Yeah no. You can take the subway to a LIRR station called Jamaica or a parking lot in Howard Beach. Neither is actually at the airport let alone within a mile of an actual check in counter.
NJ transit isn’t a subway, and even so you still can’t take it to Newark Airport. You can get off a mile or two from the nearest terminal. Utterly inexplicably, the PATH train, which is reasonably described as a subway system, stops an entire stop short of even doing that, despite the tracks continuing onwards to that AirTrain station.
Once you get off each of these subways, in a location that is near to, but definitely not in, an airport, you may choose to take a slow and oddly expensive rubber wheeled bus that sort of is a monorail (and is certainly not a subway) device onwards to a terminal.
And of course at LaGuardia you can’t do even that.
So yes, it is “really true” that you can’t take the fucking subway to the airport.
All you have to is try it, get off the subway, and then ask “am I in an airport now?” and if the answer is no then you’ve figured out the problem.
The difference is that the subway is the main transit mode. OP is very reasonably complaining that every reasonable public transit option to NYC airports is multi agency and multi modal.
Most major cities I've been to have a train to the airport that is not part of the regular subway system. That requires a different type of ticket, etc.
This is especially because airports are frequently further out from a city than the subway system goes -- you need light rail.
But the A train is a subway that actually connects directly to the AirTrain which goes around the terminals at JFK.
So I don't think it's a reasonable complaint that you have to connect to an AirTrain that goes around the terminals, or that getting to Newark requires NJ Transit instead of MTA. This is entirely normal.
Also, the subway is not "the main" transit mode. For a huge proprotion of people in the metropolitan area, they rely just as much on NJ Transit, PATH, LIRR, and even Metro-North.
LaGuardia is honestly the only one that's annoying, because the connecting bus is more annoying.
Big deal if it doesn't run as fast as you'd like. That doesn't make it not a train.
Also, MTA buses run at a normal vehicle speed. So I don't even know what you're complaining about. You really need to get to your terminal, what, 5 minutes faster? You need a bullet train between terminals or something?
Yes I know what trains in Europe are like. You're changing the subject. Your point seemed to be that NYC airports aren't connected to convenient public train transportation, but the fact is that 2 out of 3 of them are.
Even if it's not technically the MTA subway itself that is the train that brings you directly to your terminal. Still, quite literally, 100%, a train.
NJ transit isn’t a subway, and even so you still can’t take it to Newark Airport. You can get off a mile or two from the nearest terminal. Utterly inexplicably, the PATH train, which is reasonably described as a subway system, stops an entire stop short of even doing that, despite the tracks continuing onwards to that AirTrain station.
Once you get off each of these subways, in a location that is near to, but definitely not in, an airport, you may choose to take a slow and oddly expensive rubber wheeled bus that sort of is a monorail (and is certainly not a subway) device onwards to a terminal.
And of course at LaGuardia you can’t do even that.
So yes, it is “really true” that you can’t take the fucking subway to the airport.
All you have to is try it, get off the subway, and then ask “am I in an airport now?” and if the answer is no then you’ve figured out the problem.