The MTA already does seamless switching between catenary/3rd rail out of Grand Central. All the tracks out of Grand Central are 3rd rail and Connecticut bound trains only switch to catenary north of where the lines split in Harlem.
And even if you wanted to run catenary only. You could have through running trains over Hell Gate bridge to the Bronx.
This doesn't really relate to Matt's point, but I think it's notable what a poor job moynihan station currently does at communicating crucial information to riders. I used it a few months ago, and somewhere between 50 and 100 riders got on the wrong train because at the bottom of the escalator, there was a train right there that was actively loading passengers. We didn't realize that a good 100 ft further down the track, on the other side of the platform, was the train we were supposed to be in. In theory we should have remembered our track number and checked it against the track the train was on, and all I can say is that it seemed clear to me that that was my train, and 50 plus other people thought so too.
Great article. What's kind of funny is the exact framework Matt proposes, having a quasi-fixed budget for construction projects and an independent board to review and approve them I'm pretty sure is EXACTLY how the military operates for the construction projects related to them with the MilCon system. So it wouldn't even be that hard to set up. I guess the question is how this intersects with the recent view by folks that individualized projects (ie pork) is a good thing that greases larger bills?
A quibble on the Green Line Extension: the agency talked itself into grandiose stations. The Patrick Administration thought they could build universal consensus for projects but the only way to do that, of course, is to spend a lot of money.
"... said fridge had exactly zero functional advantages over a normal fridge."
Sub-Zero refrigerators have separate compressors for the refrigerator and the freezer. Most other refrigerator/freezers have a single compressor for both sections. Sub-Zeros can regulate the temperatures of the two different compartments separately, therefore ensuring temperature uniformity regardless of what is happening in the other compartment (such as one being opened more than the other, or one warming up faster than the other, or the need to warm up the freezer to periodically to avoid frosting, etc.). This leads to better performance with less food spoilage.
It occurs to me that Matt needs to read up on "path dependency" (which is not the same as PATH dependency). Obviously if we were starting from scratch we could/would do better for cheaper than Moynihan as the New Penn Station. But given the pieces already in place, and the immovability of some other pieces (Madison Square Garden) are we better off with the Moynihan add-on or sticking with the rather squalid status quo? The $1-2 BB price tag is irrelevant in the scheme of things. It's a one time charge. The comparison with the Oculus is telling. The rebuilding of the WTC provided the opportunity for a reworking of the complicated subway and PATH connections around WTC and frankly the job the planners did is excellent. You can walk across downtown Manhattan underground in well functioning passageways and future generations will appreciate the extravagance of the Oculus the way we appreciate Grand Central (whose beauty is thrilling every time I'm there and which a couple decades ago required an extravagant sum to preserve). But the clean-slate-ism of lower Manhattan required a tragedy. A better target for Matt's jeremiad is the gridlock between City and State that means important infrastructure work on the MTA is put off because each player is trying to get the other guy to pay the relatively small sums. (eg, one time charge of a couple $billion in a city budget that increased from $60BB to $90BB in deBlasio's mayoralty).
Penn Station is a depressing nightmare, difficult to use, and unfit for a great democracy. I wonder about the cumulative cost of ugly and dysfunctional architecture. The second avenue subway stations, on the other hand, always made me feel proud to be an American, cost overruns and all. Worth it? I don't know.
It's rare that I get a chance to just walk up to and personally inspect the subject of a slowboring post, but hey: Moynihan Station is literally on my way home, I just haven't had any cause to ride amtrak since the pandemic started, so I got off the A and walked around a bit.
The good: it's very pretty! Frankly it's a little hard to get used to after the dingy grime of Penn v2. The food hall isn't there yet but they're clearly aiming for something a little more upscale than Sbarro and the scary inedible sandwich shops underneath Penn, so that's nice. The announcement loudspeakers are echo-y but more or less comprehensible. There are uniformed attendants actually walking around the main hall making sure that people know their trains are leaving, which is astonishingly un-new-york-like. And although Amtrak is the official tenant here, there's a board with LIRR departures and it seems like you can board them from here as well? (Note who's missing though. We'll come back to that.)
The bad: there's a seating area but it is of course for ticketed departing passengers only. If you're waiting to meet someone, you're out of luck: stay on your feet or sit on the floor. The new hallway that leads over the tracks to the A/C/E lines is full of people just sitting on the floor as a result. And while there are wayfinding signs that point you to the A/C/E lines from inside the main hall, if you're trying to find the 1/2/3 (which is now an extra avenue block away) you'd better just know that they're in the same direction. And there are...
...and I swear I looked. and it should not be _possible_ to miss this:
...there are NO SIGNS AT ALL pointing the way to NJ Transit from Moynihan Hall. I don't even know what to say. You had one job. Holy fuck.
The ugly: Amtrak's record of ruining the extremely basic experience of boarding trains continues unabated. I hung around long enough for a NE Corridor train to DC to be called: once the boarding announcement began, instantly a 200-person single-file line to the escalator formed, snaking across the entire hall. I understand that for Penn this is in some part an inevitable consequence of the fact that the platforms are just too narrow, but this just means that anyone who's in the know will wait for the boarding announcement and then sprint to the aforementioned hallway to the A train and go down one of the unattended stairs there.
The beauty we’re fussing about seems to be about 75% a reflection of better lighting and cleanliness, which is another way of saying newness. Let’s talk about the station’s beauty in 2051. For now, I’d like to know what the plans are for upkeep and maintenance.
This might have been said by other commentators, but this comes on the heels of the Port Authority's "Oculus" station for the PATH in the financial district--$2 billion spent on a glorified subway stop with a mall next door that replaces the existing station with zero additional transit benefit. There is zero political vision for actually improving transit in the NYC area (Regional Planning Association reports and Alon Levy posts seem not to be in the inbox of our political leaders).
Great post. Noticed you threw in "lead-induced crime" like it's a widely accepted explanation for falling crime rates. Seems like the fact that the crime trend has reversed while the lead trend has not calls for an update. Would be a good post
Let's check back on this in a bit: if the murder rate is still rising in 2023, we can stick a fork in the lead hypothesis, or at least start regarding it with a lot more suspicion. A one year uptick that's still hugely below the late-90s peak, during and after a massive unemployment surge from the pandemic, is not a trend yet.
"...during and after a backlash against policing accompanied by BLM protests that too often morphed into riots and lack of prosecutions for criminal mischief, is not at trend yet."
It's comforting for people of good will to think that these "root causes" (lead and abortion) could just explain it all, so we don't have to argue about culture or policing or social cohesion. Maybe it's true, I don't know.
I don't necessarily disagree that there were better uses of the money, but this post seems to have a lot of uncertain assumptions about what is good.
Is it necessarily the case that the inconvenience of switching trains if you're going from NJ to LI is clearly a social ill in need of solving but the experience of commuting through a dank, unpleasant train station is not? I'm a Mets fan who grew up in NJ, so I have in fact done the Penn Station switch that you're talking about. But in terms of my overall transit experience, I would probably prioritize improving the restroom experience at Penn Station to avoiding a train switch on the few occasions I am traveling NJ to LI.
More generally, there are values beyond efficiency of time. It's easy to dismiss some of these things as mere aesthetics, but having nice, pleasant public spaces that are open and accessible to all is quite important.
"I would probably prioritize improving the restroom experience at Penn Station to avoiding a train switch on the few occasions I am traveling NJ to LI"
Note that Moynihan Train Hall does neither of these things, as "officials [anticipate] it to be used primarily by Amtrak passengers, which accounted for about five percent of daily ridership prior to the pandemic". So the other 95% are still stuck in the squalor of the current/primary Penn Station, which didn't get any funding for improvements while we built a glistening airy train hall for 5% of Penn's total passengers.
I wasn't suggesting as much. As noted, I don't necessarily disagree that there were better uses of the money. I was making a broader point about the lens through which he was analyzing the issue.
"Fridges really don’t have a lot of performance characteristics; they either keep the food cold or they don’t. The Subzero name sort of implies extraordinary performance in terms of making things unusually cold, but unless you’re storing mRNA vaccines, that’s not actually something you would want. And the reality is it chills your food to the exact same temperature as a normal fridge. You’re just paying extra because it looks cool. This is fine if you’re rich and you’re spending your own money, but the government should try to meet people’s actual transportation needs."
I guess you've never had a noisy fridge or a fridge with a particular predelection for freezing things at the back of the refrigerator, because refrigerators definitely have performance characteristics. I can't speak to SubZero.
Yeah, the fridge thing was a little glib. There are definitely useful features that can be added to a fridge - how the doors are set up, where the freezer is, overall size, whether/what kind of ice the freezer will produce, whether there's a water filter/dispenser built in, whether the controls are based around temperature or abstract 0-10 number settings. As a renter I've gone through a bunch of fridges and I definitely have favorites!
Yeah, but you hit the point of diminishing returns _really_ quickly. Is the $2500 Samsung that Costco sells objectively nicer in a lot of ways than the $400 Chinese-brand model your landlord put in? Yes.
Sub-Zeros _start_ at $6000. Are they more than twice as nice as the Samsung? Probably not, unless of course you're in the lucky position of not being sensitive to the cost difference. Basically their main selling point is that they're designed to lie flush with all of your cabinetry, which means they're a lot prettier than standalone fridges and some models are definitely larger.
Placing Amtrak into a separate building has the functional benefit of making the rest of Penn Station less crowded for LIRR and NJTransit riders. You seem to missing that part.
I wonder if projects like this are motivated by something like spite. “Fuck you, Republicans, we are society that collects a lot of taxes and does expensive stuff with them.” A monument to its own cost is the perfect political symbol. Whether it’s going to also be useful or good value for money is bad-faith talking point from the enemy, or the worry of a tiny minority of nerds on our side.
The MTA already does seamless switching between catenary/3rd rail out of Grand Central. All the tracks out of Grand Central are 3rd rail and Connecticut bound trains only switch to catenary north of where the lines split in Harlem.
And even if you wanted to run catenary only. You could have through running trains over Hell Gate bridge to the Bronx.
This doesn't really relate to Matt's point, but I think it's notable what a poor job moynihan station currently does at communicating crucial information to riders. I used it a few months ago, and somewhere between 50 and 100 riders got on the wrong train because at the bottom of the escalator, there was a train right there that was actively loading passengers. We didn't realize that a good 100 ft further down the track, on the other side of the platform, was the train we were supposed to be in. In theory we should have remembered our track number and checked it against the track the train was on, and all I can say is that it seemed clear to me that that was my train, and 50 plus other people thought so too.
Great article. What's kind of funny is the exact framework Matt proposes, having a quasi-fixed budget for construction projects and an independent board to review and approve them I'm pretty sure is EXACTLY how the military operates for the construction projects related to them with the MilCon system. So it wouldn't even be that hard to set up. I guess the question is how this intersects with the recent view by folks that individualized projects (ie pork) is a good thing that greases larger bills?
A quibble on the Green Line Extension: the agency talked itself into grandiose stations. The Patrick Administration thought they could build universal consensus for projects but the only way to do that, of course, is to spend a lot of money.
"... said fridge had exactly zero functional advantages over a normal fridge."
Sub-Zero refrigerators have separate compressors for the refrigerator and the freezer. Most other refrigerator/freezers have a single compressor for both sections. Sub-Zeros can regulate the temperatures of the two different compartments separately, therefore ensuring temperature uniformity regardless of what is happening in the other compartment (such as one being opened more than the other, or one warming up faster than the other, or the need to warm up the freezer to periodically to avoid frosting, etc.). This leads to better performance with less food spoilage.
It occurs to me that Matt needs to read up on "path dependency" (which is not the same as PATH dependency). Obviously if we were starting from scratch we could/would do better for cheaper than Moynihan as the New Penn Station. But given the pieces already in place, and the immovability of some other pieces (Madison Square Garden) are we better off with the Moynihan add-on or sticking with the rather squalid status quo? The $1-2 BB price tag is irrelevant in the scheme of things. It's a one time charge. The comparison with the Oculus is telling. The rebuilding of the WTC provided the opportunity for a reworking of the complicated subway and PATH connections around WTC and frankly the job the planners did is excellent. You can walk across downtown Manhattan underground in well functioning passageways and future generations will appreciate the extravagance of the Oculus the way we appreciate Grand Central (whose beauty is thrilling every time I'm there and which a couple decades ago required an extravagant sum to preserve). But the clean-slate-ism of lower Manhattan required a tragedy. A better target for Matt's jeremiad is the gridlock between City and State that means important infrastructure work on the MTA is put off because each player is trying to get the other guy to pay the relatively small sums. (eg, one time charge of a couple $billion in a city budget that increased from $60BB to $90BB in deBlasio's mayoralty).
Penn Station is a depressing nightmare, difficult to use, and unfit for a great democracy. I wonder about the cumulative cost of ugly and dysfunctional architecture. The second avenue subway stations, on the other hand, always made me feel proud to be an American, cost overruns and all. Worth it? I don't know.
It's rare that I get a chance to just walk up to and personally inspect the subject of a slowboring post, but hey: Moynihan Station is literally on my way home, I just haven't had any cause to ride amtrak since the pandemic started, so I got off the A and walked around a bit.
The good: it's very pretty! Frankly it's a little hard to get used to after the dingy grime of Penn v2. The food hall isn't there yet but they're clearly aiming for something a little more upscale than Sbarro and the scary inedible sandwich shops underneath Penn, so that's nice. The announcement loudspeakers are echo-y but more or less comprehensible. There are uniformed attendants actually walking around the main hall making sure that people know their trains are leaving, which is astonishingly un-new-york-like. And although Amtrak is the official tenant here, there's a board with LIRR departures and it seems like you can board them from here as well? (Note who's missing though. We'll come back to that.)
The bad: there's a seating area but it is of course for ticketed departing passengers only. If you're waiting to meet someone, you're out of luck: stay on your feet or sit on the floor. The new hallway that leads over the tracks to the A/C/E lines is full of people just sitting on the floor as a result. And while there are wayfinding signs that point you to the A/C/E lines from inside the main hall, if you're trying to find the 1/2/3 (which is now an extra avenue block away) you'd better just know that they're in the same direction. And there are...
...and I swear I looked. and it should not be _possible_ to miss this:
...there are NO SIGNS AT ALL pointing the way to NJ Transit from Moynihan Hall. I don't even know what to say. You had one job. Holy fuck.
The ugly: Amtrak's record of ruining the extremely basic experience of boarding trains continues unabated. I hung around long enough for a NE Corridor train to DC to be called: once the boarding announcement began, instantly a 200-person single-file line to the escalator formed, snaking across the entire hall. I understand that for Penn this is in some part an inevitable consequence of the fact that the platforms are just too narrow, but this just means that anyone who's in the know will wait for the boarding announcement and then sprint to the aforementioned hallway to the A train and go down one of the unattended stairs there.
It's very pretty. I wish it were more functional.
The beauty we’re fussing about seems to be about 75% a reflection of better lighting and cleanliness, which is another way of saying newness. Let’s talk about the station’s beauty in 2051. For now, I’d like to know what the plans are for upkeep and maintenance.
This might have been said by other commentators, but this comes on the heels of the Port Authority's "Oculus" station for the PATH in the financial district--$2 billion spent on a glorified subway stop with a mall next door that replaces the existing station with zero additional transit benefit. There is zero political vision for actually improving transit in the NYC area (Regional Planning Association reports and Alon Levy posts seem not to be in the inbox of our political leaders).
A _leaky_ $2 billion dollar subway stop and mall. But at least it looks like the interior from a Ridley Scott movie, so that's....nice?
Great post. Noticed you threw in "lead-induced crime" like it's a widely accepted explanation for falling crime rates. Seems like the fact that the crime trend has reversed while the lead trend has not calls for an update. Would be a good post
Let's check back on this in a bit: if the murder rate is still rising in 2023, we can stick a fork in the lead hypothesis, or at least start regarding it with a lot more suspicion. A one year uptick that's still hugely below the late-90s peak, during and after a massive unemployment surge from the pandemic, is not a trend yet.
"...during and after a backlash against policing accompanied by BLM protests that too often morphed into riots and lack of prosecutions for criminal mischief, is not at trend yet."
I caught that too. Matt has written about lead a couple of times:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/lead-pipes
https://www.slowboring.com/p/lead-poisoning
I'm less than convinced by the lead -> crime studies I've seen, but it's almost taken for granted now, as displayed here.
It's comforting for people of good will to think that these "root causes" (lead and abortion) could just explain it all, so we don't have to argue about culture or policing or social cohesion. Maybe it's true, I don't know.
I don't necessarily disagree that there were better uses of the money, but this post seems to have a lot of uncertain assumptions about what is good.
Is it necessarily the case that the inconvenience of switching trains if you're going from NJ to LI is clearly a social ill in need of solving but the experience of commuting through a dank, unpleasant train station is not? I'm a Mets fan who grew up in NJ, so I have in fact done the Penn Station switch that you're talking about. But in terms of my overall transit experience, I would probably prioritize improving the restroom experience at Penn Station to avoiding a train switch on the few occasions I am traveling NJ to LI.
More generally, there are values beyond efficiency of time. It's easy to dismiss some of these things as mere aesthetics, but having nice, pleasant public spaces that are open and accessible to all is quite important.
"I would probably prioritize improving the restroom experience at Penn Station to avoiding a train switch on the few occasions I am traveling NJ to LI"
Note that Moynihan Train Hall does neither of these things, as "officials [anticipate] it to be used primarily by Amtrak passengers, which accounted for about five percent of daily ridership prior to the pandemic". So the other 95% are still stuck in the squalor of the current/primary Penn Station, which didn't get any funding for improvements while we built a glistening airy train hall for 5% of Penn's total passengers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Train_Hall#Service
I wasn't suggesting as much. As noted, I don't necessarily disagree that there were better uses of the money. I was making a broader point about the lens through which he was analyzing the issue.
When Christie cancelled ARC I left NJ because of the commute. Wise choice it seems.
"Fridges really don’t have a lot of performance characteristics; they either keep the food cold or they don’t. The Subzero name sort of implies extraordinary performance in terms of making things unusually cold, but unless you’re storing mRNA vaccines, that’s not actually something you would want. And the reality is it chills your food to the exact same temperature as a normal fridge. You’re just paying extra because it looks cool. This is fine if you’re rich and you’re spending your own money, but the government should try to meet people’s actual transportation needs."
I guess you've never had a noisy fridge or a fridge with a particular predelection for freezing things at the back of the refrigerator, because refrigerators definitely have performance characteristics. I can't speak to SubZero.
Any midrange fridge at home depot is likely to work fine for 10-20 years.
Yeah, the fridge thing was a little glib. There are definitely useful features that can be added to a fridge - how the doors are set up, where the freezer is, overall size, whether/what kind of ice the freezer will produce, whether there's a water filter/dispenser built in, whether the controls are based around temperature or abstract 0-10 number settings. As a renter I've gone through a bunch of fridges and I definitely have favorites!
Yeah, but you hit the point of diminishing returns _really_ quickly. Is the $2500 Samsung that Costco sells objectively nicer in a lot of ways than the $400 Chinese-brand model your landlord put in? Yes.
Sub-Zeros _start_ at $6000. Are they more than twice as nice as the Samsung? Probably not, unless of course you're in the lucky position of not being sensitive to the cost difference. Basically their main selling point is that they're designed to lie flush with all of your cabinetry, which means they're a lot prettier than standalone fridges and some models are definitely larger.
Placing Amtrak into a separate building has the functional benefit of making the rest of Penn Station less crowded for LIRR and NJTransit riders. You seem to missing that part.
I wonder if projects like this are motivated by something like spite. “Fuck you, Republicans, we are society that collects a lot of taxes and does expensive stuff with them.” A monument to its own cost is the perfect political symbol. Whether it’s going to also be useful or good value for money is bad-faith talking point from the enemy, or the worry of a tiny minority of nerds on our side.
Bingo. It's proof of state capacity without showing the benefits of having state capacity.