of public transportation at a main terminal, check your bags, get tickets, go through security, etc and then board an automated train to go to an auxiliary terminal where the plane is located.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    >which was previously not allowed. That wouldn't seem to be universally true. As noted elsewhere, the Silver Line in Boston (buses with a dedicated lane) serves terminals at the airport from one of the city's train stations in addition to serving some locations that were largely undeveloped when most of the city's subway system was created.
    - bobthepanda 6y ago
      The issue is more with the specific pot of money. One could totally build what you’re describing, just not with Passenger Facility Charges. Given the general poor state of public transit funding in the US not using that money means not building a train at all.
ghaff 6y ago
The funding angle aside, there are still reasons why large airports have their own "terrible trains" (and buses) to connect to the transit system. There's usually just one airport stop in any case, which in a major airport, may (or may not) be convenient to one or two terminals but will require some sort of separate transportation system from at least part of the airport.
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Large airports outside the US often do have one station per terminal, or a station conveniently between two terminals. See eg London Heathrow, Tokyo Haneda, Tokyo Narita, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi and many more.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Some do. Mostly when they're at the end of the line because you're mostly not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route such as in the case of San Francisco, say. Which didn't originally have a BART connection at all. (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.)
    - Clewza313 6y ago
      Large modern airports tend to be at the end of the line, because few cities have the space to build them anywhere near the center anymore. Then again, Sydney is 15 min from the city center and has two stops, one each for the international and domestic terminals, on a line that continues far into the burbs.
    - ipsi 6y ago
      > (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.) Terminal 4 at Heathrow is a different "route", in that trains go to Terminal 2/3, then 5 or 4 IIRC (and you have to switch if you get on the wrong one), but they go there. > not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route Generally, but see Sydney Airport here, where the Domestic and International terminals are very close to the Central station, which is in turn almost the start of the T8 line. I'm sure there are others as well.
Clewza313 6y ago
OMG. I'd long wondered why the US had so many of these ridiculous boondoggles (eg AirTrain JFK) and now I know. Unfortunately this comes too late for one airport that has absolutely miserable public transport, since they're already building their $2 billion boondoggle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAX_Automated_People_Mover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAX_Automated_People_Mover
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  AirTrain JFK exists because - the circle of terminals is too wide to be well served by one or two stations without significant walking, but too small to have a full length subway or commuter train stop every terminal. If you built a direct heavy rail link, you would probably need something like the AirTrain still; BART has a similar setup at SFO, as does DFW - JFK itself is located awkwardly. It is too far away from straight path rail lines. So you are either diverting everyone passing through on a time consuming detour via every terminal, or you are splitting frequency upstream and depriving commuters of train capacity they used to have.
viceisdumb 6y ago
> On January 12, a time when most of us were distracted by other events pertaining to the federal government Oh Vice, so close to admitting they liked a Trump Administration policy, but won't say his name, before spending an entire article essentially thanking Trump for doing what Republicans are supposed to do -- removing a stupid regulation.
SeanLuke 6y ago
This article mentions Dulles Airport's "mobile lounges", but doesn't explain their extraordinary history, which has absolutely nothing to do with the issues discussed in the article itself. [Dulles has no train connection yet]. If you've gone through DC's Dulles Airport, especially its international terminal, you may have experienced traveling in what must be described as a moving room, a kind of huge, wide bus. Long ago, these things were an experiment in a radical and wonderful 1960s approach to airport design which sadly couldn't work with our modern airport security. The original design of Dulles airport was a single rectangular building: one huge atrium. There were no terminals at all, no gates at which airplanes parked. Airplanes stayed out on the tarmac somewhere. Instead, the building had an array of what might be best described as garage doors. When your flight was ready, a mobile lounge would drive over to a certain garage door and attach to it. The door would open and everyone on the flight would walk into the lounge. The lounge would then disengage and drive you over to the plane. There, it would lift vertically until it matched the plane door and attach to the plane. You'd then walk into the plane. [Edit: yes, many european airports drive you out to the plane by bus: but you must still climb the entranceway to the airplane outdoors, and you must enter the bus in, well, traditional bus fashion. With the mobile lounges, it's as if you never went outdoors.] It was an elegant and simple distributed system. Wikipedia says it failed because it couldn't keep up with passenger numbers: but I think, at least with Dulles Airport's one-single-massive-atrium-building design, it mostly failed because it was completely incompatible with a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports. So the whole architectural design was doomed to failure. Over the years Dulles has grown terminals and security checks and underground passageways, and the lounges are now relegated to basically being buses between terminals.
- chrismcb 6y ago
  Why do you think the"single point bottle neck " was the failure? While I disagree with the need for"modern security " surely you have your single point bottle neck to enter this large room. Once in the room, you are cleared and free to travel in the lounges.
  - SeanLuke 6y ago
jcranmer 6y ago
> This unique type of U.S. transportation has no commonly-recognized name, and I will soon arbitrarily assign a term for them just to make everything easier. They're a kind of tram. I suspect the author is from New York, because the train-to-the-train of which he speaks largely doesn't exist in any other city in the US, and the concept of a two-car light rail-esque system seems astonishingly foreign to him. Especially because the tram style of light rail is quite rare in the US but rather more common in Europe. > The train itself should just go to the airport, like they do in virtually every other airport with a mass transit connection in the world. Let's look at cities in the US that have a large airport and a metrorail mass transit system: * NYC, LaGuardia: accessible only by bus * NYC, JFK: Tram system (electrified 3rd rail) that connects to two subway lines. * NYC, Newark: Monorail that connects to commuter rail station * DC, DCA: Metro stops literally between the parking garage and the airport terminals. * DC, Dulles: Metro stops literally between the parking garage and the main airport terminal (although there is a very large surface lot between the two). * Chicago, Midway: L stops literally at the terminal. * Chicago, O'Hare: L stops in the middle of the three main terminals. * Boston: T stop is roughly as far away as economy parking. No internal circulation over than buses. * San Francisco, SFO: BART stops at the airport terminals (although it does a funny Y setup to get in there). * San Francisco, Oakland: BART station is some distance from the Oakland airport. The tramline connecting them is a rubber-tired tram owned and operated by BART. * Philadelphia: SEPTA has a connection to the airport that is a commuter rail connection, with stations at several terminals. * Atlanta: MARTA stops literally at the airport terminal, in fact closer than the tram line stop to the rental car facility. * LA: Metro does not have a particularly close stop to LAX. No tram-like system at LAX. * Miami: Metro stop is at the rental car facility, terminal itself accessed via tram-like system. * Baltimore: Light rail stop at the terminal itself. (No connection between the heavy rail at Baltimore and the airport). * Cleveland: Metro stop at the airport terminal itself. In summary, of 16 airports considered here, 4 have the pattern the author decries, 9 have rail transit stops directly baked into the terminal entries, and 3 do not have either pattern. Functionally speaking, the Oakland and JFK systems are effectively mass transit spurs not built to the same technology as the main mass transit system and having little other destination than the airport, neither of which it turns out are particularly uncommon (since airports tend to be massive tracts of land far removed from anything else, it's often uneconomical to extend regular mass transit all the way to the airport). (There are basically two competing proposals to bring transit to LaGuardia. One would extend the N/W from Ditmars to the airport, the other would be an AirTrain-like system that extends to the 7/LIRR at Mets/Willet Point and is sometimes suggested to connect all the way to the existing AirTrain at Jamaica. Guess which one is moving forward.)
chrismcb 6y ago
Wish airport charts a fee to use thier train? The article mentions several times about a second fare, but I don't know if any airport that actually has a fare for their "skytrain"
- shahan312 6y ago
  JFK is one example, when you’re transferring to/from the subway/LIRR to the AirTrain, costs $7.75
- jcranmer 6y ago
  JFK, Newark, Oakland. Two of those three airports are NYC airports, and I strongly suspect (especially from the train-to-the-train phrasing) that the author is mostly complaining about JFK's setup, which is an unusual setup for airports.
m4rtink 6y ago
There was an interesting issue with a rail connection on the Narita International Airport serving Tokyo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narita_International_Airport#Construction_and_local_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narita_International_Airport#C... The airport was build in big style on the 60s on farmland forcefully bought from local farmers and should have been served by a Shinkansen high speed line directly from Tokyo station, making it's 50+ km distance from the city center an non-issue! Lets say this did not go well with the farmers, who felt their rightful possession was forcefully taken and started what was effectively a major guerilla warfare campaign against the airport. There was a lot of sabotage, arson, general attacks and even high towers built near the Airport edge on still private land. Over the years the airport project managed to prevail and the situation mostly quieted down (there is actually still one farmer quietly farmer who never sold tending his farm in the middle of the airport grounds, complete with a route access tunnel!). Still, there was the problem of actually getting to the airport from Tokyo - no one wanted to risk another war with farmers for the land needed to build the Shinkansen line to the airport, so it ended up with a fully built Shinkansen station under the airport but no rail actually connecting to it. This got even more bizzare over the years as private railway companies creeped with their conventional lines ever closer to the airport yet the airport staunchly prevented anyone from using their shiny useless station with unworthy non-shinkansen trains. The situation was untenable long term, with travelers having to travel to a nearby train station and then take a bus to the airport, causing delays. So finally in 1991 after immense political pressure the first rail connection to the airport opened and these days 3 different rail lines serve the airport, including a non-shinkanse high speed train that takes you to the center of Tokyo in 45 minutes with 160 km top speed (~ 1/2 of what modern shinkansen can do).
- mattm 6y ago
  Wow, thanks for the background on this. I lived in Japan previously and I had always assumed that there was no Shinkansen to Narita due to airline lobbying. Most international flights go through Tokyo. If you live in Nagoya or Osaka and a direct Shinkansen connection was available to Narita for your international flight, I think a lot of people would choose to take the Shinkansen to/from the airport rather than the domestic flight.
treis 6y ago
I'm pretty sure this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Every airport in the US in a city with a subway (or equivalent) has a station at the airport. Off the top of my head ATL, ORD, JFK, SLC, OAK all do. And the point of the plane trains is to move people between different terminals. I have less international airport experience but the only way they don't have them is if they use buses instead.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  is your contention that he is lying about the existance airport-only rail lines? Or that he is lying about the PFC subsidy restriction?
  - treis 6y ago
    I added in a paragraph with an edit that you probably didn't see, but to be clear these are separate problems. The plane trains are to get people around an airport. The subway/train connections are to get people to/from an airport. He's wrong two ways. (1) most if not all major US airports are connected to rail and (2) international airports use plane trains and if they don't they have buses that do the same thing.
- currymj 6y ago
  JFK certainly doesn't have a subway stop at the airport. You have to get off the subway, get a separate AirTrain ticket, and ride the AirTrain to the airport.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I think he's arguing that, with a different funding model, transportation between airport terminals would be integrated with the main transit systems. Which mostly works if the airport is at the end of the line--and, even so, it introduces some complications to the degree that intra-airport transportation is usually free.
  - treis 6y ago
    That doesn't work because you would have to go through security when transferring between terminals.
supernova87a 6y ago
I think this guy is living in a mass transit dream world, at least in the American context. Even if city mass transit systems were now allowed to serve multiple airport terminal buildings, the number of cities able to pay for, let alone plan for and build such extensions to their lines is near 0. Basically, this provision only provides benefit to a new airport (or new terminal building) going up, with a willing city metro system planning for a subway line that the airport planners also design to be integrated. The uncoordination of city infrastructure in the USA is too pervasive for us to have some NRT/HND/LHR/FRA style rail-to-airport intermodal paradise. I cannot think of a single existing US airport where this could be taken advantage of in practice in the next 20 years. And the number of new major airport terminal buildings that have gone up in cities with metro systems in the last 20 years I can count on a single hand. We will be forever stuck with a shitty bus to LaGuardia. And btw, our problem isn't getting subway lines to go to more terminals. It seems to be getting the subway to stop before it hits the terminal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEe5b_KkACw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEe5b_KkACw
- sofixa 6y ago
  Maybe we read a different article, but in this one it literally says: > Silver Line in D.C Is the one for which the rules were changed and the one in the process of being built, so that's at least one
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

56 points by elsewhen 6y ago

What happens with the existing ones? We already have many large airports, and this article seems to imply new airports don’t have to do this.

jacurtis 6y ago
The new law simply removes the requirement for airports to manage their own internal transportation. So it leaves the possibility for public transit to connect riders directly to terminals, which was previously not allowed. This doesn't force airports to use Public Transportation or restrict them from doing what they are already doing. The fact that most large airports where this would apply are already built to use the system the way it is, seems to me that it is unlikely we will see any change for at least a few decades. This change is a significant overhaul of the organization and layout of an airport. Airports aren't changing that often and new ones don't pop up very often. Likewise, I am not sure the demand for the change is really there to pressure airports to change. From the airport user's perspective, the only change is that they could now take public transportation directly to the terminal that their plane is at. This is different than the current system where you get off of public transportation at a main terminal, check your bags, get tickets, go through security, etc and then board an automated train to go to an auxiliary terminal where the plane is located.
- ghaff 6y ago
  >which was previously not allowed. That wouldn't seem to be universally true. As noted elsewhere, the Silver Line in Boston (buses with a dedicated lane) serves terminals at the airport from one of the city's train stations in addition to serving some locations that were largely undeveloped when most of the city's subway system was created.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    The issue is more with the specific pot of money. One could totally build what you’re describing, just not with Passenger Facility Charges. Given the general poor state of public transit funding in the US not using that money means not building a train at all.

ghaff 6y ago

The funding angle aside, there are still reasons why large airports have their own "terrible trains" (and buses) to connect to the transit system. There's usually just one airport stop in any case, which in a major airport, may (or may not) be convenient to one or two terminals but will require some sort of separate transportation system from at least part of the airport.

Clewza313 6y ago
Large airports outside the US often do have one station per terminal, or a station conveniently between two terminals. See eg London Heathrow, Tokyo Haneda, Tokyo Narita, Kuala Lumpur, Delhi and many more.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Some do. Mostly when they're at the end of the line because you're mostly not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route such as in the case of San Francisco, say. Which didn't originally have a BART connection at all. (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.)
  - Clewza313 6y ago
    Large modern airports tend to be at the end of the line, because few cities have the space to build them anywhere near the center anymore. Then again, Sydney is 15 min from the city center and has two stops, one each for the international and domestic terminals, on a line that continues far into the burbs.
  - ipsi 6y ago
    > (And Heathrow as I recall still needs a bus for Terminal 4.) Terminal 4 at Heathrow is a different "route", in that trains go to Terminal 2/3, then 5 or 4 IIRC (and you have to switch if you get on the wrong one), but they go there. > not going to make a bunch of airport stops in the middle of a public transportation route Generally, but see Sydney Airport here, where the Domestic and International terminals are very close to the Central station, which is in turn almost the start of the T8 line. I'm sure there are others as well.

Clewza313 6y ago

OMG. I'd long wondered why the US had so many of these ridiculous boondoggles (eg AirTrain JFK) and now I know. Unfortunately this comes too late for one airport that has absolutely miserable public transport, since they're already building their $2 billion boondoggle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAX_Automated_People_Mover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAX_Automated_People_Mover

bobthepanda 6y ago
AirTrain JFK exists because - the circle of terminals is too wide to be well served by one or two stations without significant walking, but too small to have a full length subway or commuter train stop every terminal. If you built a direct heavy rail link, you would probably need something like the AirTrain still; BART has a similar setup at SFO, as does DFW - JFK itself is located awkwardly. It is too far away from straight path rail lines. So you are either diverting everyone passing through on a time consuming detour via every terminal, or you are splitting frequency upstream and depriving commuters of train capacity they used to have.

viceisdumb 6y ago

> On January 12, a time when most of us were distracted by other events pertaining to the federal government Oh Vice, so close to admitting they liked a Trump Administration policy, but won't say his name, before spending an entire article essentially thanking Trump for doing what Republicans are supposed to do -- removing a stupid regulation.

SeanLuke 6y ago

This article mentions Dulles Airport's "mobile lounges", but doesn't explain their extraordinary history, which has absolutely nothing to do with the issues discussed in the article itself. [Dulles has no train connection yet]. If you've gone through DC's Dulles Airport, especially its international terminal, you may have experienced traveling in what must be described as a moving room, a kind of huge, wide bus. Long ago, these things were an experiment in a radical and wonderful 1960s approach to airport design which sadly couldn't work with our modern airport security. The original design of Dulles airport was a single rectangular building: one huge atrium. There were no terminals at all, no gates at which airplanes parked. Airplanes stayed out on the tarmac somewhere. Instead, the building had an array of what might be best described as garage doors. When your flight was ready, a mobile lounge would drive over to a certain garage door and attach to it. The door would open and everyone on the flight would walk into the lounge. The lounge would then disengage and drive you over to the plane. There, it would lift vertically until it matched the plane door and attach to the plane. You'd then walk into the plane. [Edit: yes, many european airports drive you out to the plane by bus: but you must still climb the entranceway to the airplane outdoors, and you must enter the bus in, well, traditional bus fashion. With the mobile lounges, it's as if you never went outdoors.] It was an elegant and simple distributed system. Wikipedia says it failed because it couldn't keep up with passenger numbers: but I think, at least with Dulles Airport's one-single-massive-atrium-building design, it mostly failed because it was completely incompatible with a single-point bottleneck security line (sadly) required at modern airports. So the whole architectural design was doomed to failure. Over the years Dulles has grown terminals and security checks and underground passageways, and the lounges are now relegated to basically being buses between terminals.

chrismcb 6y ago
Why do you think the"single point bottle neck " was the failure? While I disagree with the need for"modern security " surely you have your single point bottle neck to enter this large room. Once in the room, you are cleared and free to travel in the lounges.
- SeanLuke 6y ago

jcranmer 6y ago

> This unique type of U.S. transportation has no commonly-recognized name, and I will soon arbitrarily assign a term for them just to make everything easier. They're a kind of tram. I suspect the author is from New York, because the train-to-the-train of which he speaks largely doesn't exist in any other city in the US, and the concept of a two-car light rail-esque system seems astonishingly foreign to him. Especially because the tram style of light rail is quite rare in the US but rather more common in Europe. > The train itself should just go to the airport, like they do in virtually every other airport with a mass transit connection in the world. Let's look at cities in the US that have a large airport and a metrorail mass transit system: * NYC, LaGuardia: accessible only by bus * NYC, JFK: Tram system (electrified 3rd rail) that connects to two subway lines. * NYC, Newark: Monorail that connects to commuter rail station * DC, DCA: Metro stops literally between the parking garage and the airport terminals. * DC, Dulles: Metro stops literally between the parking garage and the main airport terminal (although there is a very large surface lot between the two). * Chicago, Midway: L stops literally at the terminal. * Chicago, O'Hare: L stops in the middle of the three main terminals. * Boston: T stop is roughly as far away as economy parking. No internal circulation over than buses. * San Francisco, SFO: BART stops at the airport terminals (although it does a funny Y setup to get in there). * San Francisco, Oakland: BART station is some distance from the Oakland airport. The tramline connecting them is a rubber-tired tram owned and operated by BART. * Philadelphia: SEPTA has a connection to the airport that is a commuter rail connection, with stations at several terminals. * Atlanta: MARTA stops literally at the airport terminal, in fact closer than the tram line stop to the rental car facility. * LA: Metro does not have a particularly close stop to LAX. No tram-like system at LAX. * Miami: Metro stop is at the rental car facility, terminal itself accessed via tram-like system. * Baltimore: Light rail stop at the terminal itself. (No connection between the heavy rail at Baltimore and the airport). * Cleveland: Metro stop at the airport terminal itself. In summary, of 16 airports considered here, 4 have the pattern the author decries, 9 have rail transit stops directly baked into the terminal entries, and 3 do not have either pattern. Functionally speaking, the Oakland and JFK systems are effectively mass transit spurs not built to the same technology as the main mass transit system and having little other destination than the airport, neither of which it turns out are particularly uncommon (since airports tend to be massive tracts of land far removed from anything else, it's often uneconomical to extend regular mass transit all the way to the airport). (There are basically two competing proposals to bring transit to LaGuardia. One would extend the N/W from Ditmars to the airport, the other would be an AirTrain-like system that extends to the 7/LIRR at Mets/Willet Point and is sometimes suggested to connect all the way to the existing AirTrain at Jamaica. Guess which one is moving forward.)

chrismcb 6y ago

Wish airport charts a fee to use thier train? The article mentions several times about a second fare, but I don't know if any airport that actually has a fare for their "skytrain"

shahan312 6y ago
JFK is one example, when you’re transferring to/from the subway/LIRR to the AirTrain, costs $7.75
jcranmer 6y ago
JFK, Newark, Oakland. Two of those three airports are NYC airports, and I strongly suspect (especially from the train-to-the-train phrasing) that the author is mostly complaining about JFK's setup, which is an unusual setup for airports.

m4rtink 6y ago

There was an interesting issue with a rail connection on the Narita International Airport serving Tokyo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narita_International_Airport#Construction_and_local_resistance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narita_International_Airport#C... The airport was build in big style on the 60s on farmland forcefully bought from local farmers and should have been served by a Shinkansen high speed line directly from Tokyo station, making it's 50+ km distance from the city center an non-issue! Lets say this did not go well with the farmers, who felt their rightful possession was forcefully taken and started what was effectively a major guerilla warfare campaign against the airport. There was a lot of sabotage, arson, general attacks and even high towers built near the Airport edge on still private land. Over the years the airport project managed to prevail and the situation mostly quieted down (there is actually still one farmer quietly farmer who never sold tending his farm in the middle of the airport grounds, complete with a route access tunnel!). Still, there was the problem of actually getting to the airport from Tokyo - no one wanted to risk another war with farmers for the land needed to build the Shinkansen line to the airport, so it ended up with a fully built Shinkansen station under the airport but no rail actually connecting to it. This got even more bizzare over the years as private railway companies creeped with their conventional lines ever closer to the airport yet the airport staunchly prevented anyone from using their shiny useless station with unworthy non-shinkansen trains. The situation was untenable long term, with travelers having to travel to a nearby train station and then take a bus to the airport, causing delays. So finally in 1991 after immense political pressure the first rail connection to the airport opened and these days 3 different rail lines serve the airport, including a non-shinkanse high speed train that takes you to the center of Tokyo in 45 minutes with 160 km top speed (~ 1/2 of what modern shinkansen can do).

mattm 6y ago
Wow, thanks for the background on this. I lived in Japan previously and I had always assumed that there was no Shinkansen to Narita due to airline lobbying. Most international flights go through Tokyo. If you live in Nagoya or Osaka and a direct Shinkansen connection was available to Narita for your international flight, I think a lot of people would choose to take the Shinkansen to/from the airport rather than the domestic flight.

treis 6y ago

I'm pretty sure this guy has no idea what he's talking about. Every airport in the US in a city with a subway (or equivalent) has a station at the airport. Off the top of my head ATL, ORD, JFK, SLC, OAK all do. And the point of the plane trains is to move people between different terminals. I have less international airport experience but the only way they don't have them is if they use buses instead.

metalliqaz 6y ago
is your contention that he is lying about the existance airport-only rail lines? Or that he is lying about the PFC subsidy restriction?
- treis 6y ago
  I added in a paragraph with an edit that you probably didn't see, but to be clear these are separate problems. The plane trains are to get people around an airport. The subway/train connections are to get people to/from an airport. He's wrong two ways. (1) most if not all major US airports are connected to rail and (2) international airports use plane trains and if they don't they have buses that do the same thing.
currymj 6y ago
JFK certainly doesn't have a subway stop at the airport. You have to get off the subway, get a separate AirTrain ticket, and ride the AirTrain to the airport.
ghaff 6y ago
I think he's arguing that, with a different funding model, transportation between airport terminals would be integrated with the main transit systems. Which mostly works if the airport is at the end of the line--and, even so, it introduces some complications to the degree that intra-airport transportation is usually free.
- treis 6y ago
  That doesn't work because you would have to go through security when transferring between terminals.

supernova87a 6y ago

I think this guy is living in a mass transit dream world, at least in the American context. Even if city mass transit systems were now allowed to serve multiple airport terminal buildings, the number of cities able to pay for, let alone plan for and build such extensions to their lines is near 0. Basically, this provision only provides benefit to a new airport (or new terminal building) going up, with a willing city metro system planning for a subway line that the airport planners also design to be integrated. The uncoordination of city infrastructure in the USA is too pervasive for us to have some NRT/HND/LHR/FRA style rail-to-airport intermodal paradise. I cannot think of a single existing US airport where this could be taken advantage of in practice in the next 20 years. And the number of new major airport terminal buildings that have gone up in cities with metro systems in the last 20 years I can count on a single hand. We will be forever stuck with a shitty bus to LaGuardia. And btw, our problem isn't getting subway lines to go to more terminals. It seems to be getting the subway to stop before it hits the terminal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEe5b_KkACw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEe5b_KkACw

sofixa 6y ago
Maybe we read a different article, but in this one it literally says: > Silver Line in D.C Is the one for which the rules were changed and the one in the process of being built, so that's at least one
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]