The Port Authority has dropped its plan to bring AirTrain service to LaGuardia Airport in favor of less costly alternatives, including a new express shuttle bus service, officials said.  

An “expert panel” tasked with evaluating LaGuardia’s mass transit options excluded a light rail link from its recommendations for the airport, the Port Authority said in a press release.  

Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday said she would accept the panel’s recommendations, effectively quashing a Cuomo-era proposal that dated back to 2015. 

“I look forward to [their] immediate implementation by the Port Authority in close coordination with our partners at the MTA, in the City of New York and the federal government,” she said in a statement. 

The Port Authority paused the AirTrain project, commissioned a transit study and convened a three-person panel to oversee the analysis at Hochul’s behest in October 2021.

At the time, the governor said she wanted to “take some breathing room to assess what’s been done in the past, what ideas were rejected and how we ended up with AirTrain in the first place.”

Estimates put the cost of a light rail link to LaGuardia in the $2.4 billion to $6.2 billion range, the Port Authority said Monday, far exceeding the $450 million projection former Gov. Andrew Cuomo floated when he unveiled a plan to rebuild the airport in 2015. 

The expert panel recommended two bus-centric alternatives to the AirTrain, the Port Authority said in its release: bringing “substantial improvements” to the MTA’s existing Q70 LaGuardia Link bus service and launching an express shuttle bus service to and from the airport.

The shuttle service would connect the Astoria-Ditmars Boulevard subway station — the last stop on the N and W lines — to the airport’s three terminals via “fully electric” buses and dedicated bus lanes, according to the release. 

Outside firms that worked on the LaGuardia transit study estimated the bus service improvements would cost “just under $500 million” and “benefit nearly 5 million total passengers annually,” the release said.

Queens Borough President Donovan Richards in a statement released Monday said the governor and the Port Authority were “correct in their move to scrap the LaGuardia AirTrain once and for all.”

“It has been clear that the proposed line was both fiscally dubious and insufficiently beneficial to the communities surrounding the airport, which are in serious need of more pressing infrastructure improvements,” Richards said.

In its own statement, the Riders Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for subway and bus riders, said it was “so refreshing to see government leaders admit a mistake and change course before it’s too late.”

“The backwards boondoggle AirTrain belongs just where it landed, on the scrapheap of history,” the alliance said. “Much better bus service is the right answer both for Queens riders and the travelers who pass through their neighborhoods on the way to the airport.”