Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Traveling to Boston

The 1 hour flight to Boston requires you to arrive at the airport 1 hour in advance of departure. For me, that means that I have to get to the airtrain 80 minutes before departure, and the LIRR to get to the airtrain 30 minutes before that, which requires leaving the house a total of 2 hours before the flight takes off. It takes another 45 minutes in Boston to get to Cambridge from the airport. That means that if everything clicks perfectly it will take 3 hours 45 minutes total travel time for a 1 hour flight.

Take the bus, and you have 20 minutes extra travel on each end of a 4 hour ride, for a total of 4 hours 40 minutes. So taking the bus to Boston takes 25% more time and costs 10% as much.
The Amtrak train costs slightly more than the plane and takes about the same amount of time.

So why not always take the bus? Comfort is a consideration, but is that comfort worth a 900% premium? Reliability is another, but I don’t have enough information to determine the relative reliability of these modes of transportation; if anything, I think the bus is more reliable. So really it is a comfort issue. Today, comfort won out, but maybe next time I’ll go with cost, given my general annoyance with JetBlue today. Anyway, food for thought I suppose.

[Stuck in JFK because I missed a flight by 2 minutes...]