http://www.leprechaunlines.com/commuter_newburghbeacon.cfm

At this point it’s only weekdays, which is one of those bus-service head-slappers. But it takes half an hour to get to the Metro-North station, according to the schedule.

Just today I connected from a MNR train to a bus at Tarrytown to go across the river to the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack. Even though everything went smoothly, it still felt just a tad unreliable, and I don’t think I’d want to do it on a regular basis. I think it would have felt the same if I’d been coming from Poughkeepsie or Dobbs Ferry.

A bit more about Hudson Valley airport access: when I was a kid, there was a “Hudson Valley Airporter” that went to both La Guardia and JFK. It went down the Thruway and picked people up in selected parking lots at each exit, completely separate from the existing Adirondack Trailways system. I remember taking it on a trip to Europe in 1984. They may have had another one that went to Newark. I can’t remember how many there were a day.

A few years ago I was living out of state and figured I’d go directly from the airport to visit my mom. The airporter was gone! Just pointing out that it wasn’t always tough travel getting to JFK from Kingston.

http://www.panynj.gov/AboutthePortAuthority/PressCenter/PressReleases/PressRelease/index.php?id=831

I don’t know and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. Lots of people don’t like living near airports (the point I raised in #14 above) and a reason is that they don’t like the noise (support I offered in #26.) It doesn’t matter if noise is the actual most important reason, or one of several reasons, or just a rationalization.

I get this idea from watching the protestors complain about airport expansions, and the appeasements that airport authorities have granted them.

(I don’t get this directly, although I have seen the noise-barrier walls. Both the Boston Globe [left of the NY Times] and the Boston Herald [left of the Manchester Union-Leader ] have reported on the noise abatements, as has MassPort itself.)

Regardless, if you are correct that noise is only one among several factors that make it unpleasant to live near an airport for most people, even if ground traffic and pollution are stronger reasons, we are in agreement that most people don’t like living near airports, and we would not expect airports to yield more suburban sprawl development in their neighborhoods. (Hotels are not sprawl.)

Since you revealed David that you get your info directly from Sen Dan Inoye and former members (Jonathan Adler) of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank (which can be researched at link below) I find myself seriously doubting the truthfulness of anything you might say.

Has following Google links to those sites corrupted my mind so badly that you think ad hominem is a refutation of things I’ve said? I’ve demonstrated as false things you’ve written (such as “you never offer any resources for your statements” — have you done the same where you’ve disagreed with me?

Interestingly enough, you don’t believe anything I write because I’ll cite sources from the Right, but in that Weatherpeople thread I was taking the position that at Comment 2 Adam ascribed to the “ACLU/free-speech types”, which is usually thought of as Left.

Blow-up Amtrak and refund each state’s contribution. NE states take the money and create a regional passenger rail system from DC to Boston. I am a big believer in a strong federal government, but congressional politics destroyed rational national passenger rail a long time ago. The money is going down the toilet and the ticket prices are going through the roof.

I’m wondering where you got your info about people’s preferences for living or not living near airports. How do you know it’s simply the noise that bothers people and not other issues, ie traffic, pollution etc? Maybe you could supply some info as to what qualifies you to make such a statement.

Since you revealed David that you get your info directly from Sen Dan Inoye and former members (Jonathan Adler) of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank (which can be researched at link below) I find myself seriously doubting the truthfulness of anything you might say.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Competitive_Enterprise_Institute

(if anyone is interested in checking out the fact that David does get his information from the sources mentioned above)

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Competitive_Enterprise_Institute

There must be some sort of breakeven point , isn’t there?

Because most people fly so infrequently that proximity to the airport is not a consideration at all where they move. Even those that fly regularly might care that there is an airport, but having to take a cab an extra 30 minutes twice a year doesn’t trump saving $5000 on the price of the house. (This is not the situation where the daily commute to work is involved.)

Most people don’t like being near airports due to the noise. (My former office-mate is an exception. He was very happy to live under flight paths — but he is an aero engineer specializing in commercial air.)

MHT (Manchester, now Manchester-Boston, “International” (there is a flight from Canada once a week or something) Airport) has expanded lately, but that’s been a response to the urban sprawl into southern New Hampshire, not a cause of it. Enough airports have been expanded, and enough areas have sprawled, that correlations if they exist should be easy enough to find, rather than relying on gedanken experiments.

But why is that? Why is the only regional transportation agency worried about accommodating increases in air traffic, instead of working out what mix of air traffic, regional rail and other modes make the most sense from a economic and sustainability perspective. Every new highway built is justified by the need to accomodate trends in auto use. But what is the goal? What do we want the region to be like?

It is not the Port Authority’s job to develop NE Corridor rail, but it is its job to deal with regional airport capacity constraints and they currently have no reason to believe someone else is going to bail them out by diverting lots of trips to rail.

The line currently has hourly service during rush hours, and fairly frequent service at off-hours. Here’s a PDF of the schedule:

http://www.njtransit.com/pdf/rail/r0020.pdf

If Bob Moses could fund the BQE as a “tunnel approach road,” then the right leader at the Port Authority could fund re-double-tracking of the Port Jervis line as an airport improvement.

http://railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=12739&view=next&sid=aef0e0b0ba118d8420ef1e9821c6fc10

The train takes 40 minutes to go the 25 miles or so (and four stops) from Salisbury Mills to Suffern, which could probably be improved with better tracks and/or electrification, if the PA cared at all.

In the meantime, the Salisbury Mills station is eight miles by bus from the airport:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=stewart+airport&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=48.240201,81.5625&ie=UTF8&z=12&ll=41.478232,-74.072914&spn=0.17954,0.318604&om=1

Of course, that does nothing to help people who want to get to the airport from, say, Poughkeepsie or White Plains.

Of course, I agree with the many comments that investment in the Northeast Corridor would be better than investment in Stewart. I also disagree with Mark (#12) that the NEC subsidizes the long-distance routes. That’s a very simplistic view of the Amtrak system.

Would it encourage sprawl? Probably. Think of all the cheap lodgings that tend to spring up around airports for an example.

Stewart had a burst of traffic in the early 1990s which was trimmed down by airline cutbacks and the collapse of IBM’s Mid Hudson operations. American, United, Delta and US Air were based there, you could fly to their hubs.

5 million people live within the counties immediately surrounding Stewart. Their current options to fly are to drive to LGA, JFK, or EWR except for a few domestic locations served out of White Plains.