Perhaps I am missing your broader point, but the fact that ITH exists and only has scheduled service to New York is a bit ridiculous. That should be a high-speed rail route that takes you from city center to center, if America intends to become a developed nation.
God it's gotten worse. Last time I looked they had flights to PHL and DTW.
As it is now there is fierce competition for bus service from Ithaca to NYC (budget to various grades of premium) and I find it almost unimaginable that I'd fly to NYC to get to NYC because flying to JFK or atrocious EWR (never once made a transfer at EWR that didn't involve re-entering the secure zone) wouldn't save time to get to Midtown.
If you try to take the bus in the other direction you find you can't get from here to there. A friend of mine who used to ride the bus through Canada to get to the Detroit suburbs now takes the bus up to Syracuse, then takes Amtrak and gets out at 4am. On the way back one time there was no room on the bus although he paid for a ticket ahead of time.
The real significance of the regional airport is that it connects to a hub that goes everywhere. As it is if I have to fly somewhere I'll probably have to go up to SYR where at least I can fly on Jetblue and know I'm flying on an Airbus.
which I really enjoyed flying in, but they got replaced with 50-seat regional jets because regional jets are less likely to break down at a small airport requiring a crew to travel two hours to repair them.
As it is, academics at Cornell and Ithaca College will struggle to bring in speakers and it's just one more bit of "stave the countryside" that will drive knowledge workers to go to blue cities where their votes don't count -- it's how you hand the next election to a Demagogue.
You're right I was not thinking of the probable more common use case that a trip originating at ITH is only connecting at JFK and eventually arriving elsewhere. For that traveler a train to Manhattan doesn't work as well.
If it was all integrated it could be great. I have always been puzzled about how few Americans will use public transit to the airport. When I go to a conference in San Francisco I run into European conference goers on the BART but if I am with American coworkers they always insist on taking the SuperShuttle. Similarly I’ve usually taken the subway to JFK even when it meant riding on an insipod shuttle bus
