jmoiron.net

Every time I go to Asia, it gets harder and harder to come back. Landing at Newark "Liberty" International Airport via Hong Kong's airport feels like travelling to a third world backwater.

The ride to the Hong Kong Airport takes you across multiple attractive suspension bridges. Or you could have checked in your baggage at the Tsim Sha Tsui or Central train stations and taken a train directly to the terminal. The departures terminal (all flights are international) is large, spacious, and clean, with gratis luggage trucks. You take off surrounded by new (by US standards) high rise buildings and the beautiful nature enveloped mountains of Lantau Island.

You land in the US at the massive concrete sprawl of Kennedy Airport, or in the shipping container fields and chemical waste swamps of Elizabeth, NJ. You walk out into a room where you wait on line (even if you are a US citizen; there's never a line for Hong Kong residents in HK), and you undergo a biometric check (eye scan and finger print). You fill out a card detailing what you've brought, which is then stamped (after one line wait) and then ignored and placed in a pile in customs. The documentation creates lines that wrap around the baggage carousels, which are in a low-ceilinged dingy room where cell phone usage is prohibited. Last time I bothered to check, the baggage trucks carried a fee.

If you're lucky enough to leave the airport in a car, you're taken to your destination either via the perpetually congested Van Wyck, the congested route 1&9, or the toll road GSP. If you're unlucky enough to be taking the trains, JFK will charge you $5 to leave the airport, and then you're stuck out in the boonies waiting for a subway. At Newark, you ride a (free, if I recall) airport rail out to an NJ transit station, then make a (non-free) transfer somewhere on the line to a path train, then (probably) another non-free transfer onto the NYC subway.

The differences aren't really for lack of cash; certainly if there's a metropolitan area in the US that can compare with the economic output of Hong Kong it'd be the New York one. This kind of difference in the quality of service is pretty pervasive; it's not just in public transportation. The evidence seems to suggest that in the US, competing private interests with ulterior motives are given sway over these public services, whereas in Hong Kong they operate under one consistent vision.

Why don't we have one convenient method of rfid debit payment in the NYC metro region that I can use in busses, trains, kiosks, etc? Why isn't there one (cheap) rail line that seamlessly connects the subway and the airports? How can the MTA still be leaking money while providing increasingly poor service at dirty, run down stations? Provided there was a clear vision and a decision to solve these problems, I can't imagine that we would lack the resources to do so. The collective reluctance to do so, say, because of the impact it'd have on private enterprise operating in those spaces, or because of power plays between unions and corporations, is the reason why I am not very optimistic about it getting fixed any time soon.