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This so inefficient it’s painful to watch. It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. A train could ship thousa

This so inefficient it’s painful to watch. It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. A train could ship thousands of people in one go, supports millions of ordinary people in their daily lives, and doesn’t cause excessive noise pollution at street level (not to mention the climate, safety, and infrastructure benefits) In London a new train line was built deep underground from Heathrow all the way through central London and out the other side. It stops all the way, travels further (19 miles) and still only takes 25 minutes, so don’t pretend it can’t be done. Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck, while we pretend we’ll one day be rich enough to ride these things

mvkel 5mo ago
The infrastructure requirements to get a train into operation, let alone travel to a destination twenty minutes away, takes decades of development and billions. This needs a 20x20ft approximately flat surface.
- sho_hn 5mo ago
  I haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains, and that's before you consider that people developing and building a train line get to eat and put their kids through schools. I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.
  - dzhiurgis 5mo ago
    EVTOLS supposed to be less complex than cars and cars are already cheaper than trains.
    - Jblx2 5mo ago
      Call me skeptical on being less complex than cars. I suppose this must be referring to parts count compared to an internal combustion engine car?
      - dzhiurgis 5mo ago
        Suspension, steering, brakes, airbags, body... Of course on a serious EVTOL you got variable pitch props and tilting rotors (basic 4 rotor design is inefficient just doesn't scale). Avionics vs modern AEB, ESP, etc likely on par. Inverter redundancy way more important on EVTOL, but EVs have redundancy too.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains In Manhattan? I honestly would. If it were a nation, it would be the 22nd-largest economy. Any disruption to that system is massively expensive. I'm not saying we shouldn't do the math. But we also shouldn't be reaching conclusions without attempting it.
    - timcobb 5mo ago
      People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time This isn’t in the same category as burying a new train line. I lived around just the Hudson Yard water and electric expansions when those happened. It was years of increased noise, traffic and litigation.
        djeastm 5mo ago
        Sure it was bothersome, but it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself, either.
        JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself Straw man. Nobody claimed these were existential threats. OP said "I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains." I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite came out–take the costs of the disruption and time value of money into account, and building a new train line anywhere in Manhattan is a worse use of resources than (a) increasing capacity on existing lines, a veritable forest of low-hanging fruit or even (b) eVTOLs.
  - signatoremo 5mo ago
    NYC already have a functional mass transit system. Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus? Why it's so hard to understand there still is the need for other modes of transportation. At the very least, tourists want to view the city from above, or those who wants a quick hop from JFK to Manhattan. This is not a replacement for mass transportation. At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo 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.
      - sho_hn 5mo ago
        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.
        bluGill 5mo ago
        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.
      - rsynnott 5mo ago
        ... 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.
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Do the people who run the helipads not also get to eat and put their kids through school though? Where are you that makes the parents pay directly for school such that not having a job at the train station means their kids go hungry and unschooled? What horrible place is that? (Wait, don't tell me, is it the USA?) I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.
- albertgoeswoof 5mo ago
  You state that like decades and billions is a long time. You have 10000 people who need to do this trip every hour, how will you manage that with this? It can’t scale. In the end normal people will be stuck without proper transport, while a tiny majority will fly around in comfort.
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so I used to live on 30th & Madison. Blade was about 30 minutes door to door. LIRR was 50 to 55 minutes. Car 45 to 120 minutes. Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations; for most people, eVTOL will almost always be faster than the train. (I mostly take the train.) > Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck Blade cost $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan, 30% of New York City and America and about 5% of the world. I'm not arguing we don't need better rail (and ferry) connectivity between our airports and urban cores. But you're always going to have a need for time-efficient travel options. And eVTOL has significant applications outside luxury transport. This complaint lands like someone complaining that the original Tesla Roadster was "inefficient and painful" as it was only affordable to the rich.
- dghlsakjg 5mo ago
  People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent? This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality. As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent? Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions. Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel. (I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.) > the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.
Jblx2 5mo ago
Interestingly enough, I posted this as a follow on to a comment I made on yesterday's derailed Waymo-in-Portland discussion, where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S. I'm could see it happening within my lifetime. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943360
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S.? I had a similar thought a few days ago in respect of Waymos specifically: "Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide." Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915937
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
- llbbdd 5mo ago
  I'm very much in agreement. All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way, more so if they're autonomous. I'd be comfortable betting that any serious passenger rail projects breaking ground right now today are going to be legitimately antiquated by the time Waymo and/or Flying Waymo and their equivalents are commonplace and cheap. More desirable, more convenient, easier infrastructure build out, less disruptive maintenance, better capacity allocation. I hope I live to see the day I can summon a car to my house, hop inside, and it travels automatically to a designated VTOL zone, docks into a fixed-wing harness and takes me anywhere I'd like to go. I'd get fat as hell.
dzhiurgis 5mo ago
They are not mutually exclusive you know?
billfor 5mo ago
It would be expensive to build a new train to JFK. The unions and regulations in NYC make those projects very long and very expensive (look at the 2nd Ave subway line). There is an "AirTrain" to JFK but you have to take other trains to get to it first. There was supposed to be one to LGA but it got cancelled. We used to have a really nice water shuttle to LGA but that also stopped many years ago. People didn't want to travel to the water shuttle and pay $20 to get to the airport in 15 minutes. I'm hard pressed to see how a cheap quadcopter ride is going to be anything other than a novelty unless the FAA allows the heliports to be built inland -- we've had a bad history with blades flying through the streets.
- HWR_14 5mo ago
  There's a free bus to LaGuardia from the subway.
- lmm 5mo ago
  Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
  - hakrgrl 5mo ago
    Isn't it? Look up the California high speed rail. There is massive corruption, incompetence, and red tape.
  - maccard 5mo ago
    > Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations. Every country says this about every other country. The UK has HS2, and we point to Germany. Germany has Stuttgart 21 and they point to Spain. Spain has the Sagrada Familia. Spain points to China, and China has the HZMB [0] This stuff is really really hard, and standards have evolved hugely. The london underground would never be built today, because of the ignored costs. HS2's massive problem isn't that we spent £100m on a Bat tunnel [1], it's that nobody was willing to say no because that decision is pinned to you but the blame absolving is "someone elses problem". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80%93Macau_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80.... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo
hakrgrl 5mo ago
This argument always comes up. "Why not public transit? It's so efficient, look at country X". Well, country X has people who respect public property and are orderly, so they can have nice things. The US is filled with people who don't. And who do drugs. And who rob. So people retreat to places like a Joby aircraft or self driving Waymo, which don't have those issues.
- albumen 5mo ago
  Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage. I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly. America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible). Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system. *https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates
  - interestpiqued 5mo ago
    You’re probably right on crime. But I will say that both SF and Chicago(most of my experience) local train systems are constantly filled with homeless people with severe mental health issues. Generally , without fixing that a large segment of the population are never going to want to ride public transport.
- _DeadFred_ 5mo ago
  I'm with you. Imagine the Sackler class being forced to see the results of what they have inflicted on American society?
baxtr 5mo ago
If you’re interested how some of these things got build in New York in the past I recommend the books of Robert Caro about Robert Moses. Building new massive infrastructure requires a level of ruthlessness that is not socially acceptable these days.
- timcobb 5mo ago
  Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.
  - baxtr 5mo ago
    It’s not only about underground vs evicting people. It’s also in large part about making sure that your project gets the required funding and other (social) projects don’t.
  - jtbetz22 5mo ago
    According to Bloomberg[1] construction of the first phase of the second avenue subway cost about 2.5B USD per mile. At that rate, even if you just look at extending the A/C/E from Jamaica to JFK, you're talking about 15B or so USD. And compared to today's [subway|LIRR] -> airtrain system, you probably only cut about 25% of the travel time (from 60 minutes down to 45 minutes) Compare that to, for example, the Gateway Tunnel, estimated to cost about 16B USD and double the daily commuter capacity from NJ to NYC (including traffic to and from EWR!), and it's hard to justify new infrastructure to make it easier to get to the airport. 1. In NYC Subway, a Case Study in Runaway Transit Construction Costs - Bloomberg https://share.google/SPcN8iRDZG7lNiwt9 https://share.google/SPcN8iRDZG7lNiwt9
    - ericd 5mo ago
      That’s something like $2k/resident to build, and then ongoing maintenance. Seems high for something that most will never use.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
moomoo11 5mo ago
Yeah but I don’t want to travel on a train packed with randoms, some of whom are unpleasant or dangerous. Have you taken public transit? Either it is good or it is awful. The only country whose public transit was actually good is Japan, and why is deeper than just having a good transit system. The privacy convenience and comfort are why I prefer Waymo over a bus/rail or even uber. I will pay for an air taxi if it’s a good service.
renewiltord 5mo ago
I don’t get it. Did they use the MTA budget or something? If the train is better then just build the train. Certainly these guys aren’t stopping you.
jonnybgood 5mo ago
> A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. There’s already a train that does this. It’s the express A train, which gets you to the AirTran. And as someone who has taken the train from Manhattan to JFK on multiple occasions, it most certainly does not take 20 mins or so. It takes at least an hour and that’s not including the highly likely delays. I think it would be inefficient to have a dedicated train take up the line just for JFK.
- piva00 5mo ago
  Stockholm with a bit over 1 million people has an express train from Arlanda airport to the center of the city, it goes at ~200km/h making the transit of ~40km in 20-25 minutes. I don't understand why it would be inefficient for one of the busiest airports in the world to one of the largest cities in the world to have a similar setup.
  - jonnybgood 5mo ago
    Do you know where JFK is? JFK does not sit outside the city like Arlanda. JFK is in the NYC Queens borough surrounded by highly dense urban sprawl. That setup makes sense for an airport that sits far outside the city. No track to JFK can support anything near a 200km/hr train and building a track for such a train is a nonstarter.
    - rsynnott 5mo ago
      It'd likely have to go largely underground. This is the approach being taken for Dublin Airport (again, a far, far smaller city than NYC); it'll be served by a largely underground metro line, running every 3 minutes each direction, taking about 20 minutes from the city centre. Now, the catch there is that this metro isn't going to the airport, it's going _through_ the airport. Even without the airport it would be justifiable, so the airport kind of gets it for free. That's probably the only scenario where you can justify this sort of thing; it would be comically overkill if it was just to serve the airport (it will be able to move 20,000 people per hour per direction, which is... a lot more than the airport can move.) That said, you'd think something along these lines might be justifiable; as you say, the area surrounding JFK is dense.
Leonard_of_Q 5mo ago
Back in the time when I frequented NYC I took the train to JFK, is that no longer a thing? the LIRR brought me a'clackity-clacking (haven't you Yanks learned about that new thing called welded rails?) past Rockaway to where those driverless shuttle things took over the ride. It did take a while but I rather liked the trip. I use public transport wherever I can, certainly over overpriced taxi 'services'. Once when in London I let myself be convinced by the press rep who insisted I take a taxi with her to the airport instead of the tube as I intended. Well, let's just say that if this were all part of her plan to corner me for a few more hours it worked because the non-unexpected traffic jam kept us from catching our flight. Great job, miss press rep, drinks are on you. In other words yay for public transport in those places where it is more or less reliable and not suicidally unsafe to ride.
ericd 5mo ago
There is a train to JFK, it does not take 20 minutes.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > There is a train to JFK, it does not take 20 minutes An express train could. It would be a political non-starter since it does jack shit for the boroughs.
- tootie 5mo ago
  Multiple trains. You can take LIRR to Jamaica and transfer to AirTrain. Or take the A subway line. LIRR is faster but still like 45 minutes to either Brooklyn or Manhattan.
MisterTea 5mo ago
I live two blocks form the Rockaway A station, two stops from the Howard Beach/JFK station that hooks you into the Air train. It's at least 30 minutes on an express A to Fulton St, the first stop in Manhattan. Takes me about 45 minutes to get to Penn station from my house, an hour or more with delays. Unsure of what the Air train to LIRR Jamaica then to Penn in Manhattan takes, might be faster then the A depending. 15 minutes to fly from JFK to lower Manhattan is at least a 3x speed up, likely closer to 4-5x.

mvkel 5mo ago

The infrastructure requirements to get a train into operation, let alone travel to a destination twenty minutes away, takes decades of development and billions. This needs a 20x20ft approximately flat surface.

sho_hn 5mo ago
I haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains, and that's before you consider that people developing and building a train line get to eat and put their kids through schools. I can't believe seriously arguing for oversized quadcopters as a mass transport alternative.
- dzhiurgis 5mo ago
  EVTOLS supposed to be less complex than cars and cars are already cheaper than trains.
  - Jblx2 5mo ago
    Call me skeptical on being less complex than cars. I suppose this must be referring to parts count compared to an internal combustion engine car?
    - dzhiurgis 5mo ago
      Suspension, steering, brakes, airbags, body... Of course on a serious EVTOL you got variable pitch props and tilting rotors (basic 4 rotor design is inefficient just doesn't scale). Avionics vs modern AEB, ESP, etc likely on par. Inverter redundancy way more important on EVTOL, but EVs have redundancy too.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > haven't done the math, but I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains In Manhattan? I honestly would. If it were a nation, it would be the 22nd-largest economy. Any disruption to that system is massively expensive. I'm not saying we shouldn't do the math. But we also shouldn't be reaching conclusions without attempting it.
  - timcobb 5mo ago
    People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time This isn’t in the same category as burying a new train line. I lived around just the Hudson Yard water and electric expansions when those happened. It was years of increased noise, traffic and litigation.
      - djeastm 5mo ago
        Sure it was bothersome, but it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself, either.
        JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > it didn't seem to cause the city to collapse into itself Straw man. Nobody claimed these were existential threats. OP said "I wouldn't be surprised if cost/passenger over useful lifetime still shakes out better for the trains." I'm saying I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite came out–take the costs of the disruption and time value of money into account, and building a new train line anywhere in Manhattan is a worse use of resources than (a) increasing capacity on existing lines, a veritable forest of low-hanging fruit or even (b) eVTOLs.
- signatoremo 5mo ago
  NYC already have a functional mass transit system. Why does any transport discussion on HN become train focus? Why it's so hard to understand there still is the need for other modes of transportation. At the very least, tourists want to view the city from above, or those who wants a quick hop from JFK to Manhattan. This is not a replacement for mass transportation. At least try to show curiosity about what they want to solve.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo 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.
    - sho_hn 5mo ago
      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.
      - bluGill 5mo ago
        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.
    - rsynnott 5mo ago
      ... 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.
- fragmede 5mo ago
  Do the people who run the helipads not also get to eat and put their kids through school though? Where are you that makes the parents pay directly for school such that not having a job at the train station means their kids go hungry and unschooled? What horrible place is that? (Wait, don't tell me, is it the USA?) I don't know how the economics in the electric VTOL era works out, but the thing about air travel vs train travel is that in order for the train to be useful, you have to build tracks from every train station to every other train station to have perfect routability, which is expensive. However, for a helipad, once you've built the helipad it automatically connects to all other helipads in range.
albertgoeswoof 5mo ago
You state that like decades and billions is a long time. You have 10000 people who need to do this trip every hour, how will you manage that with this? It can’t scale. In the end normal people will be stuck without proper transport, while a tiny majority will fly around in comfort.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

> It’s about 14 miles to go from jfk to manhattan. A train could do this in 20 minutes or so I used to live on 30th & Madison. Blade was about 30 minutes door to door. LIRR was 50 to 55 minutes. Car 45 to 120 minutes. Helipads are cheaper to build and site than train stations; for most people, eVTOL will almost always be faster than the train. (I mostly take the train.) > Instead of supporting people we solve problems for the 0.001% who will give us a quick buck Blade cost $200 a trip. Assuming that's only affordable for someone making $50k a year or more, that covers the top 80% of Manhattan, 30% of New York City and America and about 5% of the world. I'm not arguing we don't need better rail (and ferry) connectivity between our airports and urban cores. But you're always going to have a need for time-efficient travel options. And eVTOL has significant applications outside luxury transport. This complaint lands like someone complaining that the original Tesla Roadster was "inefficient and painful" as it was only affordable to the rich.

dghlsakjg 5mo ago
People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent? This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality. As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent? Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions. Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel. (I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.) > the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.

Jblx2 5mo ago

Interestingly enough, I posted this as a follow on to a comment I made on yesterday's derailed Waymo-in-Portland discussion, where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S. I'm could see it happening within my lifetime. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943360 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47943360

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> where I wondered when will personal (flying) quadcopter vehicles have more annual passenger miles than every passenger rail combined (subways/light rail/Amtrak) in the U.S.? I had a similar thought a few days ago in respect of Waymos specifically: "Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide." Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915937
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
llbbdd 5mo ago
I'm very much in agreement. All of the pitches for more passenger rail have a for-the-greater-good tint to them that glosses over the fact that point-to-point private vehicles are better in every other conceivable way, more so if they're autonomous. I'd be comfortable betting that any serious passenger rail projects breaking ground right now today are going to be legitimately antiquated by the time Waymo and/or Flying Waymo and their equivalents are commonplace and cheap. More desirable, more convenient, easier infrastructure build out, less disruptive maintenance, better capacity allocation. I hope I live to see the day I can summon a car to my house, hop inside, and it travels automatically to a designated VTOL zone, docks into a fixed-wing harness and takes me anywhere I'd like to go. I'd get fat as hell.

dzhiurgis 5mo ago

They are not mutually exclusive you know?

billfor 5mo ago

It would be expensive to build a new train to JFK. The unions and regulations in NYC make those projects very long and very expensive (look at the 2nd Ave subway line). There is an "AirTrain" to JFK but you have to take other trains to get to it first. There was supposed to be one to LGA but it got cancelled. We used to have a really nice water shuttle to LGA but that also stopped many years ago. People didn't want to travel to the water shuttle and pay $20 to get to the airport in 15 minutes. I'm hard pressed to see how a cheap quadcopter ride is going to be anything other than a novelty unless the FAA allows the heliports to be built inland -- we've had a bad history with blades flying through the streets.

HWR_14 5mo ago
There's a free bus to LaGuardia from the subway.
lmm 5mo ago
Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations.
- hakrgrl 5mo ago
  Isn't it? Look up the California high speed rail. There is massive corruption, incompetence, and red tape.
- maccard 5mo ago
  > Funny how every other developed country manages to build more infrastructure cheaper despite having stronger unions and stricter regulations. Every country says this about every other country. The UK has HS2, and we point to Germany. Germany has Stuttgart 21 and they point to Spain. Spain has the Sagrada Familia. Spain points to China, and China has the HZMB [0] This stuff is really really hard, and standards have evolved hugely. The london underground would never be built today, because of the ignored costs. HS2's massive problem isn't that we spent £100m on a Bat tunnel [1], it's that nobody was willing to say no because that decision is pinned to you but the blame absolving is "someone elses problem". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80%93Macau_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80.... [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo

hakrgrl 5mo ago

This argument always comes up. "Why not public transit? It's so efficient, look at country X". Well, country X has people who respect public property and are orderly, so they can have nice things. The US is filled with people who don't. And who do drugs. And who rob. So people retreat to places like a Joby aircraft or self driving Waymo, which don't have those issues.

albumen 5mo ago
Other countries with good systems also have such people. America’s crime rate is far lower than the 1990s; the impression that you live in a crime-infested world is likely increased media coverage. I think the real reason the US has poor public transit is that its transport landscape has been shaped by years of planning and funding decisions that have put the car first, and cities rebuilt accordingly. America’s enormity also makes nationwide PT more difficult (but not impossible). Then add the meritocratic attitude that if you can’t afford a car it’s somehow your fault, and you end up with little political and societal interest in a good public transit system. *https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates https://ourworldindata.org/us-crime-rates
- interestpiqued 5mo ago
  You’re probably right on crime. But I will say that both SF and Chicago(most of my experience) local train systems are constantly filled with homeless people with severe mental health issues. Generally , without fixing that a large segment of the population are never going to want to ride public transport.
_DeadFred_ 5mo ago
I'm with you. Imagine the Sackler class being forced to see the results of what they have inflicted on American society?

baxtr 5mo ago

If you’re interested how some of these things got build in New York in the past I recommend the books of Robert Caro about Robert Moses. Building new massive infrastructure requires a level of ruthlessness that is not socially acceptable these days.

timcobb 5mo ago
Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.
- baxtr 5mo ago
  It’s not only about underground vs evicting people. It’s also in large part about making sure that your project gets the required funding and other (social) projects don’t.
- jtbetz22 5mo ago
  According to Bloomberg[1] construction of the first phase of the second avenue subway cost about 2.5B USD per mile. At that rate, even if you just look at extending the A/C/E from Jamaica to JFK, you're talking about 15B or so USD. And compared to today's [subway|LIRR] -> airtrain system, you probably only cut about 25% of the travel time (from 60 minutes down to 45 minutes) Compare that to, for example, the Gateway Tunnel, estimated to cost about 16B USD and double the daily commuter capacity from NJ to NYC (including traffic to and from EWR!), and it's hard to justify new infrastructure to make it easier to get to the airport. 1. In NYC Subway, a Case Study in Runaway Transit Construction Costs - Bloomberg https://share.google/SPcN8iRDZG7lNiwt9 https://share.google/SPcN8iRDZG7lNiwt9
  - ericd 5mo ago
    That’s something like $2k/resident to build, and then ongoing maintenance. Seems high for something that most will never use.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

moomoo11 5mo ago

Yeah but I don’t want to travel on a train packed with randoms, some of whom are unpleasant or dangerous. Have you taken public transit? Either it is good or it is awful. The only country whose public transit was actually good is Japan, and why is deeper than just having a good transit system. The privacy convenience and comfort are why I prefer Waymo over a bus/rail or even uber. I will pay for an air taxi if it’s a good service.

renewiltord 5mo ago

I don’t get it. Did they use the MTA budget or something? If the train is better then just build the train. Certainly these guys aren’t stopping you.

jonnybgood 5mo ago

> A train could do this in 20 minutes or so. There’s already a train that does this. It’s the express A train, which gets you to the AirTran. And as someone who has taken the train from Manhattan to JFK on multiple occasions, it most certainly does not take 20 mins or so. It takes at least an hour and that’s not including the highly likely delays. I think it would be inefficient to have a dedicated train take up the line just for JFK.

piva00 5mo ago
Stockholm with a bit over 1 million people has an express train from Arlanda airport to the center of the city, it goes at ~200km/h making the transit of ~40km in 20-25 minutes. I don't understand why it would be inefficient for one of the busiest airports in the world to one of the largest cities in the world to have a similar setup.
- jonnybgood 5mo ago
  Do you know where JFK is? JFK does not sit outside the city like Arlanda. JFK is in the NYC Queens borough surrounded by highly dense urban sprawl. That setup makes sense for an airport that sits far outside the city. No track to JFK can support anything near a 200km/hr train and building a track for such a train is a nonstarter.
  - rsynnott 5mo ago
    It'd likely have to go largely underground. This is the approach being taken for Dublin Airport (again, a far, far smaller city than NYC); it'll be served by a largely underground metro line, running every 3 minutes each direction, taking about 20 minutes from the city centre. Now, the catch there is that this metro isn't going to the airport, it's going _through_ the airport. Even without the airport it would be justifiable, so the airport kind of gets it for free. That's probably the only scenario where you can justify this sort of thing; it would be comically overkill if it was just to serve the airport (it will be able to move 20,000 people per hour per direction, which is... a lot more than the airport can move.) That said, you'd think something along these lines might be justifiable; as you say, the area surrounding JFK is dense.

Leonard_of_Q 5mo ago

Back in the time when I frequented NYC I took the train to JFK, is that no longer a thing? the LIRR brought me a'clackity-clacking (haven't you Yanks learned about that new thing called welded rails?) past Rockaway to where those driverless shuttle things took over the ride. It did take a while but I rather liked the trip. I use public transport wherever I can, certainly over overpriced taxi 'services'. Once when in London I let myself be convinced by the press rep who insisted I take a taxi with her to the airport instead of the tube as I intended. Well, let's just say that if this were all part of her plan to corner me for a few more hours it worked because the non-unexpected traffic jam kept us from catching our flight. Great job, miss press rep, drinks are on you. In other words yay for public transport in those places where it is more or less reliable and not suicidally unsafe to ride.

ericd 5mo ago

There is a train to JFK, it does not take 20 minutes.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> There is a train to JFK, it does not take 20 minutes An express train could. It would be a political non-starter since it does jack shit for the boroughs.
tootie 5mo ago
Multiple trains. You can take LIRR to Jamaica and transfer to AirTrain. Or take the A subway line. LIRR is faster but still like 45 minutes to either Brooklyn or Manhattan.

MisterTea 5mo ago

I live two blocks form the Rockaway A station, two stops from the Howard Beach/JFK station that hooks you into the Air train. It's at least 30 minutes on an express A to Fulton St, the first stop in Manhattan. Takes me about 45 minutes to get to Penn station from my house, an hour or more with delays. Unsure of what the Air train to LIRR Jamaica then to Penn in Manhattan takes, might be faster then the A depending. 15 minutes to fly from JFK to lower Manhattan is at least a 3x speed up, likely closer to 4-5x.