Originally Posted by
transportprof
I had a transportation professor who taught that 'Monorails are the transportation mode of the future, and they always will be" around the time that the Newark Airtrain was being planned.
Perhaps he was angling for a big fat consulting contract from the Seattle Monorail crowd, which actually got to running TV ads promising monorail lines all over the city before the project collapsed of its own ridiculousness.
Originally Posted by transportprof
My understanding is that the architecture of EWR's current terminals was designed so that only a monorail could serve the buildings. The idea was to prevent PATH from easily serving the airport, which the Port Authority was determined to avoid in the 1980s. Times have changed and it's going to cost a lot to undo past idiocy.
I dunno. Terminals A and B are legacy-footprint structures planned in the 1960s and opened in '73, and Terminal C was planned by PeoplExpress in the early 1980s (though PE was gone by the time it finally opened, with Continental the successor tenant). The isolated-necklace-of-terminals design, like LAX and JFK and MCI, is a major burden to overcome, but I don't think it was part of a conspiracy to stop PATH. I think it's just the way things turned out.
Originally Posted by
milepig
These two statements seem to be in conflict, no access other than NJ Transit or Air Train - vs. buses run from the EWR stop when the Air Train isn't functioning. Which is correct?
There is definitely an easy bus-access alternative to the EWR NJT station for when the AirTrain is broken. As unreliable as AirTrain is you couldn't not have alternative ground transport.