NY Airports Last In Transit Access To City

airport transit
JFK Airport Map from panynj.gov

If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere. It’s up to you New York, New York.”

-New York, New York by Frank Sinatra

Make it anywhere? If it involves leaving the airport and making it into the city promptly, I highly doubt that this would be the case….

So what’s all of this talk about?

NY airports rank last in transit access, study says according to Crain’s New York.

(Thanks to Kim for sending this one in!)

Based on a study by the Global Gateway Alliance, JFK Airport ranks last and LaGuardia ranks third to last “in mass transit accessibility compared with 30 of the world’s busiest airports“.

In the survey, airports are graded on a scale of 0 – 100 based on “transit user’s total travel time, cost, mode of transport and number of transfers”.

airport transit
images:Global Gateway Alliance survey

airport transit

Kennedy Airport tied for last place with Denver, each only scored a 30. LaGuardia and Newark tied for third to last (along with a few others) with 40 points.

The purpose of the Global Gateway Alliance is “to advocate for improvements to the region’s airports“.

Spain’s Madrid- Barajas Airport topped the list, scoring a 95/100. The highest ranked airport in the US is Atlanta’s Hartfield-Jackson Airport.

Find out more from Crain’s New York here,

6 thoughts on “NY Airports Last In Transit Access To City

  1. DavidB- Airports in the NY area are pretty crappy on pretty much all levels including commuting into the city. It’s probably hard to compare many of these airports in terms of transit access due to other variables involved…

    Augias- Good points. I think the study was done to tell the story of the NY airport’s poor transit access while still comparing it to other cities.

    Bob- Haven’t left LAX since I was around 10 years old and even then it was with a rental car so I personally have nothing to go by to agree to this or not…

    DaninMCI- I’m going to guess that KC isn’t one of the world’s 30 busiest airports! It is surprising how bad connections to the city are once you arrive at a NY airport…

  2. I would rank Kansas City last but I’m biased. I’m currently trying to set up a business trip based near LGA with trips to the Bronx and Brooklyn but it’s hard trying to use trains to connect these places. NYC should be the best on the planet. I don’t get it.

  3. nevermind I saw in the article how they calculated it. It makes sense according to their own methodology. But it doesn’t tell the full story.

  4. mmmmmh – it seems to me that Newark has better public transit connection than La Guardia or JFK, or many US airports – with NJ Transit and Amtrak connecting it to the city and to New Jersey. La Guardia is the worst (doesn’t even have a subway connection), while JFK at least has some sort of a (tedious) connection to the E and A subway trains.
    I don’t follow a lot of the other rankings either. My experences are quite different.

  5. Agree generally that NYC’s airports are a disgrace when it comes to getting to/from them with public transit. And while a ride on the A Train may be lyrically memorable, the added charge to ride the AirTran to get to a JFK terminal is [highway] robbery. If Como is suggesting the same approach at LGA, I’ll stick to the M80 bus to/from the appropriate east or west side subway line.

    However, the chart is a bit misleading. An airport’s accessibility quotient can’t be a penalized because the airport is considerably distant from the city centre. In the case of ICN or DFW, both offer inexpensive rail to the city centre, albeit it takes a fair amount of time. Insofar as MAD is concerned that single subway line doesn’t get you to most places you’d want to stay at without a transfer or two…with a lot of up and down steps and long interconnect tunnels. And for PVG, the speed only relates to the MagLev which gets one half-way into Pudong, not the city centre.

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