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lee1026 t1_j9kb54r wrote

Reply to comment by TheNormalAlternative in Uber, Lyft drivers won’t pick up passengers at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday in pay protest strike by ThreeLittlePuigs

No. Well, probably not. MTA doesn't publish stats, but JFK airtrain simply don't see a lot of use.

Most American airports have transit connections (examples: SFO, OAK) see very little ridership on the transit lines.

Nor is the problem entirely American. I have been on more empty rail cars coming to and from every airport in the world than I care to count.

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TheNormalAlternative t1_j9kegub wrote

>No. Well, probably not. MTA doesn't publish stats, but JFK airtrain simply don't see a lot of use.

Color me skeptical of your claim that admittedly isn't backed by stats.

At least anecdotally in my experience, unless I'm landing at like 11pm, anytime I've been on the Q-60, Q-70 or JFK Air Train coming from an airport, it's been a crowded. It's also rare in my experience to board an empty bus to LaGuardia when I get on in either Astoria or Jackson Heights.

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lee1026 t1_j9kf1i1 wrote

Okay, since you think the JFK airtrain is crowded, JFK airtrain sees 3,439,400 passengers a year.

JFK, the airport, sees 55,175,249 passengers per year. A quick bit of math suggests that 6% of JFK passengers take the airtrain. Whether that is a lot is up to you, but JFK's traffic is overwhelmingly from people who don't use the airtrain.

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LostSoulNothing t1_j9kg7r9 wrote

Is that 55 million only people arriving or departing JFK or does it include the millions of people who connect through there on their way to somewhere else?

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lee1026 t1_j9kwnq7 wrote

I am also leaving out employees; JFK have more employees (35k) than the airtrain gets in daily passengers (22k). Call it a wash with the connections.

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TheNormalAlternative t1_j9kxcmq wrote

First off, the OP is about LaGuardia, and my OC was about the bus to LGA. You've kinda hijacked this thread to make it about the airtrain to JFK without addressing the bus to LGA.

Second off, your numbers are wrong and don't support your argument.

Your 3.5 million ridership estimate (from Wikipedia) is for 2021 and doesn't take into account the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on travel. According to the Port Authority, "AirTrain JFK handled nearly 21 million passengers in 2019."

Your argument was "JFK airtrain simply don't see a lot of use" and that airports with transit connections "see very little ridership on the transit lines." Regardless of whether ridership is 3 million or 21 millions, that's literally millions of people using transit every year, and between 25-50,000 people each day.

Comparing that number to the number of air passengers is a totally inapt comparison. For one thing, that does not take into account air passengers who use JFK as a layover, nor does it take into account how people travel. For example, a family needs to buy flight tickets for children who can ride the MTA for free. Further, not everyone who flies in and out of JFK is coming to or leaving NYC; people from Long Island are probably less likely to use the airtrain, especially if they don't live near the LIRR.

In any event, comparing transit ridership to air passengers would, at most, support a different argument: that transit isn't the primary means of transportation for air passengers, not that it isn't a popular mode.

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noobforce t1_j9kgfy8 wrote

I do agree with the logic but the 55M JFK stat may be overinflated due to including layovers

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atyppo t1_j9l6h7y wrote

Is that only paid pax or everyone? Because that could make for a 50% increase by my estimate.

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W00DERS0N t1_j9kvvh5 wrote

SFO's problem is the way the connection is set up. They have an "Air Train" that hits every terminal, but you have to haul over to the BART station.

They should've built it out to the Milbrae station to directly connect with CalTrain and BART and stop splitting the BART services at the end of the line. It'd also hook right up with the new HSR line as well. Super Short sighted.

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