“I’m very impressed,” Brennan said, becoming the first foreign dignitary to take the AirTrain. “Connecting the airport to downtown is the right thing to do. Cities need to get people out of their cars.”
While Brennan’s visit was primarily a private vacation, trying out the AirTrain came as the minister had recently announced plans to link Dublin International airport with Dublin city center using a dedicated express rail service.
Two proposals are on his desk and Brennan had said he would decide by Christmas which to choose.
If the AirTrain is any sort of indicator, such rail links are rarely a smooth ride.
The original AirTrain proposal was to take the passengers taken from the JFK terminals right to Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.
After total spending of $1.9 billion, the AirTrain opened last week to fanfare (besides Brennan’s arrival), faultfinding and frustrating glitches.
The driverless rail link now takes passengers only as far as the Howard Beach subway stop and the existing A express subway station and it also pulls into Jamaica Center in Queens, to connect with the Long Island Railroad and the E, J, Z and F subways.
Barely was the AirTrain in service than mayor Michael Bloomberg was caused to stumble by a suddenly closing rail link door.
But the mayor paid scant attention, welcoming the service: “It will ensure that travelers have the option of a quick, easy and affordable way to get to their New York City destinations and then back to the airport.”
Later that day, doors failed on the AirTrain and passengers were trapped in the carriages.
“These are in essence some growing pains,” said Pasquale Defunct, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. “It’s a brand new rail system that was built from scratch.”
A lawyer, Paul Sheehan of Manhattan, told reporters that he took the AirTrain on Wednesday at 10:20 p.m. He arrived at his Upper West Side home at 1:40 a.m., exasperated but also amused at the teething troubles of the AirTrain.
In March, the minister visited Madrid to examine the way the Spanish capital is undertaking a program involving roads, a Metro, and a second terminal at Barajas Airport.
Brennan said his officials were examining the regulatory procedures applied in Madrid to determine if they can be adopted in Ireland and contribute to reducing the cost and time frame of developments.
It is forecast that the airport will be catering to about 30 million passengers a year by 2015. However, estimates of passenger traffic have proved to be conservative in the past.
Last year’s Public Transport Partnership Forum on short-term measures to improve public transport access to the airport said that more than 38 percent of all passenger journeys across the greater Dublin Area were to and from the airport.