The Port Authority is breaking ground tomorrow for a new AirTrain at Newark Airport. It is not a one-seat ride into Newark Penn Station and Manhattan and it is therefore a mistake, following earlier mistakes at Newark, JFK and LaGuardia. Gov. Hochul and the soon-to-be new governor of New Jersey, Democrat Mikie Sherrill or Republican Jack Ciattarelli, should stop it.
At Newark, the PA is wasting $3.5 billion on the wrong technology and a system that is little better than the lousy AirTrain being replaced. The only difference is that the old 1996 AirTrain is a monorail, a warm weather only train that is fine at Disney World, but has problems when it gets below freezing, which surprisingly it does every winter in Jersey.
The new AirTrain will be a cable pull, like the San Francisco cable cars, and will be forever limited to the airport grounds, never being a one-seat ride. It should instead run on steel wheels with a standard gauge of 4 feet, 8½ inches and then run on either PATH tracks or NJT and Amtrak tracks into Newark Penn and then Manhattan.
That’s the one-seat ride into the city center that is available to travelers at every other major airport in every other major city in the U.S. and around the world.
Chicago has two airports, both have one-seat rides to the Loop. D.C. has two airports, both with one-seat rides into downtown Washington. London has two airports, both have one-seat rides to the center of the city. Paris has two airports, both have one-seat rides to the city center. New York has three airports, none of them with one-seat rides.
JFK is the easiest to achieve a one-seat ride and Hochul can make it happen. The JFK Airtrain runs on steel wheels with the standard gauge, the same as the subway and the LIRR.
What is needed is to construct a new rail car that can travel around the airport and then connect on the LIRR Main Line tracks at Jamaica and head into Manhattan.
That was the goal when the JFK train was planned in the late 1990s. We recall seeing a scale model presented by then Port Authority Executive Director Bob Boyle at his office on the 68th floor of the North Tower of the original World Trade Center. We asked Boyle, “where is the one-seat ride?”
We were so insistent that we had Tony Cracchiolo, then director of priority capital projects for the Port, and Bill Wheeler, then the MTA’s director of planning and development, come meet with us.
They explained that the LIRR was one kind of standard gauge vehicle, the subway was another and AirTrain would be a third. What would be needed was a fourth kind of vehicle.
The technology wasn’t the challenge. The availability of capacity to run new trains in the already crowded tunnels into Manhattan and Penn Station was. It would have to wait until there was more capacity when the East Side Access project opened. Well, it opened. There is now capacity for more trains, into both Penn and now Grand Central. So build the fourth car.
As for LaGuardia, Hochul smartly killed a stupid AirTrain there. The best option is to extend the N train. But JFK is simple.
