"I don’t feel obligated to accept what I have inherited," Hochul added later Monday at a press conference in Brooklyn. "There were alternatives on the table that even the FAA said that people were saying people were not looking at as close as they should."<\/p>\n
The AirTrain was a top priority of Cuomo, who pushed the project through despite opposition from some transit advocates and even officials at the Federal Aviation Administration and the Port Authority, the bi-state agency that oversees the regional airports and would have built and operated it.<\/p>\n
Critics including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) questioned the logic of the route, which would require Manhattan-bound riders to first travel east — away from the island — before connecting to the subway at Willets Point and then heading back west. They said it’s faster to take a cab or bus to Midtown and the cost doesn’t justify the number of riders who would use it.<\/p>\n
In the last week alone, the AirTrain picked up newfound skeptics and opponents including Mayor Bill de Blasio, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards and two of the borough’s most powerful state senators, Leroy Comrie and Mike Gianaris.<\/p>\n
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and newly sworn in Gov. Kathy Hochel<\/span> (AP \/ AP Images)<\/span><\/p>\n Hochul had previously said she was in conversation with Port Authority Exeuctive Director Rick Cotton about the future of the project.<\/p>\n ANTI-VACCINE-MANDATE PROTESTORS MARCH NYC STREETS ON EVE OF ENFORCEMENT FOR HEALTH CARE WORKERS<\/strong><\/p>\n The project and its questionable route would attract just 6,000 new daily transit riders, government watchdog Reinvent Albany and former city DOT official Jon Orcutt found in a report released last month.<\/p>\n That comes out to a whopping $350,000 per rider, the report said — the most expensive project per-rider in history.<\/p>\n State Sen. Jessica Ramos, whose district encompasses part of the proposed project, called Hochul’s decision to seek alternatives "great movement in the right direction."<\/p>\n "The next step is to define with more clarity what this means in practice," Ramos tweeted. "The sentiment of a review is appreciated. What my community and our coalition partners are calling for is a halt."<\/p>\n One local elected continues to support Cuomo’s "wrong-way" proposal – longtime Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry, who castigated his colleagues for turning against the project.<\/p>\n "To do nothing by blocking LaGuardia AirTrain, as some of my colleagues in elected office now want, means that we will have no opportunity for success and more and more cars on the roads and in and out of our community for generations to come," Aubry said in a statement.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/a57.foxnews.com\/static.foxbusiness.com\/foxbusiness.com\/content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/931\/523\/split-cuomo-hochel-nygov.jpg?ve=1&tl=1\")
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