A Rush-Hour Drive to JFK Is the City’s Worst Airport Commute
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The subway to the AirTrain may be your best bet if you’re traveling to Kennedy Aiport during rush hour. Photo via Port Authority/Flickr.
By Jonathan Sperling
Plan on driving or Ubering to Kennedy Airport at rush hour? Good luck.
The ride to the Jamaica airport takes roughly twice as long during rush hour than other parts of the day. And it’s the worst rush hour traffic of any airport in the region, worse than LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst and Newark Airport in New Jersey, according to a new report from data-scraping tool ReadyPipe.
Chad Horner, a data analyst with ReadyPipe, arrived at that conclusion using data collected from Bing Maps.
Horner used driving routes from 11 New York City neighborhoods, including Long Island City, Williamsburg and Midtown, to determine the longest travel times.
The average drive time to Kennedy Airport remains flat in the early morning — it’s under 40 minutes between midnight and 6 a.m. The drive time starts to rise with the sun, as average driving times increases to nearly an hour by 3 p.m. and over an hour by 4 p.m. Average driving times do not decreased to 40 minutes until after 9 p.m.
Drivers care at the mercy of rush hour traffic on their way to LaGuardia in East Elmhurst as well, but the report found that even during rush hour, the driving route did not average more than 40 minutes. In the early morning hours, drivers can get to LaGuardia in as little as 25 minutes on average.
Driving routes from Harlem, the West Village and Prospect Park were also taken into the account in the report.
Besides a few select Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, LaGuardia was by far the most convenient airport to drive to. From Long Island City, for example, drivers could travel to LaGuardia in an average of 21.6 minutes, while a trip to Kennedy would take 35 minutes on average. In fact, a trip from LIC to JFK could take as long as nearly an hour and a half in the afternoon.
Kennedy Airport is accessible by Long Island Rail Road and the subway, as long as you’re willing to take a short ride on the AirTrain.
LaGuardia is accessible by several Queens bus lines, including the Q70 LaGuardia Link and the M60.
With the current state of the MTA, those options may not be much better timewise.
But at least as a public transportation passenger, you can tweet your frustration at various state and city agencies rather than stew alone in your puttering automobile.
