JFK International Airport

New York City was great to travel to and visit. It has culture, great food, and good public transportation (decent enough for a tourist).

But wow, is JFK International Airport ever bad. Let’s list my grievances:

Air Train

It costs $8 to use the Air Train (shuttle train that gets around airport terminals). Why.

Other airports around the world have some sort of toll as well. Vancouver Airport charges for taking the train into the airport (departure). Edmonton Airport is in the middle of nowhere so the transit authority runs a special bus service and charges a nominal fee.

SFO is like JFK. BART charges more as soon as the trip origin or destination involves SFO. BART is not a great service. Therefore, by powers of inductive reasoning, the AirTrain is also not a great service.

You know that both SFO and JFK are doing this because they can. Supply and demand, there is demand and they are the monopolistic owners of the supply.

Dated Decor

I’ve been to many different airports, all around the world. They’re all in varying stages of disrepair and agedness.

I would have let this point slide if anything about this airport didn’t suck. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. I would not describe this experience as “it’s not broken”.

Employees

The employees at this airport are terrible. At many airports, the employees are just kinda there, not in the way. But the few experiences I had with social interaction were miserable.

Maybe the daily interaction with the kinds of people who go through this airport that have broken them.

Maybe airport jobs attract people of a certain type of character. When I worked at a call center (outbound calls to do surveys), there was high turnover as many people didn’t have patience or charisma to succeed. Or couldn’t deal with the moral/ethical ambiguity of cold-calling people. This results in filtering for certain types of people, the survivors.

New Yorkers were very pleasant people to interact with. This includes outside touristy areas. Some may be direct or a tad brusque but no one was actively hostile. Not exactly small-town-chatty nice but they didn’t make public their disdain for their jobs. Not at JFK, there clearly isn’t any criteria for customer service or politeness. Or “be kind to fellow human beings, why unnecessarily be a dick” aptitude test.

TSA

The security checkpoint here was very inefficient. And that’s saying a lot, since TSA has a reputation for being inefficient in general, compared to other countries.

I have TSA pre-check, which means they have done background check and whatnot and therefore can expedite me through. Shoes stay on and you go through metal scanner instead of body scanner (probably 3x slower).

But here, they thought it was a good idea to mix TSA pre-check passengers with regular passengers to go through x-ray scanner. What happens is that the TSA pre-check folk go through a separate line (metal scanner) and wait for their stuff. But non-pre-check folks line up for body scanners and their shit blocks the x-ray scanning pipeline. X-ray scanning is probably the main bottleneck and has low throughput, so this makes little sense to slow down for this. What ended up happening was 3-6 TSA pre-check folks were waiting on their stuff that hadn’t even began to go through.

Argh! Who designed this!

Long story short, passengers are miserable, the TSA agents are miserable (their peers are slowing them down, might affect their performance metric or something), lines take longer, more manual intervention and shuffling of roles, which causes context overhead for everyone and undue stress.

Conclusion

I enjoyed New York City. I would go visit again. However, it’s a long flight there. And I don’t look forward to the hot mess that is JFK.

If I lived in the North East, I would probably prefer to take 3-7 hours to road trip there, instead of dealing with this nonsense.