The Columnist Manifesto

Let me speculate about why so many of our major cities – in contrast to Europe, for example – have such ridiculously poor public rail transportation between the downtown and the airport. Places like New York and San Francisco, which have had extensive metro and commuter rail systems for decades, have only recently begun to address public rail transit to the airport, as though it were some mind-boggling, 21st century technical problem.

But it had to have been a tough political, not a technical, problem: I guessing that the taxi-cab ownership interests were able to strong-arm these city governments to prevent an initial rail link when the airports were first sited, and then to subsequently block efforts to rectify the situation. Otherwise the lack of public rail transit to airports just makes no sense.

LaGuardia is now the hold-out of the three New York area airports with no direct rail link. You can take a cab, of course, or a privately-operated bus line. But the bus is carefully priced to make it almost worth your while to spring for a cab when you have two passengers. And a bus, subject to the vagaries of highway traffic, doesn’t have feeling of speed, directness and certainty you get from a train. On public transportation, you have to take a bus to the subway – a daunting prospect out there in the deep forest of Queens.

Yet, for some reason, B and I, traveling light and feeling plucky, decided to do it. That’s right, we got on a city bus that wove its way through the Queens on that hot summer night, making local stops and treating us to a visual feast of the diverse Jackson Heights area, immigrant neighborhoods, and Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, streets with street life, with people walking or hanging around outside their homes keeping cool. With the elevated train tracks overhead, the tableaux could have been from any decade in the past hundred years.

The bus ride ended at the Jackson Heights/ Roosevelt avenue subway stop, and we took the E-train straight to 42nd Street. Cost of trip for two people: $4.00. Thumbing your nose at the taxi monopoly: priceless.