[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Eveningsong

They want to extend the subway/commuter rail here?

There's been talk for years of extending subway service to LaGaurdia, there was even a plan for it at one point. But as noted earlier, there are more pressing concerns for additional subway service that are not being met either. Adding subway or any type of rail service to the airport seems vital to improving service there, but it would be just a small percentage of the overall service in the city. The airport itself really needs to be brought into the modern world. They could build a teleportation service that would get you from Manhattan to the airport in a split second, and it wouldn't change the level of amazement from seeing a gateway to one of the world's great cities in the condition that it is.

Originally Posted by mrnyc

any terminal reconstruction should include more than just identifying and saving right of way for rail transit, it should also include at least some preconstruction. if there is going to be this level of construction disruption lets get more out of it.

If they can do that, they can just build the whole thing. There's a whole wish list of things we can have, but the reality is different.




http://secondavenuesagas.com/2010/01...-to-laguardia/

Over the last few decades, city officials have become quite intimate with the problems plaguing LaGuardia, and many have tried to fix it. The N train, whose northern terminus is less than three miles away from the LaGuardia terminals, is so tantalizing close to the airport and yet so far away.

...Last week, in his “Why Train” segment, NBC 4′s Andrew Siff posted just this question. “What about the train to LGA?” asks Siff. In a one-minute piece, he mentioned how, 12 years ago, city and MTA officials were heavily invested in a plan to extend the N to LaGuardia, but in the face of other pressing transit needs and widespread community opposition, the agency eventually shelved this much needed link to LaGuardia. So what then were the plans that engendered widespread community outrage and still cause politicians to chime in now and then, nearly a decade after the MTA discarded the idea? Let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and explore some Giuliani-Era transit developments.

The plans to extend the N to LaGuardia first came to light in 1998 as city officials recognized the need to build better access to the airports. As part of a $1.2 billion package with funding coming from the MTA, the Port Authority and the city, Giuiliani put forth a plan to build an airtrain to JFK and extend the subway to LaGuardia. The JFK line — built over preexisting rights-of-way — survived. The LaGuardia plans, obviously, did not....

In the end, despite opposition, political support for the plan from City Hall continued well into the 21st Century. With the backing of Mayor Guiliani and Queens Borough President Clare Shulman, the MTA’s 2000-2004 Five-Year Capital Plan included $645 million for the LaGuardia subway link, and even though a $17 million planning study was the project’s only expense, in late 2002, Mayor Bloomberg threw his weight behind the LaGuardia extension as a key post-9/11 revitalization plan.

Finally, in mid-2003, the Queens communities won the battle as the MTA announced plans to shelve the airport extension. With money tight after 9/11 and Lower Manhattan on the radar, then-MTA Chair Peter Kalikow said that the agency’s attention had turned to the JFK Raillink from Lower Manhattan, another plan that never materialized, and that the agency was prioritizing the 7 Line Extension, the East Side Access Plan and the Second Ave. Subway over the LaGuardia N train extension. “LaGuardia is a good project, but you have to prioritize,” Elliot Sander, then at NYU, said. “In terms of political support from City Hall, Albany and Washington, it’s moved back in the queue.”

You can read more of that there, but that's that for now. The focus remains on rebuilding at the airport itself, until some extra funding and support comes to build rail.