I commute through Penn Station three days a week, I can't understate how terrible it is for commuters.
Every morning when I exit the train to a blast of heat on cramped platforms, wait in line for my turn to weave up a tiny staircase, into the aging waiting halls with hoses routing ceiling leaks into trash cans, zig zag through a labyrinth of low-ceiling corridors, giving a wide berth to half-naked mentally ill people, to a side exit (since the main exit has been closed for months, and finally, as icing on the cake, I jump over a permanent puddle created by construction barriers RIGHT at the crosswalk where THOUSANDS of people exit the busiest train station in the entire country, I think about the line:
“One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.”
I don't think the statistics about journey times on public transit anywhere are true. Or they are fundamentally dishonest, in the sense that they should be measured relative to cars, biking and walking.
Whether I was a suburban commuter in Chicago or cross-town commuter in Boston, public transit was so crazy slow. In San Francisco it is insanely slow. In New York it was so utterly baffling how long it took to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the subway. Like 3-4x a bike, 1-2x a car.
Bike consistently beat out everything in any locale they work in. You don't need any stats to understand why: (1) you never have to wait for one, (2) you very rarely need to walk further to your destination than a car, and (3) you never have to waste time parking it.
But here we are, still arguing about bike infrastructure, even San Francisco can't help itself and would, rather than a nice bike lane 7 days a week, it wants to give some mega church free parking 1 day a week. It loves little nurt nurt trains shlepping 0 passengers most of the day. Those red bus lanes...
Does it make sense to subject anyone to the misery of living in New Jersey to work in New York? Those suckers pay taxes higher than the French to live like a budget suburb in Los Angeles. It's just so stupid. Maybe work from home is the only reprieve for millions of Americans.
> In New York it was so utterly baffling how long it took to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the subway. Like 3-4x a bike, 1-2x a car.
I live in Brooklyn and commuted to Manhattan 5 days a week before 2020, primarily by subway, but occasionally by car and a few times by bike, and this was not my experience.
At rush hour the subway was consistently faster than a car, and I think comparable if maybe a bit slower than a bike, but certainly not 4x. For a road distance of 3-6 miles between various offices/home addresses I spent 25-45 minutes door-to-door on the subway.
I’m a big proponent of cycling infrastructure but I’m not sure I’d choose to commute by bike if I went back to working in an office, though I imagine a modern ebike would go a long way towards helping with the sweat factor.
The e-bike only works if you keep below the speed at which it's mandated to stop assisting. If one has a mental disability that urges the individual to pass by any and all cyclists in front of them, an e-bike will not relieve them from the necessity to shower.
> Bike consistently beat out everything in any locale they work in.
That’s absolutely not true and I say that as a massive cycling advocate. There are countless journeys in London which are fastest by public transport, especially since the coming of the Elizabeth Line.
Never going to risk my life commuting by bike in NYC. Dont push your lifestyle onto me. Or in the vernacular, “You do you.” I’ll stick with the subway.
There'd be less opportunity for fatal crashes due to the surface area between cycle paths and car paths being reduced. This would literally mean that it'd be safer if there was better infrastructure.
Proper bike infrastructure isn't just extra lanes next to cars. Typically "proper" includes things like protective walls, and bridges specifically for bikes + pedestrians separate from cars.
It is entirely possible to design bike infrastructure that removes car impacts from the equation - we have the technology, we only lack the political will.
Proper bike infrastructure is for example a line of trees between a cycling path and a road. Or a moat with water and angry homeless drug addicted goose. Reading the comments here makes me think drug addicts in the streets work quite well as urban planning tool is US.
> I don't think the statistics about journey times on public transit anywhere are true.
Journey times everywhere should come with variance data. Often times people will say you can get to Manhattan within x minutes from a certain location, except 1 standard deviation from the mean could be 30min+, and 2 standard deviations might be 60min+.
The station has hundreds of staircases and dozens of entrances. If you commute into it three days a week and haven't found a path that's workable, maybe the train station isn't the problem.
As a very occasional user, I think it would be fantastic if NJT could abandon their system of announcing the track number for a departing train at the last minute and thus causing a stampede for every train. (Not to mention a rather unsafe situation at the bottom of the escalator.). As a side effect, a decent fraction of passengers might happily wait on the platform for 10-15 minutes before departure, which might even reduce the degree to which the portions of the station above the platforms are overcrowded.
I suspect a viable plan for this could be arranged for less than $1bn :)
The two "easy" fixes (in the sense of not needing construction) are to through-run trains (which reduces the amount of time trains need to occupy tracks) and to assign and announce trains to the tracks on a permanent basis.
The main reason trains aren't assigned to tracks in advance is because American passenger trains are run by incompetent people who insist that practices that are normal outside of the US are completely and totally impossible and therefore it's impossible to assign trains to tracks. There is also a subsidiary reason that the platforms at Penn Station are too narrow to have good bidirectional passenger flow, so they want to keep people off of them as much as possible.
Yes, the width of the platforms is basically 'tech debt' in physical form.
Most of the layout of Penn Station is historical to its original construction (the destruction of Penn Station destroyed the hall, but the corridors below it are still there.) In the 1910s when Penn Station was built, commuting by railroad was miniscule and the future suburbs of New Jersey were still just woods and farms. So the layout gave large, wide platforms to the central tracks that hosted intercity trains, and narrow platforms to the commuter tracks that can barely host the width of a single escalator. This is a liability in 2023, because the share is overwhelmingly commuter traffic.
Through run trains also have a problem with this, because if we implemented through running, today, the platforms would not adequately clear before the next train arrived, creating crowd crush on the platforms. The station is also fully at capacity, so there isn't really a way to expand the platforms to allow through running that wouldn't cut Penn Station's capacity for the next few years, if not a decade. (To give some perspective, the Japanese do projects fairly well, and Shibuya Station reorganization/widening started in 2015 and has stuff to do until 2027.) The current plan to maybe get a start on widening the existing platforms is to demolish a block of Manhattan to build new platforms to take the load while the existing ones can go out of service. Funding to take a block of the most expensive real estate in the world is unclear.
There are a lot of platforms at Penn Station, and it seems to me that trains spend quite a long time at these platforms, in part due to issues related to passenger loading and unloaded.
What if the number of platforms was reduced? (By placing bogeys that’s are just platforms on every second or third track, for example?) This would reduce the number of usable platforms by 1/3-1/2, but it would massively increase availability space for loading and unloading passengers. If this enabled faster train turnaround, it could plausibly increase station throughput.
(Aside from being annoying and perhaps dangerous, the current scheme is absurdly inefficient. People can board a train far fast than they can go down the one or two (!) main escalators, and the train cars far from the escalators barely load at all until the nearer trains are mostly full.)
edit: I’m apparently not entirely off base. Here’s a proposal that increases throughput while reducing the number of tracks:
Simply bridging the platforms is not enough. You’d also need to get those people off the platforms before the next train arrived, and you would need something more permanent than platform bogies to support wider stairs and escalator banks.
A bridge gets passengers off the other side of the train to the escalators on the next platform over (I think), which could double or more-than-double the egress throughout. (More-than-double because, at least with some gates or careful monitoring, you don’t actually need the passengers off the platform to move the train - you just need the passengers off the train. Similarly, to board the train, the passengers could already be on the platform when the train arrives, allowing all cars to board simultaneously. (Of course, this isn’t terribly helpful for train cadence — you can’t board the next train until those passengers get to the platform.) As currently configured, unlike most sensible train stations, a train full of passengers can’t fit on the platform.)
It’s still pretty narrow, because the individiual stairs themselves are only about one to two people wide, and they’re far enough apart that people would probably ignore any left/right directional flow that you would see on a double-wide set of stairs.
To give some perspective on how long a reconfiguration like this takes, JR East has been working on platform optimization like this at Shibuya Station since 2015, and the last elements will complete in 2027; and that’s at a station that started more optimally than Penn Station.
As someone who used the train in Japan extensively, it drives me crazy that Amtrak can’t do simple stuff like knowing what platform a train is going to come to, let alone get the train to line up so the doors are in the right place. A train system run in a foreign language should not be simpler and less confusing than one in my native language!
Amtrak is incompetent because it's primarily a government welfare program for exactly two kinds of people:
- People in the northeast corridor (Boston, NYC, DC) taking Acela[0]
- People who live in rural towns without airports
The structure of Amtrak's ticket fees ensures the former subsidizes the latter, but the end result is the same: the vast majority of Americans do not give a shit about the functioning of commuter trains, so the organizations who run them are effectively vestigial.
A microcosm of this is train priority. Under US law, if Amtrak runs a train on freight rail networks, Amtrak gets priority. In reality, freight operators tell Amtrak to go fuck themselves and Amtrak duly complies. This means that their schedules have no connection to reality and trains get delayed for hours because the freight operators need to send 40,000 cars worth of coal to Texas and none of their lines are dual-tracked. Nobody at Amtrak is actually going to try forcing the issue, though, because that requires money, and running a functioning train service is Not Their Job.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if their inability to properly announce platforms has something to do with the priority issue, too. If you don't know when a train is going to come you can't reserve a platform for it either.
Amtrak says[1] that while they technically have priority, they have no power to enforce it (and the DoJ isn’t doing anything about the problem); so the best they can do is write an irritated-sounding PDF[2]. I think they’d like you to call your representative and ask them to get this fixed.
In the NE corridor, Amtrak (as bad as it is) is the fastest means of transport from city center to city center. A car is close but just getting into NYC is so slow that Amtrak will win in almost every case.
If for some reason you wanted to go from the DC suburbs of Virginia to Queens a plane might be okay, but realistically planes waste so much time on security and boarding that it’s not worth it.
>A car is close but just getting into NYC is so slow that Amtrak will win in almost every case.
I take Amtrak into NY even though it's basically an hour in the wrong direction to drive to Route 128 station (a suburban station south of Boston). But I do it because I find driving into Manhattan so unpleasant in spite of probably being a bit faster.
Trains vs. planes make sense for the two ends of the Northeast Corridor especially if you're going downtown to downtown. They really don't on a price or time basis for the whole route.
Train is often more expensive than budget airlines in Europe too. (And the Shinkansen in Japan isn't cheap either.) Long distance train can be a comfortable way to travel but economy (and, often, speed) aren't really why you choose long distance rail much of the time.
And the second of those are mostly more served by buses.
There are probably a few city pairs here and there like maybe Seattle and Portland. But Amtrak mostly has utility for the two halves of the Northeast Corridor where it actually has quite a bit of utility. (The whole Boston to DC run is mostly too long relative to flying.)
> Under US law, if Amtrak runs a train on freight rail networks, Amtrak gets priority. In reality, freight operators tell Amtrak to go fuck themselves and Amtrak duly complies.
It’s a bit more complex than that. All train journeys are scheduled ahead of time down to the block level, to ensure that only one train will ever occupy any given block at any given time. During this scheduling process conflicts are inevitable. Each conflict must be resolved somehow, and usually it is done by having one train wait in a siding for the other to depart the conflicted block. If one of these trains is a passenger train, then the law requires that the passenger train must always be given priority. This means that the other train must enter the siding and stop while the passenger train passes.
The freight companies always follow this rule, except for one tiny exception.
Consider what happens when one of the two trains cannot fit into any of the sidings. It wouldn’t do any good for that train to enter a siding and stop, because the back of the train would still be occupying the main line. Instead, the short train must use a siding and allow the longer one to pass.
Back in the 70s when Amtrak was founded and the law was written there just weren’t any long trains. But long trains are definitely more efficient, especially when they only have one type of cargo and all the cars are going to the same place. For one thing, the short trains need a lot more conductors and engineers than the single long train does.
So you can see that when an Amtrak train conflicts with a 2–mile–long coal train, it will definitely be the Amtrak train that ends up waiting. However, this does not _delay_ the Amtrak train, because it is built into the schedule. The Amtrak train has a published arrival time, and getting there on time assumes that it will be stopped for a certain amount of time waiting for that long train to pass.
There are people who think that the freight companies are breaking the law here, but the core fact is that the law simply doesn’t say anything about it; it simply assumes that either train could wait in the siding for the other. I believe it’s been brought up in Congress even, but there’s not been enough political will to amend the law; certainly Congress could ban long trains, or require the track owner to build sidings long enough to accommodate them, etc.
There is also the issue that a _late_ train loses priority. If an Amtrak train departs late (or is delayed during the trip somehow), then it could end up waiting on trains that it was originally scheduled to go ahead of, and this can make it later.
Funny story time: I was taking a trip on the Zephyr. We were delayed for ~20 minutes shortly after leaving Denver because the train ran over a shopping cart. The conductor got on the intercom and apologized for the delay, but of course they had to dig the remains of the cart out from under the engines and inspect them for damage. The train had been on time up til that point; they made up some time during the night, but we were still late getting in to Chicago. Fun times!
> But long trains are definitely more efficient, especially when they only have one type of cargo and all the cars are going to the same place. For one thing, the short trains need a lot more conductors and engineers than the single long train does.
I’ll believe this when I see a real analysis, and only when I see a real analysis.
A long train is huge, and revenue per long train net of fuel seems likely to be quite high. Notably, I expect it to be dramatically higher than the cost of even the number of conductors and engineers needed to run several short trains. (Conductors and engineers are not well paid.)
The tradeoff is that a long train fails if any of the cars fails, so the actual availability of a long train falls exponentially with length. (Which is “mitigated” by what appear to be rather poor, perhaps intentionally poor, inspection practices on the parts of the rail companies, thus allowing long trains with malfunctioning cars to continue to operate.)
I would expect shorter trains to be more economical with all costs considered, especially if signaling and safety systems were upgraded to allow more efficient scheduling.
They’ve been doing really long trains for a couple of decades now, and they’re not showing any signs of stopping. I’d say that the economics of it probably works out.
Anyway, the economics don’t really matter. The long trains exist and have to be scheduled somehow.
I wonder how much it would cost to add extra tracks in places like the Seattle -> Eugene line (that I recently took, except that the trip back turned into a bus due to ... well, freight I think). It's mostly emptiness, my understanding is that actually laying the track isn't hard.
But the more I think about other rail networks, the more I feel like I almost never see multi-track lines. I think these lines are also being used for freight and yet... is the US really just running uniquely long trains for freight?
At Penn station, you used to be able to wait on the floor below (which has a staircase from the main floor as well as its own staircases down to each platform) and then just directly go down to your Amtrak as soon as you wanted rather than waiting for them to form a giant line. My dad taught me this trick, and we both used to use it to be able to avoid waiting longer, but once when I did it one of the Amtrak workers got super angry at me for it despite the fact that I did wait until after everyone leaving had come up, and as a socially awkward teen, I was too nervous to ever do it again.
I suspect the rationale behind not telling people beforehand is that they don't want to have to deal with people trying to get on at the same time as people leaving, but I feel like the main reason people are so aggressive about trying to get to the train as fast as possible on Amtrak is precisely _because_ the system treats them as too irresponsible to get timely accurate information. If people didn't need to worry about having only a couple short minutes to avoid missing their train and could plan ahead where to be when the train arrived, I think that a lot of people wouldn't feel the need to try to jostle through the crowd to race each other for the earlier spots in the line.
You can still do this. In fact, it’s even easier since the construction of the new mezzanine beneath Moynihan. There are glass windows on the mezzanine looking out onto the tracks beneath. If you’re good at differentiating train set for your train, you can easily spot your Amtrak train as it pulls in and head down to the platform well before the track is announced.
Knock on wood, but I’ve never had anyone give me so much as a sideways glance for this. The red caps will let you down early if you ask for assistance anyway.
Nice! I haven't ridden on Amtrak nearly as much in recent years, so I've only boarded twice in Moynihan, but it's definitely a _lot_ nicer than Penn Station, and it's nice to hear that the benefits go beyond just cosmetic.
Also a random aside here, but have you noticed the social media video folks setting up on this mezzanine to do dance videos? Every time I've been through lately I've seen squads of kids filming...
>I suspect the rationale behind not telling people beforehand is that they don't want to have to deal with people trying to get on at the same time as people leaving, but I feel like the main reason people are so aggressive about trying to get to the train as fast as possible on Amtrak is precisely _because_ the system treats them as too irresponsible to get timely accurate information. If people didn't need to worry about having only a couple short minutes to avoid missing their train and could plan ahead where to be when the train arrived, I think that a lot of people wouldn't feel the need to try to jostle through the crowd to race each other for the earlier spots in the line.
Agreed, this is the case with the LIRR, the tracks are usually known well ahead of time and so when the train arrives, people stand to the side of the doors so anyone on the train can get off, and then relatively orderly board the train. Very little rushing involved.
Not announcing the platform in advance is a conscious choice by Amtrak. They do it intentionally because they do not want people waiting on the platforms, ostensibly in the interests of safety and efficient passenger flow in the limited space. It's not really an matter of incompetence, Amtrak absolutely could announce the platforms in advance if they wanted to do that.
The crazier thing is that at Penn, the train is usually on the same stupid track. You realize this after you see the regulars lingering around certain areas of the mezzanine so they manage to get to the front of the line once it's formally announced.
So I think its more a keeping people off platform thing or overall zero care for customer service.
The Zürich main station for their busiest tracks uses a system where the track is not guaranteed, but the platform is, i.e. you wait on the platform, but you will only know a few minutes in advance whether the train is going to arrive on the left hand side or the right hand side.
For those who have ridden LIRR on weekends, theres the old Long Beach summer route where everyone is sprinting down the stairs in flip flops carrying beach chairs too. It's truly insane.
"people who insist that practices that are normal outside of the US are completely and totally impossible"
This seems to be the culture in the US as a whole.
Gun control? Completely impossible, even tho it's worked well in every first world country on the planet.
Paying employees instead of tipping? Completely impossible, would disincentivise work and the economy would collapse, even tho it works well in every first world country on the planet.
Public healthcare? Completely impossible, even tho it works well in every first world country on the planet.
It's downright nonsense because the NYC MTA and even the notoriously incompetent Boston MBTA can do it. Meanwhile Amtrak apparently can't do it either, but at least they have the luxury of long wait times between arrival and departure.
Union Station in Toronto has the same issue with narrow platforms— if people were waiting on the platforms to get on, there'd be no room for anyone to get off the trains.
Pretty much every train I’ve ever boarded at Penn station was empty when it pulled in. Trains that come in with passengers discharge them then leave for service.
In the Long Island direction, trains are most often coming from the West Side Yard, which is what Hudson Yards was built on top of.
In the New Jersey direction you have a higher chance of encountering a train with passengers on it, because they use Sunnyside Yard in Queens for this purpose, but the yard is often at capacity or the tunnels leading to them are, so those trains may need to turn around in Penn instead.
The station does not have the space on the tiny platforms for a few hundred people to wait for the train, and they would obstruct those exiting the train if they did. The upstairs does.
I don't find it overcrowded, just inefficient. Folks sitting on steps, no other seating, etc. etc...
The announcements aren't at the last second, but they are usually after the train has final slot verification and may already be unloading. You will routinely have 5-7 min to board unless there is a schedule issue.
Perhaps in off-hours they could consider early announcement, but for high density times, the infra just isn't built for that efficiently or safely.
The trick is to not wait in the main NJT lobby area. All their tracks are accessible from the other Amtrak hallways and you will get timely notification from the video terminals.
The old trick was to watch the green Amtrak monitors, because the NJT trains would pop up there first a few seconds before the official NJT displays. That system is gone now so you can't get an early jump on the track assignment but being in the other hallways puts you at the other end of the train from the crowd and it's easier to get your preferred seat.
The platforms are too narrow to have everybody waiting for their train, but an NJT train should have been there about 12 minutes before departure, so you could wait on the train instead. :)
The LIRR is the same way. As an occasional user every time I've gone the track number gets posted a few minutes before it departs and it's usually between tracks 16-21. Even if it's during the late evening (off-peak at 8:30pm'ish) you often have to make a mad dash or you won't get a seat. I can't imagine how bad it must be during prime time peak hours.
can't get on the trains at Penn without assistance as I'm visually impaired and can't engage in the "see sign, bum rush train" system they've come up with. I don't have this issue literally anywhere else, as I can take my time finding the platform.
The problem is, after people like Robert Moses didn’t stupid stuff with their power, we’ve spread the keys to getting anything done to too many people. Fixing Penn station is pretty straightforward, but politically there basically needs to be a dictatorship on the regional level. The ability to do that doesn’t exist anymore
My dad is a huge train buff. HO scale model railroads dominated our basement and thus my childhood. He worked for Burlington Northern, now BNSF. He even developed a natural gas powered locomotive. During Perestroika and Glasnost he hosted Russians for tech transfer discussions because Reagan asked the CEO of BN to make it happen. He went to Russia multiple times, for discussions of railroads. Dinner conversations ranged from wax motors for bearing overheating conditions to FRA regulatory proceedings.
So, as an adult, I love trains and travel them preferentially when possible. I've been on train systems in Tokyo, Osaka, San Francisco, Bangkok, Philly, Boston, DC, Chicago, and NY. I've taken AMTRAK from DC to Boston just to do it, literally cost me more than flying, and took longer. Just did it. Not really counting the various light rail systems (e.g. Houston), the California coastal systems, the tourist lines, the airports, yada yada.
And then I took the train from Cambridge into Stratford for a West Ham vs Manchester game. That was mind-bending. They turned the ground into navigable Swiss cheese and then pack it with so many people I was getting a bit panicky. It's probably not larger than the Japanese stations, but the experience is nuts by comparison.
The New York system I remember just seems, rickety by comparison to Japan and the UK. DC is actually pretty solid. When it's not on fire.
All these various other proposals ignore the main problem: the original station never should have been demolished in the first place. The only proper solution is rebuilding the original, not designing some new thing that is slightly more acceptable than what's there now.
The New Yorker had a great article earlier this year, by Pulitzer Prize winner William Finnegan, about Penn Station [1]. It's filled with examples, in case we needed any more, of how a handful of insanely rich people in this country can thwart the public good.
I sometimes daydream of running for Mayor of New York on a single-issue platform: rebuilding the subway platforms at Penn Station so that express and local trains stop on the same platform, like every other express train stop. However many billions it may cost, it's gotta be worth it.
I think they wanted people to transfer at 14 and 42 because they only have adequate platform width for the people going to and from Penn.
It is a weird quirk built into the system but not too many situations where it slows anyone down since 42 is the next / previous station and you will almost always end up connecting to the same train you would have at Penn?
I guess there could be some situation where uptown local and express pull in to Penn at same time and you would be able to make a connection but then one is held and they don't connect at 42. But unusual and they run pretty frequently on 1-2-3?
with proper train clocks it shouldn't matter, if you're getting on at Penn, look at the clock and pick your platform. if you're switching downtown you could have switched at Times Square.
that being said ... not long ago I was waiting pretty late, like midnight, express train stopped on local platform with no indication or announcement whatsoever and I ran and missed it , had to wait 10 minutes for next train. that was some BS.
and there is the possibility if you're switching, that they hold one train a bit longer and don't ensure you get same connection at 42. but pretty rare, they are decent at holding for connection except in rush when trains come super frequently.
it's a bit of a quirk and not seeing why it gets people super riled (other than my late night CF)
> Those stops were built that way intentionally. [...] the designers wanted to coax passengers to switch between local and express trains at the Times Square — 42nd Street — Port Authority Bus Terminal complex, one stop to the north.
The worst is when you're waiting for the express and for some reason it shows up on the local track.
I still don't know -- was it intentionally designed to be idiotic? Or was it meant to operate some other way and they had to shoehorn local/express in?
If we follow the analogy the article gives for rebuilding the surface but not the tracks:
> It’s like having a big, clunky jalopy that doesn’t go more than 20 miles an hour, but instead of replacing the engine, we’re going to give it a paint job and hope that solves the problem.
then Moynihan was, unfortunately, more like a spit and polish. It's prettier to look at, but the main thing it did was move access for some trains a block further west (presumably away from the densest users as the article suggests of other plans). The basic experience is pretty unchanged (at least the Amtrak & subway experience, which I can speak to)
It should be noted that penn station is literally the crowning achievement of US public transit. Any complaints about it should be viewed through the lens of the fact that nothing even remotely comparable exists anywhere else in this country.
It's not working partly because the LIRR, for reasons beyond comprehension, failed to order additional trainsets and instead is splitting existing trainsets between the three terminals (Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn): https://nypost.com/2023/09/12/lirr-failed-to-order-new-train...
They've been connected since 1991[1]. Amtrak runs trains from Canada/Chicago/Vermont into Penn using this connection. Trains run down Metro North's Hudson Line, through a junction in Spuyten Duyvil[2], down the West Side Line[3] (former northern section of the High Line[4]), and into Penn through a tunnel under the LIRR's West Side Yard[5]. You can see the connection here[6] (follow "EC Freedom Tunnel"). The connection under the West Side Yard was built in '86. The rest of the tracks are over 100 years old.
Why is that weird? The biggest train stations in the world are here in Tokyo, and they don't have any place to sit down either, except in restaurants that usually aren't close to the main pedestrian traffic going to/from the trains. The idea I guess is you're supposed to sit on the train, not in other places where you'll be in the way. If you're waiting a long time for the train, you've done something wrong.
Its been a few years since I've had to go through Penn Station directly other than for LIRR. As I recall from my NE Corridor commuting days the lounge requires an Amtrak ticket. The NJ Transit waiting area had no lounge and no seats meaning people would begin to bunch up on the stairs. Admittedly, it might have changed in the intervening years.
> The other is to create more efficiency with a through-running system, where you would have what are now New Jersey Transit trains coming to the city, crossing through Manhattan, and out the other side to Long Island. Or run Amtrak trains and freight trains coming from Pennsylvania through the city and up to New England. That idea is not technically insurmountable, but it’s bureaucratically daunting, because multiple organizations oversee those lines. In a perfect world, New Jersey Transit, the Long Island Railroad, and Metro North would be united and even integrated with the New York City subway system.
The irony is then he immediately explains why this wouldn't work:
> The problem is, you can build highways and bridges and towers from scratch much faster than you can reorganize a bureaucracy.
More ironically, much of the interview is saying we need to use this behemoth of a bureaucracy to implement changes. Yet he then says the City can't do the one thing it actually can do:
> The situation is complicated by the fact that Amtrak (not the MTA) owns the station, and MSG owns the Garden; it’s a rare case of double-decker ownership. MSG isn’t a tenant. It’s not like a lease runs out and you can evict it. If you’re going to get the Dolan family, who own the Garden, to move, you would have to buy it from them.
If MSG doesn't have a permit to operate, it's mostly worthless! MSG called the City's bluff this summer and got an extension on their permit -- but the City could have decided not to renew it, and MSG would've had to close.
A bit later, he suggests using eminent domain to take property by force:
> The idea was to use the power of eminent domain to condemn large parts of the neighborhood around Penn Station, override the city’s zoning and allow massive new amounts of FAR in an area that’s largely owned and controlled by Vornando.
I'm not advocating for this, just pointing out the the interviewee is dismissing one of the few things the City can do on its own.
And more generally, neither the City of New York nor the State of New York are known for respecting property rights (or Constitutional rights broadly), so they _could_ do anything they wanted and just drag the victims through decades of legal proceedings after the fact.
(Again, I'm not advocating for this.)
There are lots of ideas for renovating/ expanding/ rebuilding Penn Station. Most of them are crap, but some are good. Unfortunately, even the good plans have to get through the government bureaucracies, where they either get axed or become ludicrously expensive.
> And more generally, neither the City of New York nor the State of New York are known for respecting property rights (or Constitutional rights broadly)
I don't really want to get sidetracked (no pun intended), but can you list a single ruling from SCOTUS on any constitutional issue that the state or city of NY is flouting? Because I think what you mean is "the city/state of New York have frequently followed interpretations of the constitution that I disagree with", despite the fact that when SCOTUS rules against their interpretation, they follow the ruling.
Having four different transit systems come into the city is what causes this problem. I think it should work like an airport: your major transit sits outside the airport, and the airport has a dedicated people mover to bring people into the airport. Keep Amtrak, LIRR, etc outside the city and make them transfer. It will be less efficient but more manageable.
Have you ever taken a train into Penn Station? There are many, many, many awful things about Penn Station, but the utility of taking a northeast corridor AmTrak train into the heart of Manhattan outweighs them all by a factor of 10.
Here in Tokyo, we have dozens of different transit system operators, and everything works like clockwork without all the problems you have over there. Many stations have multiple operators' train lines at the same station, even. Even better, you use the same stored-value fare card for all of them.
the 5 miles (200km) walk from airplane to mass transit is absurd... why is mass transit the furthest thing away from the planes instead of the closest thing? I walked around 3 construction zones at O'hare last year to get to the train.
Airports work this way because they’re obscenely large. Train stations don't have this issue, especially in NYC where the rail yard is underground. Why would we move the primary intercity train station outside the city when its main advantage over flying is its proximity to the actual city itself?
edit: misread the comment at first but edited since the core argument still stands.
> Airports work this way because they’re obscenely large.
No, US airports work that way because of bizarre bureaucratic funding rules. Sensible airports like Frankfurt or Amsterdam (or even Heathrow) connect directly to the city's ordinary transit network.
And not just the city's ordinary transit network. In Frankfurt (unlike stupid Heathrow) you can get on an intercity train to go a long way from Frankfurt without going into Frankfurt itself and changing at the Hauptbahnhof. It's so fucking sensible it makes me want to cry. Same at CDG and several other European airports (not all though).
Well, it depends. Realistically the vast majority of people arriving at Heathrow are headed for London; if you want to go to Birmingham or Manchester or Paris you fly directly there (and, given how capacity constrained Heathrow already is, planners want to encourage that). Whereas it's quite normal to fly to Frankfurt when you're actually going to Nuremburg or Stuttgart, and so the train connections are set up to support that.
Really the distinction here is "where are the airports?". I think you're saying "if you're headed to a place with an airport, you'd fly there directly, otherwise the train makes sense".
Which is not wrong, but also doesn't quite capture all the complexities of flying, especially inter-continentally.
> I think you're saying "if you're headed to a place with an airport, you'd fly there directly, otherwise the train makes sense".
It's not quite as simple as has an airport or not - Nuremburg and Stuttgart do have airports - but major intercontinental airport or not. Airports are and should be set up with their "catchment area" in mind (bearing in mind what neighbouring airports exist), and their transport connections set up to support that.
Frankfurt is the main intercontinental airport for a region with several mid-sized cities, and its transport links are set up to support that. The London airport system is already the busiest in the world, so transport links are - rightly - focused on spreading people through London rather than long-distance services to other places. (E.g. elsewhere in the thread you mentioned Bath - but Canary Wharf, one of the places Heathrow was recently connected to by Crossrail, employs more people than the entire population of Bath).
I suppose if I'm going somewhere smaller like Cambridge--or probably more to the point somewhere to the west like Bath--it's a bit inconvenient to go into probably Paddington. But, really, in a lot of cities you're transiting to different train stations in any case.
Bath is my destination 95% of the times I fly into Heathrow (my family lives there). The choices are:
1. underground to London Paddington
2. Heathrow Express to London Paddington
3. bus to Reading to get on intercity train to Bath
4. bus/coach from Terminal 3/4 station to Bath
The train to Bristol & Cardiff passes Heathrow just a few miles away, but there is no direct rail connection at all.
It's almost as bad as here in New Mexico, where our only state-level railway, connecting Santa Fe and Belen via Albuquerque, fails to go to the Albuquerque airport, which is the destination/origin for so many Santa Fe travellers.
> The train to Bristol & Cardiff passes Heathrow just a few miles away, but there is no direct rail connection at all.
The train is there, you could also get Crossrail (old Heathrow Connect) to Hayes & Harlington (or Ealing Broadway). Heathrow Express into Paddington and then out again ends up being faster because the fastest trains are the limited-stop expresses, but that's a question of rail network optimization and happens in all sorts of places (e.g. back when I lived in North London the train to Cambridge went through the rail station nearest my house (Harringay), but it was quicker for me to go into King's Cross and out again). Physical distance has very little to do with it. Most people arriving at Heathrow are not going to Bath (a city of less than 100K, compared to London's 9M) and most people going to Bath are not coming from Heathrow; having to change at a hub isn't that unreasonable.
I wasn't really suggesting that the intercity rail system should be designed around my needs as an occasional intercontinental traveller to Bath.
However, the rail system exists. Every train stops at Reading. The trains also go to the capital and largest city in Wales (Cardiff) and Bristol (the 10th largest district by population in the UK). Access to this intercity rail line requires back-tracking into London, something that I don't consider absurd, but do consider a bit silly.
Also, taking population considerations and making them central can lead to strange results in the UK. 1/6th of the population lives in the London metro. While that's important from some perspectives, it can't be the overriding principle for integrated transportation.
I don't see why it shouldn't be? A more direct line to Reading has long been planned (indeed was being worked on until COVID-19 hit), and I imagine if passenger numbers recover then it will eventually get built. But good access to London has taken priority so far, and that seems right too.
Many US airports are at least on newer light rail systems. NYC is probably not uniquely bad but it is worse than a lot of cities in terms of transit accesas from the airports to Manhattan.
Every morning when I exit the train to a blast of heat on cramped platforms, wait in line for my turn to weave up a tiny staircase, into the aging waiting halls with hoses routing ceiling leaks into trash cans, zig zag through a labyrinth of low-ceiling corridors, giving a wide berth to half-naked mentally ill people, to a side exit (since the main exit has been closed for months, and finally, as icing on the cake, I jump over a permanent puddle created by construction barriers RIGHT at the crosswalk where THOUSANDS of people exit the busiest train station in the entire country, I think about the line:
“One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.”