FUCKING LOL sweet, sweet summer child

Airports have their own mass transit because of jurisdictional pissing matches.

- Airports are the responsibility of the Port Authority. Yes, even if they're nowhere near water. The Port has its own cops, its own taxes and its own budget.

- Airports are hosted by the Port Authority but they must also host Customs & Border Protection and the Transportation Security Agency. I don't know how it works elsewhere but Seattle Port Authority cops threaten to kick TSA cops out of the airport about every eighteen months or so because the TSA is an organization of dire overreach at its very core.

- Local trains are the responsibility of some sort of municipal transit authority, which does not touch the port authority, CBP or TSA.

- inter-county trains are either the responsibility of a multi-county transit authority or Amtrak, one of the worst federal bureaucracies in America

- Then of course there's the taxi association, which may be practically dead but still very much bureaucratically in play.

Here's two ways this pissing match has played out in cities I've lived in:

SEATTLE. inner-city congestion was first recognized as a problem in 1911, when a cut-and-cover subway tunnel was first proposed. Nobody could agree on anything though so shit just got worse despite the tunnel being brought up again in 1926, 1928, 1958 and 1968. Things had gotten so ridiculously stupid that by 1984 the plan became "fuck you we'll build a tunnel for buses and convert it to trains someday." This required completely repurchasing the Seattle bus fleet to use the tunnel (which didn't exist yet) because switching the buses to dual-mode electric (to deal with smog in the tunnel) put them overweight for Seattle city streets. With state, federal and city funding the tunnel started construction in 1986, finished in 1990 and began being studied for conversion to light rail to the airport in 1996. I personally worked on this tunnel conversion project in 2001, 2003 and 2005. The project went over budget in 2006 and the "bus tunnel" was not included in light rail, then re-added three years later, with full bus exclusion in 2019. So while it was possible for about eight shining years to catch a city bus and take it to the airport without herfing your shit a block or more, it is no longer.

This, of course, kicks the ever-loving shit out of

Los Angeles, which has a fully-functional light rail system that white people don't know about but is packed elbow-to-elbow everywhere brown people live. However, it does not get within a mile and a half of LAX because in the '80s the taxi union held their breath until they turned blue to let LAX know that if any buses or trains were allowed to serve LAX they would boycott it. This led to three awesome compromises: (1) it costs $34 to take a taxi to downtown because that's the law (2) any taxi ride from LAX to anywhere within 3 miles of LAX costs $20 because that's the law (3) if you want to get from Union Station, where all the trains go, to LAX, where all the planes go, you will get a ticket on a fucking airport shuttle operated by Metro because fuck you, that's why. I hear the K-line will make it to LAX in 2024. I also hear that the Uber wait is no longer 2 1/2 hours. The trick used to be (1) get off your plane (2) hop a free shuttle to a nearby airport hotel (3) hail an Uber from the hotel, rather than the airport because otherwise yeah you're absolutely positively not leaving.

The ruling linked in the Vice article 404s, by the way, which is about as perfect an encapsulation of the situation as I can come up with. Either way, the impact of a frickin' $4.50 "passenger facility fee" has exactly fuckall to do with why US airport trains suck bawlz.