JFK Airtrain: Good News, Bad News, Good News and Bad News

"Joe Versaggi" wrote in message
...
Sancho Panza wrote:

They charge those who come in by mass transit a parking fee.


If they did include the parking fee, the charge would be $10, not $5. As
it
stands, the reverse has been the fact for more than 20 years.

They do charge $10 - for the roundtrip. Presumably, one who takes
Airtrain to JFK takes it returning as well. For a ride of 2 or 3 miles
each way to Jamaica, that is excessive, particularly for a manless
operation. It's really a rip-off for Howard Beach. Still better off
taking the Q10 from Kew Gardens however slow.

Unless you value your time. If I've just spent $800 to fly 14 hours to
Asia for instance, an extra $5 to skip a local city bus is no big deal.
Really, this is such a small part of your overall trip cost, I'd rather just
pack sandwiches and skip the airport food court than skimp a net
$3 on ground transportation to get there.

If you work there, it's a whole different story, since you'd multiply the
above by 20. Isn't that really what the whole argument about $5 is
about? For that, I'd expect employee shuttles from rail stations.
Is there any?

mrtravelkay wrote:
What form of transit did they use to get to the parking lot before
Airtrain? Was there a charge for it?

There was a free bus service that covered both the parking lot and the
Howard Beach subway station (which was adjacent to one of the long-term
lots; the bus didn't really leave the parking lot).

miguel
--
Hundreds of travel photos from around the world: http://travel.u.nu/

Robert Coté wrote:
The whole concept of "free parking" has been confusing since the
Monopoly game put in the square. There is no free parking, it costs to
purchase land, build and maintain and somebody ends up paying for it.
It's bundled in the price of goods purchased at the big box or mall.
It's bundled in the movie ticket price, etc. However, this is a two
sided coin. Those big box prices are lower precisely because of the
large parking lot and business model built around it. You get those low
everyday prices even if you arrive by walking. In that case the parking
lot subsidizes pedestrians.

No it doesn't; that's not what "subsidize" means. Pedestrians don't add any
costs to be subsidized; in fact they are cheaper than drivers because they
don't push the parking lot usage closer to the expansion-or-frustration
tipping point. Their purchases contribute to the bottom line just as much as
drivers' purchases.

miguel
--
Hundreds of travel photos from around the world: http://travel.u.nu/

David J. Greenberger wrote:
There are two station exits, one to the parking lot and one to the
subway and neighborhood. Only the latter has faregates. Even the
direct /walking/ route from Howard Beach (the neighborhood or the
subway station) to the airport now has a $5 fee in each direction.

Is it possible to walk out the parking lot exit and around to the subway
station?

miguel
--
Hundreds of travel photos from around the world: http://travel.u.nu/

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 19:30:53 GMT (Miguel Cruz) wrote:

:David J. Greenberger wrote:
: There are two station exits, one to the parking lot and one to the
: subway and neighborhood. Only the latter has faregates. Even the
: direct /walking/ route from Howard Beach (the neighborhood or the
: subway station) to the airport now has a $5 fee in each direction.

:Is it possible to walk out the parking lot exit and around to the subway
:station?

I was wondering that as well.

--
Binyamin Dissen
http://www.dissensoftware.com

(Miguel Cruz) writes:

David J. Greenberger wrote:
There are two station exits, one to the parking lot and one to the
subway and neighborhood. Only the latter has faregates. Even the
direct /walking/ route from Howard Beach (the neighborhood or the
subway station) to the airport now has a $5 fee in each direction.

Is it possible to walk out the parking lot exit and around to the subway
station?

Yes. The nearest parking lot exit is the Lefferts Boulevard exit, at
the south edge of a massive five-roadway conglomeration of highways.
The closest subway station is the N. Conduit station, about a mile
away. There are two basic routes the cross under(?) the
megahighway and walk west along N. Conduit (the westbound service
road, so to speak, although it carries mostly Belt Parkway overflow
traffic) to the subway, or walk west through a construction site on
airport property just outside the parking lot fence and cross over the
Belt (etc.) on a two-lane road with no sidewalk. I don't know if the
former route has a sidewalk; I've only done the latter (in the
opposite direction).

If you're planning on taking that walk after flying in, I recommend
you do a trial run without luggage first.

The only way across the subway tracks between the Belt etc. and the
Rockaway peninsula is via the AirTrain turnstiles.
--
David J. Greenberger
New York, NY

127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 wrote:
(Miguel Cruz) wrote:
Robert Coté wrote:
The whole concept of "free parking" has been confusing since the
Monopoly game put in the square. There is no free parking, it costs to
purchase land, build and maintain and somebody ends up paying for it.
It's bundled in the price of goods purchased at the big box or mall.
It's bundled in the movie ticket price, etc. However, this is a two
sided coin. Those big box prices are lower precisely because of the
large parking lot and business model built around it. You get those low
everyday prices even if you arrive by walking. In that case the parking
lot subsidizes pedestrians.

No it doesn't; that's not what "subsidize" means. Pedestrians don't add
any costs to be subsidized; in fact they are cheaper than drivers because
they don't push the parking lot usage closer to the
expansion-or-frustration tipping point. Their purchases contribute to the
bottom line just as much as drivers' purchases.

I don't know where you've been for the last 50 years or so, but most
development in the US in that time period has taken place outside of
concentrated urban areas, places that are too spread out to enable
walking to anything

I don't know where you've been for the last few postings, but that has
nothing to do with what we're talking about.

miguel
--
Hundreds of travel photos from around the world: http://travel.u.nu/

(Miguel Cruz) wrote in message . ..
Robert Coté wrote:
The whole concept of "free parking" has been confusing since the
Monopoly game put in the square. There is no free parking, it costs to
purchase land, build and maintain and somebody ends up paying for it.
It's bundled in the price of goods purchased at the big box or mall.
It's bundled in the movie ticket price, etc. However, this is a two
sided coin. Those big box prices are lower precisely because of the
large parking lot and business model built around it. You get those low
everyday prices even if you arrive by walking. In that case the parking
lot subsidizes pedestrians.

No it doesn't; that's not what "subsidize" means. Pedestrians don't add any
costs to be subsidized; in fact they are cheaper than drivers because they
don't push the parking lot usage closer to the expansion-or-frustration
tipping point. Their purchases contribute to the bottom line just as much as
drivers' purchases.


It is kinda a funny use of the word subsidize. But the posters point
is that the walk up guy benefits from the parking lot, whether
he parks or not. The store is able to deliver the products they
have at the price they do because of all of them SUV driving customers.
If they had to rely upon walk up business only, the selection would
be narrower, and the prices higher. As such, the pedestrian customer
has an interest in bearing the same burden for the parking lot cost
of business as the folks who actually park there.

There's an old story about a guy who makes leather purses. He
gets leather from cows that are being slaughtered for food. If he
doesn't make purses out of them, the leather is discarded. So he
gets a pretty good price for the leather. The accusation is that
the steak eaters are subsidizing the purse buyers. Then his purses
get so popular that the purse buyers become an excuse to
slaughter the cow, whether the meat is needed or not. So the price
of cow meat drops. Now the purse customers claim to be subsidizing
the meat eaters. But it's easy to understand how some folks see it
that way. But really no one is subsidizing anyone since they'd
all be buying meat or purses regardless. They do have a symbiotic
relationship however.

It is kinda a funny use of the word subsidize. But the posters point
is that the walk up guy benefits from the parking lot, whether
he parks or not. The store is able to deliver the products they
have at the price they do because of all of them SUV driving customers.
If they had to rely upon walk up business only, the selection would
be narrower, and the prices higher. As such, the pedestrian customer
has an interest in bearing the same burden for the parking lot cost
of business as the folks who actually park there.

You mean the big box stores that have low prices because of the
economy of scale involved in selling to people who fill the back end
of their SUVs and minivans with a pallet worth of stuff are subsidizing
the walk up customer who just buys what he can put in his little
urban shopping cart? I mean, in one transaction, the SUV guy probably
spends in the $100-200 range for month supplies of stuff, while the
walkup guy likely spends in the $50 range for a week or two worth
of stuff at a higher unit cost than the SUV guy. Plus, he takes up the
same amount of "store resources" to make his purchase, in terms of
space and employee time to process his transaction, assuming it takes
the same amount of time to scan a barcode whether its a single roll
of paper towels or the 12-pack, so he probably makes 3-4 visits in a
month instead of one.

OTOH, the store makes more profit off the walkup guy in a shopping cart.
I guess someone would argue that the walkup guy is subsidizing the SUV
guy, but I'd suspect the whole thing is close to a wash.

There's an old story about a guy who makes leather purses. He
gets leather from cows that are being slaughtered for food. If he
doesn't make purses out of them, the leather is discarded. So he
gets a pretty good price for the leather. The accusation is that
the steak eaters are subsidizing the purse buyers. Then his purses
get so popular that the purse buyers become an excuse to
slaughter the cow, whether the meat is needed or not. So the price
of cow meat drops. Now the purse customers claim to be subsidizing
the meat eaters. But it's easy to understand how some folks see it
that way. But really no one is subsidizing anyone since they'd
all be buying meat or purses regardless. They do have a symbiotic
relationship however.

This is a pretty smart example, though the point where leather demand
exceeds corresponding beef demand, the input price changes
dramatically. Haven't sat in an econ class in better than 10 years, but
my guess is that the purse buyers would technically be correct only if
their purse price rises.

In article ,
"Baxter" wrote:

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Free software - Baxter Codeworks www.baxcode.com
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"Robert Coté" wrote in message
...

is directly on topic. The Portland light rail extension, AirMAX, is
significantly financed by the $3 PFC that every commercial air passenger
pays coming and going.


Well, not quite, bobby - that $3 only covers the part of AirMAX that is on
Airport property.

And Tri-Met, Metro, City of, and the Port authority are famous for their
rigorous financial firewalls.

Those trains run all the way to Beaverton (on the other
side of downtown). Also, that $3 is only on departures - not both ways.

You are correct. I should have said "coming through and going" to make
that clearer.

And do note, the $3 fee only applies to construction (airport share = ~$28
million) - not operating costs.

Yeah riiiight. $28 million. Hmmm, generating $1.3 million per month it
should only be around for 22 months.


'Course, you're welcome to challenge this - but to do so would undermine
most of your other arguments about how much LRT costs.


Not at all.