Chicago's "L" goes directly to both ORD and MDW. My brief time there showed that things could be far more connected than New York's system.
Seattle just built a train to the airport (yay) but for bureaucratic reasons, it doesn't actually go in to the airport. It goes to the far edge of the airport, so you have to lug your luggage outside through the entire parking lot.
Meanwhile, everyone who took an Uber can step right into the departures area.
And, as you mention, New York is much much worse in this regard. The AirTrain from JFK costs $5, more than it costs to go from anywhere to anywhere else in all of NYC on the subway.
I'm okay with this. If I'm going to the airport, I'm identifying myself as a New Yorker (or visitor) with the means to travel by air. It doesn't make sense to use a minimum wage worker in the Bronx's taxes to subsidize my vacations.
Broadly, however, I agree that our lack of downtown-to-airport express rail lines is embarrassing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/12/nyregion/train-to-jfk-sco...
Realistically speaking, who is making leisure or business trips where a few dollars is a major concern?
In reality people don't visit a city and spend a precise, calculated number of dollars.
To get from the station to the airport, you need to take a bus or a taxi round half the perimeter of the airport. Which, if you don't have long before your flight, and the bus drives off before you board, leaving several passengers fighting over the handful of taxis in this tiny town, can be quite stressful, i can assure you.
It's a highly salient point of failure for visitors, and generally is bad PR. But besides looking bad, it's not clear that investing in single-seat-to-terminal trains to the airports are actually the best use of very limited dollars.
The JFK AirTrain for example has a ridership of ~11,000 per day. There's an argument to be made that those riders have greater economic impact than average, but ultimately that ridership resembles some of the more far-flung residential neighborhood subway stations (see: Graham St L, Bergen St F, 145th St 1 in Harlem, etc).
Compare that with parts of the system that are in dire need of maintenance/renovation with much greater ridership (see: Herald Square - 125,000 riders a day, Union Square - 106,000 riders a day, Times Sq - 202,000 riders a day).
In a world where costs are under control and funding abundant, I am all in on airport links, but right now? Right now I'm not convinced this is where money should be going, as much as it sucks for someone who flies a lot like me.
The baseline is the JFK AirTrain, which carries 11,000 riders per day, out of an estimated total of 5.6M daily subway riders (not counting commuter rail), against a total flyer volume of ~60M a year.
The Heathrow Express, which does take you straight to the terminal, for example carries about 17,000 riders per day, out of an estimated 7M total daily Tube riders (not counting commuter rail), against a total flyer volume of ~78M a year.
Another data point: the BART SFO station (also direct-to-terminal) carries about 6,500 riders per day, out of an estimated total 423,000 daily riders system-wide, against a total flyer volume of ~50M a year.
It's not all doom and gloom - we also know that Narita Airport was able to double its proportion of passengers arriving/departing by rail by improving service. But even if the same results can be replicated in the US - the baseline numbers are so low that the increased ridership would still represent one of the smallest parts of the overall transit system.
FWIW I'm one of the beneficiaries of these rail links, and I'm very grateful they exist - but these projects are ultimately more about signaling/politics/PR than they are about shrewd allocation of infrastructure spending.
Somehow other countries manage to justify it. Tokyo, London, Paris (TGV too!), Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Beijing... the list goes on. But somehow building infrastructure is hard to justify in the US. Pennywise and pound foolish.
China is able to rapidly build infrastructure because it didn’t have very much. In twenty to fifty years when everything is dur for replacement, that will be the true test of infrastructure.
NYC can and should build trains that go from dense center city locations right into airport terminals. Like real countries do. If they did they would be wildly popular.
Is there a well understood reason why?
LaGuardia, by all rights, shouldn't exist. It needs to be shut down - aside from the fact that the airport itself is already falling part, its mere existence actually creates delays across all three airport systems in the area (JFK, LGA, and EWR). Because of the way the traffic zones intersect, it would actually be more efficient to reroute all existing traffic from LGA to EWR and JFK, and we'd end up with fewer delays with the same overall capacity.
Unfortunately, LGA is the most convenient airport for people who live on the Upper East Side. They're wealthy and politically well-connected, so they would strongly oppose any efforts to shut it down. They also are only a $20 cab ride away from LGA, so the fact that it doesn't have heavy rail/light rail transportation there doesn't bother them.
The constraining factor for flights in and out of NYC, or nearly any place, is runway capacity, not available airspace. For all practical purposes airspace is essentially unlimited. You could bulldoze Brooklyn, strategically place a couple hundred runways on it, and land thousands of planes per hour if you wanted to, maybe a couple less if it got foggy.
For reference I have a pilots license and have flown across and through NYC's class B airspace many times. This post makes no sense.
What you're saying flies in the face of a decent amount of reporting on the matter, as well as what I've been told by a friend of mine who happens to work in ATC at one of the aforementioned airports.
I've looked into this some - but if someone is better versed in the history of this stuff, please jump in.
For LGA, there have been attempts for years to extend the N train north from its current terminus in Astoria, to LGA. This is the most economical way to connect the airport to the mass transit system (there is currently no train whatsoever, the only way to LGA via public transit involves a bus).
Most proposals for this line extension called for the N train to become elevated on its approach to the airport, and the neighborhood has loudly opposed any of the nuisances that come with living next to an elevated train. This political pressure has been impossible to overcome, while tunneling has not been considered feasible or affordable.
On top of this, the state government which runs the NYC subway is reluctant to endorse this plan also, since connecting LGA to the NYC subway doesn't serve the (very important) suburban electorate. The state government has consistently pushed instead for the airport to be connected to a nearby suburban commuter rail station instead (Mets-Willets Pt on the LIRR). The political calculations behind this are pretty obvious, despite this option being far less connected to the greater transit network and promising far less ridership, and also perpetuates the need for a "monorail" transfer, like JFK and EWR.
The history of the transit situation for JFK and EWR are also interesting (and like most things NYC-infrastructure related, extensively documented), but this post is running pretty long. Happy to go into it if people are interested, but the tl;dr is: funding instability, financial downturns, squabbling fiefdoms, jurisdictional battles between NJ/NY, and the ever-present NIMBYism.
1. Normal rapid transit cars have no space for luggage
2. There are no express trains, so it’s not guaranteed to be faster than driving (it often is during rush hour however)
3. The airport stations are a 10 minute walk to security instead of a 1 minute walk like the car dropoff gets
4. When traveling for business I can charge in an Uber, spread out in the back seat and get some work done. On the L I’m in a cramped seat where using a laptop is hard.
So on paper I appreciate the approach New York and London (and others) have taken with a premium airport-only service.
The O/D pairs of people going to and from airports also tends to be very dispersed, which is not great for rail unless you have an extremely comprehensive, rapid rail network covering nearly all possible trips.
Airports also, by their nature, tend to be out of the way and away from busy neighborhoods, which limits their potential catchment. Even when they are linearly arranged, terminals are generally set back from these linear routes due to their circular road networks and parking requirements. Look at how much additional mileage is required to serve the terminal at Dulles in DC, for example: https://i1.wp.com/www.thetransportpolitic.com/wp-content/upl...
Finally, airport layouts themselves tend to be really bad for transit; common configurations for airports, laid out in a circle (JFK) or a very long terminal (LGA) will require some significant chunk of passengers to walk to and from any rail station sufficiently long enough for a regular train, to the point where you need a people mover around the airport anyways (SFO, ORD). And if you need a smaller people mover to shuttle people around anyways, why not just shuttle them to a central train station a bit of a distance away, so that the rail can effectively serve both further destinations and the airport passengers?
JFK: just have to transfer from AirTrain to regular subway in Jamaica (?) Queens.
Newark: take the bus to Newark station and take PATH train to lower Manhattan.
Plus you get to see real New Jersians and New Yorkers. They are not overly friendly and they dress way too fancy compared to the Californians.
From Manhattan, it's an NJT to the Newark airport stop from where the cutest little monorail [1] takes you to the airport.
I live in Manhattan and regularly take the LIRR to Jamaica, from where I catch the Airtrain to JFK. It's a predictable-duration trip. It costs $10 to Juno to Penn Station, $7.50 (off peak) to $10.25 (peak) for the train ticket, and $5 for the Airtrain. And I don't get sick reading on a train like I do in a car.
Airports are a particularly visible omission, for a certain class of people, but they aren't in the top 5 or so most valuable possible extensions to the subway system.
Speaking of class, some transit systems suffer more than others from lacking a healthy mix of ridership affluence (MTA isn't one of them). Descending into a spiral of "only for the poor" is one of the failure modes of transit systems. If an airport line "injecting" its share of non-destitute riders is what keeps the while system from falling off that cliff it would be worth far more than just their tickets or the directly prevented road traffic.
High status destinations have indirect benefits for the whole system.
This is sort of like the case of the couple who buys more house than they need because the in-laws visit once a year and they insist on having a room for them. It's silly to optimize for rare events. When you have to go to the airport, then it's particularly noticeable that there isn't a route to the airport. But going to the airport isn't on your everyday agenda. There are far more beneficial routes.
When I told a cab driver in Tokyo I wanted to go to Narita he was extremely confused and had the hotel bell hop explain to me that, basically, I was nuts and should take the train.
That's about as convenient as taking the LIRR to/from JFK, or the NJ Transit to EWR, which many people in NYC already do.
It's the same train that takes you from one terminal to the next. The alternative would be to force the LIRR or the A train to stop at literally every terminal on its way to Jamaica/Far Rockaway. That would be way worse.
It's not like transferring between them is any more inconvenient than having to transfer between two subway lines, so it seems like a distinction that not particularly meaningful.
The NEX in Tokyo is great, since Narita is way outside of Tokyo. As is the connection to Incheon directly from the center of Seoul.
Turns what would have been a painful ass commute into something relaxing.
In Seoul I could even check in the luggage for my flight before hopping on the train.
I guess if you hate convenience....