NYC Ditches Plans for Rail Link to La Guardia Airport
New York spent $8B on La Guardia rebuild, will bus people to subway.
NYC’s La Guardia Airport has emerged from an $8B renovation without the two items it probably needed the most—a rail link and a longer runway.
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced this week that rising construction costs have doomed what was supposed to be the final piece of the La Guardia rebuild: a light-rail connection known as AirTrain that was the critical link in the original plan to create a commute from the airport in Queens to Midtown Manhattan of less than 30 minutes.
The two massive new terminals—decorated with museum-quality impressionistic art—that have reopened at La Guardia were designed with AirTrain stations in them. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, received expedited federal approval for the rail link, which would have connected La Guardia with the No. 7 subway line and the Long Island Railroad.
When the AirTrain project was announced in 2015, the estimated cost of building the rail link to La Guardia was $450M. Multiply that times five and you get the current estimate: $2.4B.
A panel of transportation experts recommended on Monday that NYC scrap the rail link, increase public bus service to La Guardia and add shuttle buses between the airport and subway stations in northern Queens. The Port Authority will spend an estimated $500M creating dedicated bus lanes along 31st Street and 19th Avenue in Queens.
The Port Authority’s experts want air travelers to get on a shuttle bus at the airport that will travel over the new bus lanes to a subway station in Astoria—about five miles away—where passengers will transfer to the subway line to Manhattan.
The Airtrain would have involved a five-minute monorail hop directly from the La Guardia terminals to the Willets Point station on the other side of Grand Central Parkway, next to Citi Field.
The Port Authority’s experts apparently didn’t consider establishing a ferry service, even though the airport runway ends in Flushing Bay, which is where several jets have ended up when they overshot the 2M SF, 7,000-foot-long slab of precast concrete that was installed in the Bay in 1966 to let Boeing 707s land at a destination built in 1939, a place Joe Biden once referred to as “a Third World airport.”
The experts told the city that adding shuttle buses at the airport to take people to a subway station miles away will reduce air travelers’ “dependence on taxis and private cars” to get to and from La Guardia, according to a report in the NY Times.
That’s right, who do these “air travelers” think they are?
You spend five hours crammed into a 17-inch-wide seat in an aluminum tube, stuck between a teenager playing non-stop Super Mario games on a Nintendo Switch and the guy Brendan Fraser played in The Whale, your only sustenance a miniature package of pretzel goldfish crackers—and you think you deserve to get into a “private” car or jump on a train at the end of your trip?
Perhaps Robert De Niro will record a “Welcome to New York City” message that can be played over the loudspeaker on the shuttle buses as they’re pulling away from La Guardia’s sparkling new terminals:
You gotta problem with the bus?
Who do you think you are, Rockefeller?
You know you just got off a bus with wings, right?
“I accept the recommendations of this report, and I look forward to its immediate implementation by the Port Authority in close coordination with our partners in the MTA, city and federal government,” Gov. Hochul said, a New York minute after they handed her the report.
Hang on, while we flip the sign on the No. 12 to Astoria from Local to Express. Done.