Sweet! This $15 Flat-Rate Rideshare From LaGuardia Seems Moderately Less Awful?

There's nothing quite like the feeling of landing at LaGuardia Airport, waiting the 25 minutes for dozens of people you've been stewing in to grab their stupid rolling luggage out of the tiny overhead bins, filing silently out of a tube and into a confused mass of humanity, smelling a faint burning odor, taking a series of moving sidewalks and stained carpets past tables of travelers staring at smudged iPads, walking down into a fluorescent basement, walking out into the exhaust-spiced air, walking onto a bus, getting off a bus, waiting on a line, sitting in a cab for 35 minutes, and paying $36 (plus tip) to get home. Yes, the Big Apple is really something. But progress marches on, and starting today, a new ride service will let you do all this for much less money.

According to a press release, the rideshare company Via is now offering $15 flat-rate rides from LaGuardia to Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and $20 to Staten Island and the Bronx. Travelers can either use the Via app and select "LGA Connect," or go to the dedicated LGA Connect pickup point outside of Terminal C/D in a special zone of the ride-hail lot. (A release promises "plenty of in-airport signage" to help you get there.) Riders will then share a car with up to 5 other people who are heading in a similar direction, and will get dropped off a few blocks from home. The service runs from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m., and the release says that each ride will depart within 10 minutes of booking.

“We are in the peak of construction of an entirely new airport with the high-volume holiday travel season now upon us," Rick Cotton, executive director of The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is quoted in the release. "Since the agency is constantly looking for ways to reduce congestion and improve the LaGuardia experience, we welcome Via’s LGA Connect service which offers LaGuardia travelers a sustainable, affordable option to reach their final destinations in all five boroughs, including travel public transit hubs.”

The Port Authority's constant search for improving the abysmal traffic situation at LaGuardia (almost 90 percent of people traveling to and from LaGuardia take private cars, taxis, or shuttles) during the years-long renovation somehow hasn't included creating a dedicated travel lane for MTA buses.

"Of course people should travel together from one point to the other to make it more efficient to get to and from the airport," said Danny Pearlstein, the policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance. "But there's nothing quite like a 40 or 60 passenger bus to make that happen, running on a fixed route to and from subways stations in Manhattan and Queens."

Pearlstein pointed to the 14th Street busway as a "sterling example" of what can be accomplished with a little political will.

"The governor needs to make the Port Authority and the MTA work together to prioritize those buses, and where appropriate, the mayor should give them priority on city streets."

Pearlstein added, "That has to come from Governor Cuomo."

After all, it is Cuomo's "vision" driving these repairs. And we'll be living with it for some time. Work on the new Central Terminal Building at Terminal B to move the airport 600 feet closer to the Grand Central Parkway, freeing up air taxiing space at the undersized airport, is supposed to continue until 2022. Delta's work on its own terminal, costing $3.9 billion, won't be finished until at least 2026.

"The bottom line is, the airport is undergoing this multi billion dollar renovation, it's going to take a period of years, we're really in the thick of it, and people have been suffering to get there. It's entirely unnecessary," Pearlstein said.

Unfortunately, Cuomo has dismissed the traffic nightmare at LaGuardia Airport as "unavoidable inconvenience.'"

For now, this Via rideshare option only exists when you're leaving LaGuardia. And Leaving LaGuardia? That's the best part.