The Metropolitan Airport. Nicholas Dagen Bloom

run Carey bus service to Idlewild by irrationally predicting worse congestion from buses than cars: “You can understand the difficult traffic problems that would arise if regularly scheduled trips at intervals of a few minutes were permitted over the parkway system to Idlewild Airport.”¹¹⁰ Yet tens of thousands of individual cars and taxis nevertheless congested parkways to and from the airport, and their numbers rose in tandem with explosive increases in aviation traffic.¹¹¹

      The airport’s negative reputation for difficult access and egress solidified during the 1950s as more and more travelers found themselves stuck in traffic: “During the past few years many travelers have noticed that at times it has taken longer to drive from New York International Airport, at Idlewild, in Queens, into Manhattan than it has to make the flight from Boston to New York City.” Carey passenger buses remained banned from the Grand Central Parkway, for instance, thus making their journey to the airport painfully slow on regular city streets like Woodhaven Boulevard.¹¹² The Whitestone Expressway, the interstate connection to the Van Wyck that finally allowed trucks and buses direct access from the airport to the regional road system, including the Long Island Expressway and the Whitestone Bridge, was not built until the 1960s as part of preparations for Moses’s 1964–65 World’s Fair.