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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

OAK is exactly the system the article describes: there’s a BART station far away at the Coliseum. To get to the airport you have to take a separate monorail that is slow and adds $6 to your fare: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coliseum%E2%80%93Oakland_Int...

I haven't flown into OAK for years. (Used to do it semi-regularly when I was flying JetBlue.) Back then it was buses which would get terribly backed up and overcrowded to the point where you might have to wait 30 minutes to get on one.

That makes it clearer what he's talking about. But still doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me. OAK and the others mentioned have spurs because of geography, not money. As an example, It'd be impractical to shunt the BART over to OAK and it would make the service a lot worse for those not going to OAk.

Yeah no. Not one of the three giant airports in the NYC area has a local or regional train that stops in any terminal at all. It’s a disaster.

LAX would like a word with you. Bring your walking shoes.

LAX doesn’t have an airport station (well, there is an Aviation/LAX station on the green line, but it requires a 10 minute bus connection to the terminal).

SJC (San Jose is the biggest city in the Bay Area) has no airport station for either VTA (light rail) or CalTrain (heavy rail). Both pass within a quarter mile of the airport.

SAN has two light rail stations nearby, but not really at the airport.

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.

That doesn't work because you would have to go through security when transferring between terminals.

And that's what you do at some airports. Even if there isn't a train post-security connecting terminals, at many airports, not all terminals are connected post-security.

is your contention that he is lying about the existance airport-only rail lines? Or that he is lying about the PFC subsidy restriction?

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.

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