Fixing Penn Station
commonedge.org
commonedge.org
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is that? Could it be because of good grade separated pedestrian infrastructure and cultural norms that protect pedestrians?
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+.
I can assure you, Penn Station is definitely the problem.
I suspect a viable plan for this could be arranged for less than $1bn :)
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.
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:
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.
- 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.
[0] Me: Mom, can we ride the Shinkansen?
Mom: We have a Shinkansen at home.
The Shinkansen at home:
[1] https://www.amtrak.com/on-time-performance
[2] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
The problem is that nobody in 45 of the 50 states cares about Amtrak.
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.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
Anyway, the economics don’t really matter. The long trains exist and have to be scheduled somehow.
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?
Yes. By a large margin.
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.
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.
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.
So I think its more a keeping people off platform thing or overall zero care for customer service.
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.
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.
They are very competent at keeping their jobs. Especially the guy who announced what track to go to.
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.
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 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.
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.
Christ, it must be really bad then. Though at least they got rid of the Pacers... Well over a decade after Iran junked theirs.
https://www.rebuildpennstation.org/
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.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/the-fight-over... (Archived: https://archive.ph/HSsxD )
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?
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/nyregion/weird-subway-qui...
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?
New North-South lines between Brooklyn and Queens, however :-)
> 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)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_railway_statio...
Surely, therefore, it makes sense to compare Penn Station to public transit systems/stations anywhere else?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Line#Empire_Connecti...
[2] https://goo.gl/maps/DgeeiQzryseFg6A5A
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Line
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Line
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Yard
[6] https://www.openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=40.756798...
Amtrak is delayed so often, I'd be hard pressed to blame the commuter for it.
If city council had some nuts, they'd just deny Dolan his permits, and he'd be up shit's creek.
All this blather about any eventual resolution needing to make him whole or happy is pure throne sniffing.
> 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.
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.
edit: misread the comment at first but edited since the core argument still stands.
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.
Which is not wrong, but also doesn't quite capture all the complexities of flying, especially inter-continentally.
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).
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 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.
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.
so...it'll be worse