Comment by JumpCrisscross
16 hours ago
> Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus?
Hypothesis: people aren't familiar with New York's trains. It's a world-class network the likes of which we don't otherwise have in North America. (Sorry Toronto.) So when they see eVTOLs, they emotionally map it to their local trainless context.
I don't fit the hypothesis - the two cities I've lived in (Berlin, Seoul) have excellent trains. So it's perhaps overfitting in the other direction.
Both of those cities are not in North America. In North America, New York City is by far our best example of a transit system. It is terrible by world standards, but is still the best example we have in North America.
... I mean, no. It's more that it is weird that there is no train to the airport (it looks like you can take ~3 trains from Manhattan). New York is likely the only really big city in the developed world where this is the case.
In Ireland, everyone thinks it's pretty ridiculous that there's no train to Dublin Airport (all going well, it will finally have one in 2036 or so, after _many_ false starts). Dublin's a city of about 1.5 million people. It's pretty incomprehensible that a city ten times the size wouldn't have one.
There is (since 2023) a train that connects directly from Grand Central to JFK AirTrain.
Airtrain opened in 2003 [1]. It connected to the subway system and, through Jamaica, Penn Station. The novel bit in 2023 was also linking into Grand Central.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirTrain_JFK
Huh. Google Maps was not showing me that.
EDIT: Oh, wait, misread, I thought you meant a direct train from Grand Central to the airport.
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