(The following article by Joseph P. Fried was posted on the New York Times website on December 5.)
NEW YORK — It was a hard ride through opposition, skepticism and a fatal accident, but last Dec. 17 a proposal for a rail link to Kennedy International Airport finally became a reality: A newly built system called the AirTrain went into operation, connecting several New York City subway lines and the Long Island Rail Road with the airport’s terminals.
How is the $1.9 billion link doing after a year? First, some background.
For several decades, city officials and transportation experts cited a need for mass transit connections to Kennedy and La Guardia Airports. But costs and other obstacles thwarted those proposals. Finally, in 1999, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airports, won city approval for a scaled-down plan.
The link would be limited to Kennedy. And instead of the one-seat ride that many officials and experts deemed vital for the system’s success, travelers would transfer from subway trains to the elevated AirTrain at either of two subway stations in Queens.
Critics insisted that few luggage-laden travelers would give up cabs or cars for such a trip. The Port Authority said that many travelers would prefer a cheaper ride (now totaling $7 for the AirTrain and subway) to a cab that could cost more than $40 from Midtown Manhattan – and could take up to two hours in heavy traffic, compared with a rail trip that typically takes closer to an hour.
The start of service was delayed for about a year after an accident in 2002 killed a driver on a test run.
More than the first year of operation will be needed to determine the AirTrain’s ultimate viability, but a Port Authority spokesman said last week that so far “there’s no question it’s succeeding.”
The average number of people entering or leaving the airport daily on the AirTrain rose from just under 5,000 in January and February to about 8,000 in each of the last five months, said the spokesman, Pasquale DiFulco.
This is less than the 11,000 daily average the agency had projected by the end of the first year, but Mr. DiFulco said that “there’s no question that ridership will increase.”
This will occur, he asserted, as more travelers become aware of the AirTrain and as airline travel at Kennedy continues its current growth. (Another benefit of the AirTrain, he said, is that more than 20,000 people a day use it for free rides between terminals and other points within the airport.)
Some critics said that as many as half the riders going to and from the airport on the AirTrain would be workers at Kennedy, but Mr. DiFulco said surveys indicated that fewer than 10 percent were workers.