On 08/11/2019 07:54, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 06:30:02 on Fri, 8 Nov 2019,
John Levine remarked:
In article ,
Roland PerryÂ* wrote:
The Long Island Railroad also goes to that Airtrain much faster and
lots of people take it.Â* The NJ Transit train goes to Newark airport
via another airtrain and it's also quite popular.

How many of those people are visitors on their first trip to NY?

I haven't a clue.Â* Probably depends where they're from.

It's vital to your thesis because HEx is catering for the high-end
airline passenger who has probably never visited London before, and just
wants to be spoon-fed an "airport express" service to the city centre.

Elsewhere in North America, the subway or local commuter train goes to
the airports in Toronto, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington
DC (National), Atlanta, Chicago (both airports), Dallas, St Louis, San
Francisco, Portland OR, Seattle, Vancouver, and probably other places
I haven't been to.Â* In each case there's been plenty of people on the
train with me with suitcases.

First time visitors to the city, who would normally use a taxi?

Here in the US, the normal thing at an airport is to rent a car, not
to take a taxi.

I think that's a huge stretch for the kind of travellers involved. For
example the first time I flew into Atlanta from the UK for a trade show
in the city centre, a hire car would be a huge liability. As would one
have been to a similar trade show six months later in New York. What I
needed was to hire a car for an hour to take me to my hotel (and a few
days later, back to the airport). That's called a Taxi.

That doesn't mean I've never flown into a city and hired a car, but
thinking back it's always when I've been on holiday, and my destination
was some way outside that city. That's quite disjoint from HEx's target
market which is people otherwise taking a taxi from Heathrow to Zone 1.

And, of course, for whom even the regular HEx fare is down in the noise
level compared to their $2000 flight or $200/night hotel.

The distances are greater, and we have absurdly large
car parks.Â* One time at a conference in Lyon (where there is a
convenient overpriced tram from the airport) a young guy from
California on his first international trip rented a car and attempted
to drive it around the city.Â* It was pretty funny.

It'd be like that in London. And remember, we are discussing why people
would use HEx rather than other modes of transport. To hire a car at
Heathrow to drive to hotel in Zone 1 would be insane.

Atlanta's another metro system where people have said I was crazy to mix
it with the locals. It's a very deep seated prejudice.

I can believe it.Â* The local snark is that MARTA means Moving Africans
Rapidly Through Atlanta.Â* The communter traffic is horrible but
adjacent counties have repeatedly voted down MARTA extensions because
Those People could come to their counties.Â* (It is my impression that
a whole lot of those people come as house cleaners and garden guys,
presumably arriving by magic, or more likely very slow buses.)Â* I've
never had any trouble on MARTA.

I've never had any trouble on MARTA either, and yes the resistance to
extensions is for precisely the same reason people fear city metro
systems almost everywhere (regardless of the ethnicity of the locals):
that it's perceived as the mode of choice of thieves and muggers.

Shades of the Duke of Wellington!

--
Graeme Wall
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