"...a catastrophe of low ceilings, bad lighting, weird passages, and giant rats."
You keep complaining about high unit costs. But with giant rats, you get a lot more rat, per rat, and at the same cost. The cost is actually going down, pro rata. And yet you're still complaining!
Matt, man, I love you, but I've read all of your articles on city planning and YIMBYism and high-density cities and suburbs and I don't think I've ever been less convinced by a vision. Your ideal city seems to be ugly, overcrowded, has no sense of history, and is populated by hapless and powerless citizens with little to no input into the form and function of their own neighborhoods. It’s kind of nightmarish.
I lived in NYC for 20 years. I got married, moved to Long Island and am raising a family. I commute into the city for work (or did before the pandemic, and will again soon). I'm one of the people greatly impacted by your schemes. In all these months, I haven't read much specific from you that I would want. I mean, you point out that because of tech limitations and a nightmare of hostile agencies looking to protect their fiefdoms, you can't take a train from New Jersey to Long Island, and we should focus on that. But you never address WHY someone would want to take a train from New Jersey to Long Island. It's not a thing that people do. Not a huge deal, but it sets off alarms.
Penn Station in its current incarnation is a dumpster fire (I haven't seen much of the Moynihan reno yet, though I saw the work every day pre-pandemic). For those of us trying to navigate it twice a day it is a depressing, broken, somewhat dangerous shithole. The argument that "yes, they shouldn't have destroyed the old, beautiful Penn Station, but they did, so now you're just going to have to live with this awfulness until you retire" just doesn't resonate. Even the Soviet Union managed to build beautiful public spaces.
It will be nice - more than nice, great - to climb out of Penn Station and not instantly hate everything. Being in an uplifting building for a bit each day would be lovely. It matters. I worked for many years near Grand Central Station, and the difference between climbing out of a nasty subway into beautiful Grand Central Station and climbing out of a nasty train into a nastier Penn Station is tremendous.
What I’m saying is that your plans rarely offer much that might make life nicer for those of us actually stuck doing these things. They always seem to be things that theoretical people might want in the aggregate and rarely what those of us actually living and acting in the spaces you want to commandeer are interested in. You need to ask the people impacted and involved what they want and need, and then do that - not what you think we want and need (please don’t ever write again that people actually want to live in high density neighborhoods even when we say we don’t. Just trust us, Matt.)
This is too long already, so I’ll close with a Penn Station anecdote that I think really captures the magic of a daily commute through the station. This happened to me a year or two before the pandemic, in one of those awful New York Augusts.
I was neck deep in the usual morning Penn Station scrum. Penn Station isn’t anywhere near large enough to accommodate the number of daily commuters, so when you get off the train during rush hour you’re packed in like a factory-farmed chicken, shuffling forward a few inches at a time, usually in no particular direction. There aren’t really lines; just a mass of sweaty people pushing towards the tiny, inadequate handful of escalators that get you outside. It’s terrible; it takes forever to move fifty feet; you’re constantly accidentally being touched and breathed on by people in a way that I don’t think will be tolerated anymore after the last 18 months.
I made it to the escalator. The escalators are also packed. Someone is standing on almost every riser, so you’re inches away from the person in front and in back of you. It’s difficult to balance and not smack into people, so you have to be careful with your bags. In front of me is a woman I’d noticed even before we got on the escalator. Mid-forties, fit, confident with an optimistic look on her face, dressed in a lovely dark red suit that hung perfectly and somehow wasn’t the wrinkled wreck that the rest of us were wearing. It occurred to me how rare it was that I actually saw someone during my commute that didn’t look angry and defeated. She was the opposite - whatever she was doing in the city, wherever she was going, she was upbeat and going to do great, and people were going to be happy with the results. While I was mulling this over – a rare bright spot of positivity during my morning commute – this lovely woman farted in my mouth. Like, I could taste it.
Yeah, let the old Penn Station burn and then salt the earth.
> please don’t ever write again that people actually want to live in high density neighborhoods even when we say we don’t. Just trust us, Matt.
He's not saying that *you* want to live in high density neighborhoods. He's saying that millions of millions of other people do, and because you won't let them, they are paying through the nose to outbid each other for those few opportunities to do so.
In NYC, the millions of people in the million rent stabilized units aren't letting other people live in high density neighborhoods and making others pay out the nose to outbid for scant opportunities to do so. The mess here is hardly just up to zoning and development policies, the entire city is benefitting from the racket.
No. He's just saying that the 60% of people that *don't* want this shouldn't be allowed to force us into this miserable price war. Those people can stay out in the suburbs and do their thing, just don't ban central neighborhoods from becoming urban because you like having us subsidize your suburban lifestyle on the most desirable central urban neighborhoods.
I apologize for the heat that came out in my comment. I overreacted to the idea that legalization of minority options amounted to putting the minority in charge.
It's the people who live in central neighborhoods who don't want them further developed (or overdeveloped). I'd argue that suburbs (at least in large cities like New York) are suppressing an equally considerable amount of housing demand by forcing apartment buildings to be small, or not allowing them to be built. I might well say, let's open up the zoning in my urban neighborhood, but not until the suburbs open up the zoning in theirs. Or maybe they should go first, since my neighborhood is already much, much denser than theirs.
I'll leave the questions of aesthetics aside and just focus on one thing here: "Why would anyone want to do a one-seat/one-fare ride from the eastern half of a large metro area to a stop in the western half?" is, to me, a frankly bizarre question to ask: there are literally dozens of major cities where thousands of people do just that on a daily basis! Go ask them why they do it!
It is one of my least favorite aspects of NYC parochialism that people here look at some of the very obvious ways in which our city is run incompetently compared to our peer cities and declare that it's secretly a virtue.
Plus, even if every LI commuter and every NJ commuter disembarked at Penn and never once took the train one stop past it in either direction, Matt already pointed out why it would still be a good idea: the trains would move _faster_, because you wouldn't be trying to turn them around (which is also where shift changes and cleaning crews happen) inside the busiest train station in North America.
I hear you on the second point (regarding the efficiency of having trains being able to pass through LI to NJ), but you're wrong on the first part. Long Island isn't on one half of a large metro area with New Jersey on the other half - we aren't in the metro at all! There are huge numbers of commuters to NYC from both areas, but both areas are independent entities, both de facto and de jure. You're going to just have to trust me, as someone who spent his whole life in these areas, that there is no significant number of people commuting between New Jersey and Long Island. I've just never even heard of someone who knows someone who does a daily commute like that. It would be way more efficient just to move.
Of course it's more efficient just to move if there's no transportation across it. But that's just like telling the railroad executives in 1900 that there's no reason to dig a huge tunnel under the Hudson because no one commutes across it!
There are two pools of several million people and several million jobs and many other destinations, that are just a dozen or so miles apart, and there are tracks connecting them. Of course there are many things that many people would want to do if it weren't so hard to get there. It's only hard to get from one to the other because no one runs service. If you ran service across, then even if no current person does that commute, there will be many families over the next several decades where one person moves jobs and they *don't* have to decide to uproot the entire household, or where someone decides to start visiting friends or museums or whatever it is that's in the other location.
Say you live and have a job in Nassau County and your partner has a job offer in Union County. Unless you can afford to live right next to Penn Station, one of you is going to have a nightmare commute, so either you go find yourself a job in Jersey or Manhattan and you move to NJ, or your partner turns the offer down.
Open up through-running and your partner can take the job and just ride the train every day and your kids can stay in the same school.
It will take a decade or so for enough people to rearrange their lives because the service now exists, because you obviously have to wait for them to choose to do so. But it will happen and there will be plenty of passengers eventually. And, in the meantime, you just have a better train service for the people who commute into Penn Station.
I'm really not certain what to say about the assertion that Long Island is not part of the greater NYC metro area. Your definition of this must be very different than mine.
And your argument here is nearly a tautology: of course very few people commute from LI to NJ or vice versa! We've gone out of our way to make that impossible! This is very different from a prediction that people would never do it if it were an option.
What would be the point of going to LI if you didn’t live there? Its beaches? The Jersey Shore has more. Its shopping malls? NJ has better. Its Italian food? Fuggedaboutit.
This kind of thing isn't helpful. The point isn't whether _you_ personally find the idea of going to LI attractive. Again let's please stop pretending that the ways in which NYC's civic infrastructure is obviously and clearly broken don't matter or are secretly good. We know what a functional metro-wide transit system looks like because they exist in other metros. This ain't it.
Where is there a “functional metro-wide transit system” where the overwhelming majority of rides are into and out of the city center? Are there people who live in Far Rockaway who commute to Riverdale? Maybe. But let’s not pretend there are or ever will be a significant number of them.
You're not addressing his point at all. I'd be willing to be 75% of LI-NJ riders today are Long Islanders going to Jersey City, which wouldn't really be helped by Matt's proposal anyways. Ken is completely right that yes there will certainty be some riders, it is absolutely not some big issue in the scheme of things. I think the burden of proof is on someone advocating this for the cost/benefit given it's not clear to me this would be worth it at all.
I guess it is, but since I live here and grew up here, I probably have a better idea of it, no?
What will this mythical New Jersey to Long Island commuter do once he gets off the train? Hail one of the two cabs available in Uniondale? What if John's sick that day? Uber every day and hope one is near enough to get you to work on time? Get on a bus? It'd be some coincidence for a LI bus line to actually take you anywhere near work. They mostly take people directly into the city, to places where they can catch a train, subway, or need to be picked up by car. Should he leave a car at the station year round and pay off the parking tickets? Where exactly does he work? Are you thinking of Long Island and New Jersey train stations like you think of NYC subway stops - that once you get out of them you can just walk to where you need to go?
And the commute right now isn't even close to impossible. It requires changing trains once. It will suck something terrible, but it will suck because Penn Station sucks, the LIRR is falling apart, and New Jersey transit... isn't bad, actually. That part would be fine. In any case, it doesn't suck like crossing the Alps sucked for Hannibal. People don't do it because it's weird and unnecessary, not because of the outrageous difficulty.
I also live here and have for decades, and see my earlier comment about NYC parochialism and worse-is-betterism. Just because you personally can't imagine why someone would take advantage of a basic feature of a working metro-wide transit system is no reason to pretend they don't exist and don't work.
Richard Gadsen, above, pointed out an obvious scenario where prompt through-running trips would be useful to people. You don't have to posit a trip from Montauk to Montvale here: just the ability to reliably get from, say, Jamaica to Newark reliably and on a single seat would be incredibly useful.
"You don't have to posit a trip from Montauk to Montvale here"
Indeed... some of the other folks here seem to be forgetting that over half of New York City's population, in Brooklyn and Queens, lives on Long Island.
In the big picture, it would only be "incredibly useful" if really a lot of people had reason to do it. And the only way that could happen is if you had large-scale trip generators and destinations in those places. What we have now is not remotely big enough. Think Hudson Yards on steroids in Secaucus and Jamaica, or perhaps on a platform over Sunnyside Yard. And now this straighforward business of through-running turns into a really enormous megaproject.
Matt grew up in New York City, so it's not like he's some villager mouthing off from the Great Plains.
Through running is now best-practice train development/operation across the world. When was the last time any major city (outside the US) built train networks that stop in the central area and don't run through?
"that there is no significant number of people commuting between New Jersey and Long Island. I've just never even heard of someone who knows someone who does a daily commute like that. It would be way more efficient just to move."
Maybe because they can't right now, because it would be utterly miserable?
Usually bridges are built when there is an expectation of heavy use that will pay off the costs of construction, either through tolls or tax revenue. There is no such expectation here.
Agreed with regards to Penn Station, but the rest of this post is just incredibly self-absorbed.
You already live in one of the most desirable locations on earth, with the greatest economic opportunities for yourself, greatest educational opportunities for your kids, greatest cultural amenities for the whole family…
Millions of people want to live there and will NEVER be able to do so precisely because your “input into the form and function of your neighborhood” instantly precludes the sort of development that would allow others to afford the locale.
Excuse the language, but the current system of local control over zoning absolutely, unutterably FUCKS everyone younger than or poorer than the existing homeowner class in desirable areas.
I’m well-off; my household is in the 98th percentile for wealth in the 25-29 age cohort. To move to comparable housing in your area I would have to liquidate all my investments, sell my primary residence in a major metro, sell my 3 investment properties (also in a major metro), and probably borrow money from my 401(k).
The federal government absolutely should ram German-style, rules-based, shall-issue permitting down the throats of every municipality in every major metropolitan region in the United States, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Local control has been an utter failure, and it’s literally impossible to overstate the degree to which that is true.
"Comparable housing" in NYC is not the point of living in NYC. You downsize dramatically and lie to yourself about being okay with it. You tell yourself the reason you live in NYC is that there's so much to experience you won't even be in your apartment very often. You stay long enough to see waves of friends come and go and after two waves say "I'm a real New Yorker now" but know deep down it's supposed to feel different. You become neurotic, angry or both. You get a therapist. If you're lucky, you can find one that takes insurance.
Besides, it's laughable to pretend zoning is why NYC housing is expensive. It's the densest place in the US and expanding its maximum capacity requires trillions of spending. At our recent population peak, you'd wait on platforms for multiple subway trains because every car was full-to-bursting on the first couple trains. We have over 1m rent stabilized units held below market rate. We have most of the country's trust fund kids. The real estate market in Manhattan is basically Too Big To Fail. You think local community boards - and not our entire national failed economic policies for decades - are why NYC housing sucks? GTFOH!
I'm already accounting for the fact that I would lose the garden plot, small yard, and every room would be 20-30% smaller when I say "comparable".
And if you despise living in the city this much, why in God's name are you there?
I lived in Beijing for years. Makes NYC crowding, impatience, traffic, and general hazardousness look like rural Iowa. I loved it, it was booming all the time and there were a million places to get lost for a day to explore. The reality is that there are a lot of people who would love to be in the NYC region and would tolerate or enjoy the fact that it's crowded, very few of whom can ever afford to do more than visit for a weekend or two.
Why? Because the various people who hate the place but need to be there for work have overrun the inner suburbs and successfully fought a war to make sure Nassau and Westchester Counties never permit another high-rise. And most of Brooklyn and Staten Island for that matter.
I am aware that there are actual, physical constraints on NYC's development. But zoning is a huge part of the problem, because people like you simply don't care about people like me, let alone those worse off than me.
> I'm already accounting for the fact that I would lose the garden plot, small yard, and every room would be 20-30% smaller when I say "comparable".
You say "every room" and not "studio" or "1 bedroom." I guess you don't really want to live here that badly, do you?
> And if you despise living in the city this much, why in God's name are you there?
You said it yourself: "the greatest economic opportunities for yourself, greatest educational opportunities for your kids, greatest cultural amenities for the whole family." I got a job and came from hundreds of miles away from the economic wasteland I grew up in. Same as lots of people when they first got to NYC. What planet have you been living on since the Great Recession where everybody gets to live and work in a place that makes them happy?
> because people like you simply don't care about people like me, let alone those worse off than me.
I got here in 2011 from a *far* less well-off family because it's where I could get a job that could pay off my education. I came here because the alternative was the California Bay Area, and quite frankly, in my opinion that part of California is pure bullshit.
Do I care about other people like you? Sure, I care enough in the abstract. But you seem to have done incredibly well *without* access to NYC's opportunities in a way that was never an option for me, and you clearly aren't willing to put in the sacrifices that it takes to make it in NY, like living in a 200 square foot studio shoebox for a few years or take on a few roommates.
From the people I've met here, those who *are* worse off than you *are* willing to risk everything and live in a shoebox to try to make it here. So no, I'm not losing sleep over your particular inability to make this place even more fucking crowded so you can *checks notes* get even richer or enjoy cultural amenities.
"I had a shitty, difficult experience coming New York due to decades of corruption, mismanagement and outright incompetence, so all potential newcomers should have to go through the same thing" is a hell of a take. Consider the possibility that NYC's disastrously broken housing market is something other than a test of personal virtue?
I have no interest in living in the New York area because I'm better off where I am, earn more money than I would there, and I'm all of 120 miles to your south, so I can come visit whenever I want without incurring the fixed expenditures of living there
My concern in NYC is the same one that has led me to fight in my neighborhood planning meetings to allow a 200-unit mixed-income development on a 5-acre lot down the street even though it will probably slow my equity growth. Prices where I live have gone up 50% since I purchased 4 years ago, and I don't want to be the last young family ever to afford this place.
So stop accusing me of having selfish motivations when I'm actually going out of my way to hurt myself to fight for this exact thing at home.
As for the rest of this... the whole point of having policy, at all, is to solve problems. If you don't see how the suffering you and others underwent to live in your neck of the woods is a problem, I don't know what to tell you.
The whole issue with locally-controlled zoning is that the only people who get a say are the ones who are already well-served by existing, restrictive policies.
Everyone in the area who hasn't yet managed to get a foot on the ladder would love to be able to buy a small 3 bedroom flat in New Rochelle or Great Neck, near a train station, for $250k, but they can't, because they don't exist, because it's impossible to build them.
That's a policy decision, one that makes the lives of everyone except people who already own homes in the area worse off.
The fact that a vast amount of the nation's economic dynamism and opportunity is concentrated in 12 metropolitan areas is a completely different policy issue. I have an old post from elsewhere that I'll dredge up and copy/paste here when I find it.
"There's a long list of policies we need to embrace to restore US economic competitiveness:
1. We need a genuine industrial policy, one that supports a Mittelstand-style belt of mid-sized, world-class firms.
2. We need a sizable bout of infrastructure investment, to restore existing infrastructure and build for the future.
3. We need major healthcare reforms, to lower costs and end rent-seeking.
4. We need anti-trust action to fight industry consolidation everywhere from IT to heavy industry.
5. We need to subsidize the "reshoring" of strategic supply chains for crucial goods from PPE and pharmaceutical precursors to hardened electronics.
6. We need to start shifting high-skill public-sector employment from the Eastern Seaboard's major cities to mid-sized ones scattered across the nation.
Every single one of these, with very minimal modification, could start to breathe life back into smaller and mid-sized cities, the Allentowns, South Bends, Topekas, and Montgomerys of the US. In fact, I would argue that if we're going to get value for money, they need to be structured in such a way that the employment and economic benefits are widespread.
It would be ruinously expensive to allow the resulting economic activity to get sucked into the "gravity wells" exerted by the Bos-Wash or Coastal Californian urban conglomerations. Do we really want to have to institute hukou-style internal passports so we can keep the teeming masses out of the top-tier cities where all the economic opportunity is?
Now this won't directly help rural regions... except that, if you look especially throughout the Northeast, there are a great number of economically vibrant rural areas. The thing they have in common is that they're within the economic orbit of a mid-sized or major city that has managed the transition to the knowledge economy well. Specifically, I'm thinking of the rural hinterlands of places like Harrisburg, Lancaster, Fort Wayne, Des Moines, Madison, Grand Rapids, or Worcester.
A huge fraction of what we consider "rural areas" are within easy reach of such cities. When those cities thrive, they anchor their hinterlands. When they fall to pieces, everything around them does as well.
Unfortunately, a large fraction of rural areas and their populations are out of reach of such a program. Those areas are mostly going to bleed out. And no amount of money will stop that, because if you look at Iowa, or Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, the economic decline of such places is wildly, ridiculously overblown, but their demographic decline isn't. The people who still live in them do so because they want to; they have jobs, there are still public services. What there aren't, in my experience, are children, not in anything like replacement quantity.
Take my family, for example; my mom grew up in a town of about 1000 in Central Pennsylvania. Her parents and grandparents had grown up there. She and her sister moved to the Philadelphia region, while her brother alone stayed. The same was true among her cousins. Now, of all of their kids (my cousins) except one are gone, and definitely not coming back. So they went from having several generations basically all live and die there, to having a third of the next stay, to having well under 10% of my generation end up there. That town still has 700 people, but the schools have consolidated several times, and almost no children stay. There will come a day when it no longer exists, in all likelihood.
We can, of course, spread around enough opportunity so that the people who wish to stay can do so. We'll always need resource inputs from rural areas, most especially forestry products, agricultural produce, and energy. We can make sure that there's enough "slack" in the system that we get power using windmills and solar cells scattered all over, rather than paving AZ and NM in solar farms and piping the results elsewhere. But that won't really solve the issue, which is that to most people, the cultural amenities, creature comforts, and wider social opportunities of the cities and suburbs are attractive when they're within reach.
We can and should devote money to making sure that the hundred million people who live in mid-sized and small urban areas have a good life, and that includes the rural regions that they anchor, but we also need to acknowledge that there are limits to such policies, and many small communities, the one-street towns a hundred miles from anywhere, are going to fade away because they no longer serve a need. Their voters may not be happy about it, but we are not able to bribe them into happiness, nor do we have any moral obligation to do so.
The unfortunate reality is that the US is now seeing the beginning of demographic trends which are already widespread in Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe. We just so happen to be stuck with a political system that gives massively outsized voice to rural areas and are coming off of a four decade-long period in which half of the political elite used grievance- and fear-mongering to prop up its share of the vote. This transition will be significantly bloodier in the United States than it will be elsewhere because of it."
So yea, this isn't all on NYC. But wouldn't you prefer to live in a world where your job is in suburban Albany and Great Neck has enough high-density housing to meet demand from the tens of thousands who can't afford to be there now?
I disbelieve this account. Are you a troll? How was breathing in Beijing during the time you were there? Learn much about KN95 masks then? Yes, we can have the CCP run NYC after they finish with Hong Kong. By the way, is it zoning in NYC that is the problem or Nassau & Westchester.
Yes, I've recently paid the annual rate for the privilege of trolling this highly impactful community of roughly 10,000 commenters.
Is it that inconceivable that people drawn to commentary and a community like this have had different experiences in their lives?
I was in Beijing for most of the period from mid-2010 to late 2016. The air pollution initially was a minor inconvenience, rising to reach a crescendo around 1H 2013 before being increasingly brought under some degree of control by a harsher regulatory regime.
At no point was it a constant thing; the climate ensured it was worse in winter and better in summer and fall, but the vagaries of the weather were such that no more than maybe 20 days a year were truly oppressive even at the worst of it.
Most days, it was just a background haze that one couldn't even feel or smell. On the flip side, one day shortly after getting back in Jan 2013, I couldn't see anything of the apartment building opposite my own, no further than 50 yards away, except the lights on top.
"Yes, we can have the CCP run NYC after they finish with Hong Kong."
Very effective argument, one might almost call it a bit trollish. One can, and you'll find that I do, strongly oppose the Chinese government while still finding the people, culture, dynamism, and history impressive and attractive.
"By the way, is it zoning in NYC that is the problem or Nassau & Westchester."
I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of a metropolitan area. The city as an economic unit and home to millions... that does not stop at the border between Queens and Nassau.
"By the way, is it zoning in NYC that is the problem or Nassau & Westchester" - This is the nub of the problem to me. I live almost on the city line in NYC, so observe the sudden transition between the apartments in my neighborhood, to the single-family houses in Westchester County a few minutes drive over the border. It is hard to find an apartment in Westchester, they are quite expensive, and only exist in certain inner towns. If NYC were to do major upzoning while the suburbs maintained their severe zoning regime, NYC neighborhoods would be inundated with high-density development that would wholly degrade the quality of life in those areas. A lot of people, especially poor people, would be displaced, and given the anti-gentrification feeling in the City, the whole enterprise would be DOA. YIMBY is a cartoon, it is not useful policy guidance. An alternate approach must be found.
“The federal government absolutely should ram German-style, rules-based, shall-issue permitting down the throats of every municipality in every major metropolitan region in the United States, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
The power exists - we must merely phrase it in the form of a tax, and refuse any federal funding to any municipality for any reason which refuses to comply.
Constitutionally, states are sovereign when it comes to zoning and land use. All local land use authority derives from state enabling acts. So states could affect this situation by taking back the authority partially or entirely. Whether they will or not, to an extent that matters, is another question. What arguments would you use to promote such legislation?
I dunno. I think that you are being a bit elitist here. You want your lovely public space and if that means you have an inefficient building so be it. MY is arguing for efficiency of use over aesthetics.
Sure aesthetics matter but I think what you really need is cleanliness. And if you spent less time in that scrum (because the building was more efficient) you would be less frustrated with the experience.
East Asian metro rail systems are insanely crowded. I can't recall having my mouth farted in ever in 14 years in Hong Kong, but I was not a daily commuter. I'm sure it happens. But the MTR is fast efficient and only reaches truly awful waits when the weather forces everyone underground.
I don't think it's either/or. Getting more bang for the buck in terms of efficiency, service levels, and throughput is important. So is having grand and glorious spaces that lift the soul even if but for a moment.
Partly what Matt is describing is dumb inefficiency apart from the money spent. Like why have those dull pieces of art above the ticketed waiting room instead of a single integrated (and very large!) train notification board? That's not about money; it's just about thoughtlessness.
I dunno. Grand and glorious spaces can happen in other venues and settings. Train stations can achieve a lot more functionality if they don't have to worry about being grand & glorious as well.
Good point. Our national cathedrals, which induce awe and a feeling of personal puniness compared to the ultimate in human imagination, are found elsewhere:
Yes! The half of my brain I was using this morning couldn't think of a better example but this is it. Make these things grandiose. But NOT on the public dime.
I get where you're coming from, but it really, really isn't elitist to want a train hub that accommodates millions of people to be nice. It's OK to want nice public spaces, even if they're inefficient.
You're point about efficiency and cleanliness in Penn Station as an alternative is understandable, but it reads like you've never been there. It's not improvable. It's possible for a space to degrade to the point where it can't be rescued (it's hard to convey how awful the rat warren set up is. NYC's subway systems, as nasty as they can be, are also way better. At least the ceilings aren't as low). I've only been on the Hong Kong metro a few times, so grain of salt and everything, but: It's fucking packed, yeah, and STILL manages to be way more pleasant than Penn Station. There's AIR.
It's ok to want nice spaces. If you're going to build a new space, you should make it be nice. But if you have a choice between spending a billion dollars making an existing ugly transit hub that serves a million people nice, and spending a billion dollars creating a modest new transit hub that will serve another million people, do the second one every time.
Since we're arguing in a few other areas of this thread, I feel like I should mention that you're right: it's not unreasonable to want our public spaces to not be horrifically ugly and dysfunctional. Penn v2's ugliness is very much one of it's problems: it sends a clear message that nobody in a position of power gives a single crap about the people who have to use the space.
That said I think that given the huge price gap between "functional" and "monumental", we should start with functional _first_ and then see how pretty we can make it. Penn v2.5 is very pretty, but didn't solve any problem of Penn v2 _except_ for the fact that it was fugly. If I had to make the choice between Moynihan Station at $1.25 Billion and Berlin Hauptbanhof at what was roughly a third the price (EU409M), I'd pick the latter in a heartbeat: it's pretty _enough_ and it's actually a functional train station.
I am probably conflating your viewpoint (user of commuter rail who may / may not be elitist) with the architectural critic in the post (certainly elitist). But I do think that what Kenny said below is what I'm trying to say, and that is, modest & efficient should be chosen over beautiful & inefficient. PS nice story about farts. Loved it.
LOL Penn Station (the existing station between 31/33/7th/8th) is absolutely improvable, and with much less money than was spent on Moynahan. The idea that it's so irredeemable that the state should spend $1.6B on a waiting room farther from offices/subways is completely bizarre and 100% wrong.
Monday, February 25, 2008. I know because I looked it up: The 100th anniversary of the PATH Train. An unusually pleasant day as well: Mid-40s in the morning, sunny, and a high in the mid-50s. I used to take the NJ Transit NE Corridor line from Metropark into NY Penn and walk to my office on Park & 32nd. Not a bad commute, generally.
It sounds as though you come in later during rush hour than I generally did. I am an early riser and prefer to avoid the traffic and crowds if I can, so I would take a 6:30ish train, getting into Penn a little after 7:00. Before continuing into NYC the train stopped at Newark Penn Station across the platform from the origin of the PATH Trains. A lot of people on the NJ Transit trains would transfer in Newark to catch the WTC Path to their jobs downtown and smaller number of people would then board to go to NY Penn.
On this particular day, just before arriving in Newark the conductor made an announcement that it was the 100th anniversary of the PATH system and to celebrate the Port Authority had made the PATH fare-free for the day. There was some murmuring among the transferring passengers, and a few smiles (hey, free stuff!), and people put their Metrocards back in their pockets or wherever.
Once in NY Penn, heading through the main concourse toward 7th Ave., I passed a couple homeless people, both pushing shopping carts. They were headed in opposite directions, and as they passed one called out to the other, “Hey, did you hear? The PATH is free today. Me and some of the other guys are going to go over to the waterfront in Hoboken and sit in the sun and smoke some some cigarettes. You wanna go?”
The other homeless guy paused, considered for a few seconds, and replied, “Naw. I got stuff to do.” And he shuffled off, pushing his shopping cart.
Huzzah. Delightful comment and story. I agree with everything you're saying on a human level and think the reason Matt can't back you up comes down to politics.
> Your ideal city seems to be ugly, overcrowded, has no sense of history, and is populated by hapless and powerless citizens with little to no input into the form and function of their own neighborhoods.
This is called "technocracy" and is kind of MY's shtick.
> Even the Soviet Union managed to build beautiful public spaces.
I mean... a command economy is great at building physical structures. It also proved structurally insolvent.
> please don’t ever write again that people actually want to live in high density neighborhoods even when we say we don’t. Just trust us, Matt.
Look, Matt is here to shill for the Democratic Party. He makes no bones about it. And the Democratic Party's version of trickle-down economics only works in high-density locations.
Matt is not in the business of figuring out the future of the Democratic Party, he writes every single day, he's here to provide suppressive fire for the Party he's got today. It's not really his fault that the future the Democratic Party has for us is "hapless and powerless citizens with little to no input into the form and function of their own neighborhoods."
Penn Station is squalid, cramped & astonishingly ugly and people deserve better.
What’s more, the argument that it’s all just about efficiency ignores a half century of NYC history.
Matt should ask someone twenty years older about what the Mens rooms were like in the Port Authority, Grand Central Station and the subways in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. Or about the pimps in the Port Authority. Though, yeah, the trains & buses still ran.
There’s a point where it gets so bad that it becomes about more than moving bodies. (As when the elderly dreaded graffiti-ridden subways.)
Okay. The oppressive ugliness, inconvenience, claustrophobia & grime of Penn Station put it there.
Penn Station may be a sore spot for Matt as its fate compared to the still spacious & astonishingly nice Grand Central (which was saved by a preservation movement led by Jackie Onassis in the 1970s) is quite the powerful argument for preservation.
When Matt’s next home, he should look at Grand Central and then compare it to Penn Station.
"On a technical level, the reason you can’t do this is that New Jersey Transit uses overhead catenaries for electricity while the Long Island Rail Road’s electrified portion uses a third rail."
London had this problem in the 1980s; the Midland Railway lines use catenaries and the Southern Railway lines use third rail. The two are connected by the Snow Hill tunnel which was closed for passengers in 1916 before the electrification was put in, which is why different systems were not seen as a problem.
In the 1980s, British Railways managed to work out how to build dual-voltage trains (Class 319) and reopened the tunnel to allow through-running. In 1988, when these were new, it was a complex technical achievement to get a train that could switch between third-rail and catenary. The first "Thameslink" service was something BR was very proud of.
However, technology has improved in the last 30 years, and that is now an option offered by all electric train builders. Indeed, the internal electronics are always included, so all it would take to convert a train is to add the relevant external pickup (a shoe or a pantograph).
What was a reasonable argument for not doing it in 1980 is now 30 years out of date.
I mean, yeah, but there are only 2 mainline electrification systems used in the UK.
I count *5* in use just in the Northeast United States:
* 25kv AC @ 60hz overhead line, used on the NEC north of New Haven by Amtrak, and also on many NJ Transit lines. The most modern system.
* 12.5kv AC @ 60hz overhead line, used on Metro-North's New Haven line (part of the NEC), essentially this is just reduced voltage version of the above.
* 12kv AC @ 25hz overhead line, used by Amtrak on most of the NEC and the Keystone corridor to Harrisburg. SEPTA also has this system for most of their lines around Philadelphia, they're not in phase but I think compatible. And outdated lower frequency AC system.
* 750v DC third rail top running (LIRR)
* 750v DC third rail under running (Metro-North except New Haven line)
It's obviously a complete mess and really should be rationalised.
It's not that the various American rail systems in the area have not invested in multi-voltage trains though.
Metro-North's M8 cars can run on 4 of the above, they just can't handle the Amtrak 25hz system:
There are three, 25kV AC @ 50Hz overhead and 750V DC top contact for most, but the 1500 V DC overhead is used by the Tyne and Wear metro and on a few bits of mainline that are shared between the metro and diesel-hauled mainline.
But also there were three more systems which British Railways converted to one of the two standard systems, mostly in the 1980s.
6250V AC @ 50Hz overhead on the LTS and Great Eastern lines east of London and the Glasgow suburban system, 1500V DC overhead in many more places (Manchester-Altrincham, Woodhead Pass, Shenfield Metro), 1200V DC side contact (Manchester-Bury).
Converting from third rail to overhead can be a major engineering exercise as you can have to raise bridges or expand tunnels, but there's no excuse for not just converting all the overhead to the same voltage and frequency and having just one third rail contact type.
You want three basic types: high voltage (25kV, 50/60Hz) AC overhead for mainline, third rail DC (750V) for metro systems and DC overhead (750V) for light rail.
For anyone wondering why: high-voltage AC systems have more power so can move larger and faster trains. Also, third rail can't be safely and reliably used above 100 mph, so mainlines that carry fast trains or freight need the high-voltage AC.
Third-rail takes up less space so you can use smaller tunnels, which is valuable for metro systems that are mostly tunnelled.
750V DC is what is used by the motors on light rail vehicles, so you save on the weight and space of a transformer (much more of an issue on a 20 ton light rail vehicle than a 100+ ton mainline loco) and overhead is necessary for safety with light rail which isn't fully-segregated from pedestrians and cars.
They are expensive and heavy. Still I took RG's original post to imply that the Americans had not considered using dual or multi voltage trains, which is a little unfair. Most of the EMUs and electric locos in the Northeast can handle more than 1 electrical system, there's just so damn many in use. Rationalising the systems would help, but given the high cost of infrastructure vs. rolling stock procurement in the US, maybe just purchasing quintuple-voltage trains is the best solution.
Sorry to necropost, but I was pulled back to this thread by Matt linking to the article.
I was responding to Matt Y saying that the reason that NJT/LIRR don't have through-running is because they don't have dual/multi voltage trains. And it's true that those specific railroads don't. My point was that that's not a good excuse and that Matt shouldn't accept that excuse from those railroads.
Examples from of dual/multi-voltage trains from the US would have made the point more effectively, I admit, but I didn't have those to hand because I don't know US railroads as well as I know British ones.
I wasn't saying that Americans hadn't considered doing it, I was saying that if NJTR and LIRR are trying to use that as an excuse and to demand massive infrastructure investment, then they're lying and journalists like Matt should call them out on it.
Ugh, that was badly phrased, oh for an edit button.
It was a reasonable argument in 1980, 40 years ago. It stopped being reasonable in 1988/9 when Thameslink started operating, which is 32-33 years ago, which I can still round off to 30.
Another argument to be made for MattY's focus on cost and efficiency in NYC (and other large cities) public works programs: it takes away a potent argument against progressive political policies. As a conservative, I am skeptical of big government programs, for reasons of both disposition and experience. Seeing governance dysfunctions in Democratically-run cities with no opposition party is a part of my reluctance to experiment with new government programs.
Examples abound: NYC train costs; CA high speed rail; Baltimore crime; NYC voting tabulation errors; homelessness in Seattle; filth in San Francisco; Portland anarchy; Chicago murders; Detroit in most forms. I'm sure there are counter-examples, and cities offer numerous benefits from economic to cultural, despite their poor governance. I merely point out that if Democratic-led cities were bastions of good & ethical governance with effective cost management it would be a boon to progressive policy proposals.
I have a similar critique of Republican's aversion to any use of government and its unwillingness to embrace good programs like SS, Medicare, SNAP, etc. But that is a rant for another day.
I would be remiss to point out there's an underlying fallacy here since nearly all big cities are Democratically-run and most of the problems you identify are either unique to big cities (e.g., construction cost overruns at commuter rail stations), more amplified because the big city is important (e.g., small jurisdictions have vote administration issues too, but no one in the media cares), or may be easier to analyze statistically--and therefore amplified--due to the law of large numbers in big cities (e.g., murder rates). And in the few cases where there are Republican mayors, they aren't exactly doing better on issues like crime--a search for "Jacksonville murder rate" and "Oklahoma City murder rate" shows dramatic increases in 2020-21, just like everywhere else.
That said, I tend to agree with your underlying point. As a resident of a Big Blue city, I find it incredibly frustrating that there isn't space in the local discourse to address governance problems in a reasonable way. As it is, the few right wing voices tend to bring up obvious governance flaws (murders are bad) in a completely trollish way that makes everyone in the majority defensive, and then nothing gets done. It's really obnoxious.
Tabulation problems aside, Kathryn Garcia's apparent success in consolidating votes through ranked choice voting makes me optimistic about its potential as a reform measure in one-party states/cities.
Note enough attention is paid to efficiency and quality of government functions. It seems to be far more attractive to do the fun horse-traded legislative stuff, than to put real thought into efficiency, simplicity, and fairness of administration. "Cut off the air" might be the solution in some cases, but not uniformly. We still have to grasp the problem.
Architects are weird. My grandfather was an architect. He refused to have an antenna on his country house because it would have hurt the aesthetic. Cable was not available. He also thought that the 9/11 attacks were punishment for the architect’s hubris in throwing up such a tall, drab, ugly building.
A city like New York should have a few show pieces, but generally we need fewer architects and more engineers.
The best summary of the architect attitude I've seen was when the American Institute of Architects named Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater "best all-time work of American architecture", at a time when it was so structurally deficient that it was near collapse (and if the initial contractor on the project hadn't added extra reinforcement over Wright's objection it would have collapsed decades ago).
I grew up attending a church that Wright had designed. It was a breathtakingly beautiful building but a maintenance nightmare. His design skills ran ahead of the engineering available at the time, so the work arounds to make the aesthetics work created problems down the line.
I understand that Usonian houses, intended to be simple, can be a maintenance nightmare. The only way to fix the underfloor heating tubes, when they decay, is to jackhammer and replace the concrete pad. Construction details were not his area of concern.
Speaking as an engineer, yes, architects are a monumental pain.
Speaking as an engineer, no, we don't need more of us. The consulting engineering model of billable hour allotments for public sector projects is quite badly broken, and miserably inefficient.
What we need is to actually build an incentive structure for engineering firms to efficiently utilize their time and for public sector project owners to move away from incredibly proscriptive and overly complex delivery standards towards encouraging the use of technology in design and capital in construction.
I guess I'm not the only one who occasionally wants to shoot everyone in the room and start over after a long meeting with consultants and DOT personnel?
Public sector procurement standards often have the effect of putting maximum risk on the contractor/consultant while minimizing their ability to manage that risk. So the prices soar.
I suppose you are right and the efficient ratio of engineers to workers is quite low. Which is disappointing because I wish more people got to use their brains in rigorous, practical ways.
Unlike your grandfather's country house millions of people go through Penn Station every day and at least some of us might like it to be a more pleasant experience.
Yes, and it's too bad that New York decided to spend over a billion dollars on Moynihan Train Hall, expected to be used by a small fraction of Penn Station commuters, rather than improve the existing facilities at Penn.
Some of the physical improvements mooted are, to be sure, really insanely expensive to even contemplate, especially at NYC's 10X cost premium. I'd love to say that we could widen the platforms and fix the boarding problems there, but it's clearly not going to happen in our lifetimes: the die was cast in concrete before any of us were born.
But a lot of the things that would improve the experience at Penn and in NYC generally are ridiculously cheap, they just would require getting three paranoid, dysfunctional bureaucracies to do their jobs and minimally cooperate. A departures board that includes Amtrak, LIRR and NJT trains. Readable wayfinding signs in multiple languages. Coordinated schedules. Regularly washed floors. It's impressive (in a bad way) that we spent ten figures on Moynihan hall and got none of these.
Yes, the die is definitively cast. Widening the platforms means moving the tracks, moving load-bearing columns, and either reducing the number of tracks or excavating the yard footprint at the sides. Construction under traffic for decades, at very high cost for no improvement in train operations. Much better to build an extension or an entirely different terminal.
One of the things I never understood was the opposition to ARC on the grounds that it was separate from Penn Station. Separate from Penn Station was the point. It was buildable, and when it had been built it would have been entirely under control of NJ TRANSIT dispatchers, producing more reliable commuter service for all those riders, and freeing tracks in Penn Station for other uses. And, the rider environment would have been world class.
It is true you could buy a new departure board that integrates LIRR trains (but why?). The true cost of which would be the integration of the different control systems at PSCC (itself a tremendous achievement). It wouldn't be ridiculously cheap, but it would be less than a billion dollars.
The old PRR used to run coordinated schedules between the locals, regionals, and expresses west of New York, but Amtrak doesn't run those trains anymore, so I don't know what you'd coordinate there. Long Island trains and PRR trains were never coordinated (LIRR has its own section of Penn Station, by design) so, again, what are you coordinating? I don't think there is much latent demand for coordinated trips that nevertheless would involve sprinting across Penn Station from one side to the other. People do commute from LI to NJ but they use cars to do it not least because both ends of the trip are likely to be in low-density suburbs.
Trains are great, but they are heavy and inflexible and very capital-intensive. Our good ideas are severely constrained by that.
Probably. Its basic problem is that it's running over capacity in all its elements, and that's only addressed by adding capacity which makes it a megaproject. Maybe if you could get rid of Madison Square Garden and opened up the footprint, you could at least make what's there meaningfully nicer, but only if you diverted some of the train and foot traffic.
There are a lot of good jokes in this piece. Huzzah.
One question I'd like to see you work out is what the rule is for determining when agencies should be apolitical/technocratic and when they should be the opposite. On one hand, you think transit agencies should be apolitical and lots of lower-level elected offices should be converted into appointive positions. On the other hand, you think the Federal Reserve should no longer be insulated from politics and that much of the Supreme Court's power should be turned over to the political branches. I can make some guesses as to how all of this fits together, but it could use some spelling out.
I found this piece fascinating for a different reason. Like a lot of people growing up in the West and living in rural areas most of my life, to this day, I never think of trains as a means to travel. Ever. Going from x to y, the word “train” never pops into my mind. When I’m back East or Europe, it’s only when somebody says, “Hey, it’s easy to catch the train,” that I even remember it’s a form of transportation. I’m sure many of you see this as a mental defect, but I’m just honestly remarking that such is the nature of I think many Americans’ lives that getting on a train just seems odd. I’m fully convinced it’s a great way to travel, but I’ll bet quite a few elected officials also find it in the realm of, “oh, yeah, that’s right, people still use trains.” No doubt this factors into why it’s hard to get a train built in California. Anyway, just an observation.
Los Angeles to San Diego, and Sacramento to Oakland/San Jose are the two lines outside the Northeast Corridor where Amtrak actually runs a profit. To and from Chicago is the one market outside of these three that has any significant amount of service, but no particular destination is served well enough to make it worthwhile for many people other than a few commuters. (And Sacramento to the Bay Area is also mainly commuters.)
Many of these shorter lines have been doing pretty well. For example, the Chicago-Milwaukee service has been steadily growing, and pre-pandemic, they were thinking to up it to 10 round trips a day: https://biztimes.com/amtrak-hiawatha-line-hits-record-ridership-in-2019-fiscal-year/ Not a lot by international standards, but a lot by Amtrak standards.
My limited understanding of passenger trains further West is that they're unreliable due to the conflict with freight train traffic. Legally, Amtrak's passenger trains are supposed to have priority, but they're riding rails owned by the freight railroads who ignore the law.
It's not just delays (which are definitely a problem) --- it's that the system is so sparse in most of the west that it's generally useless unless you're a tourist whose goal is to ride a train;* even if you're in a major city and want to go to another major city, there's probably no passenger service (especially if you need to go north or south --- most Amtrak lines out there run east or west). For example, take the four largest cities in each of the four-corner states (Albuquerque, Denver, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City). The only route connecting any pair of those is Denver and Salt Lake City. Heck, there currently isn't even any service to Los Vegas at all! And those are major cities. If you're in the boonies, it's even more worthless.
* There are exceptions. I met a guy who lived in Flagstaff and worked a few days a week in LA. Amtrak runs one train a day between the two, and the timing just happened to work out perfectly for his purposes. I once had a business trip that I could complete by Amtrak, so I jumped at the opportunity. But it only happened once. I also once had to travel from the east coast to the midwest for personal reasons, so I took a train just because I could. There happened to be a major snowstorm that killed air travel, so traveling by rail actually proved to be faster!
Thanks for that. I wonder if this doesn't underline my observations, though. If people in the West actually cared about rail transportation they would have paid more attention to such a debate, wouldn't they? That the delineation of rail lines were eventually decided in favor of joint use sort of shows how much passenger rail mattered. There's a very nice railroad museum in Sacramento that I have been to multiple times. The whole theme of that museum is a romanticized bygone era when people "used to" ride the rails. I wonder if Easterners would bother building a railroad museum like that, or at least with such a theme? You can walk through restored rail cars and see how people "used to" dine on trains and "used to" sleep on trains and "used to" travel to wonderous places like Hollywood and the Beach all while old timey music plays and characters dressed up as porters say "ticket please." Anyway, it's just an observation that some of us don't think about the rail as a thing. I know, I know, we should. I think it's just a cultural difference in the west that, as you point out, is probably endogenous with policy.
I mean you're right - people in the western US starting choosing air travel first, which led to the railroad companies losing money on their scheduled passenger trains, which led to Amtrak's creation.
At no point did folks in the western US seem to regret this state of affairs despite the poor Amtrak service they got in the end. Air travel won.
They picked air travel first because the cities in the West are spread out further apart and makes air more competitive relative to rail for intercity travel.
Californian here (Sacramentan now, actually). I think there are plenty of Westerners who do think about trains. Growing up in Santa Clara County, people rarely took trains, but Caltrain was a common option to get to San Francisco for sporting events. People were aware of BART as well although it didn't come to our part of the Bay Area.
I have talked to a fair number of people that have never taken a train, and I think that is much more normal than the Northeasterners think...not just people who don't commute on trains but have never set foot on an active one. So I do think that reminding people they exist is useful. The Capitol Corridor Amtrak line between Sacramento and the Bay Area is pretty good, albeit somewhat slow (then again, so is traffic...)
I used to take the Empire Builder from Pasco to Portland and back fairly often (the net effect was basically an extra day in the city, since the train left Pasco early and Portland late, compared to when I liked to drive), and my parents never knew when to pick me up because it was so unreliable. That section, though, was often pretty packed, especially in the winter.
I'm 100% on team Moynihan Station was a White Elephant, but I'll take ten of them over buying more useless toys for the most useless of our armed forces.
I usually agree with MY on these topics. For the first time, I find the pendulum has swung too far the other way in his analysis.
From the perspective of transportation function the improvements here seem to be minimal to nonexistent. But nobody said otherwise! The NY Times had their architecture critic write on this, not their business desk. This is not even attacking a strawman; it's analyzing a project on entirely different terms than its proponents and defenders.
It's a good point that the transportation improvements are nil. But, as the proponents of the project claim to be interested in its aesthetic value, it seems incumbent at least to assess it on that level as well. This is like reading an economist's critique of an outstanding French meal pointing out we could have gotten the same calories and nutrients for much less from staples from our local grocery - true, but also missing the point.
What's the value of such aesthetic improvements? There are various studies that try to tie aesthetic improvements to improved outcomes in practical areas, like health and crime.
I do not know if those hold up at the end of the day, or even if in light of them this project would have been better than, say, improving public housing or building parks.
Even so, the proponents of the project do not seem focused on those issues, but on the value of giving NYC a grand entryway for arriving passengers and a pleasing place for its rail users to commute through. Again, what's the value of that? I have no idea - I can think of many cities whose beautiful architecture support vast parts of their economy and culture, from Paris to Prague, but also many counterexamples - but it's not $0.
Again, I don't mean to defend this project; it could be a terrible waste of money, and the signage and similar issues identified by MY should be rectified.
The frustrating thing is that this is happening as a transportation project. The North East United States is a place that would reap huge gains from improved transit infrastructure. There's a tremendous amount of political energy around it, so much so that it has acquired partisan valence and is now a part of the never-ending culture war. And then, when we do get a billion dollars to spend on improving transportation, we build something that doesn't actually improve transportation!
Repeat that often enough and what happens is that voters rightly start associating "transportation project" with expensive boondoggles that don't actually make their commute easier. You could instead imagine a virtuous cycle where we build and operate transit cheaply and efficiently, more people start riding it because it materially improves their lives, and the increased constituency for transit leads to more projects being built.
Again, you don't need to being opposed to beautiful works of public architecture to be frustrated here. If NY State had announced a billion-dollar initiative to fight the opioid epidemic and then used it to turn the post office into the Moynihan Rehab Clinic, people would be mad! But because we already have such low expectations of transportation projects, just building the damn thing is counted as a success.
This is why the national Democratic Party is trying to shove everything they possibly can into an "infrastructure bill." Because the branding of "infrastructure" means "will never pay for itself so don't even ask."
Great point. It seems like all recent new NYC transpo projects are super expensive flashy looking buildings with deeply suboptimal functionality (see also Fulton Transit center and [ugh] the Oculus).
Having some funding continuity might help. Right now we have a boom-and-bust cycle, with masses of money dumped on the market periodically, that ends up in the hands of consultants because the transit agencies don't have permanent staff with the skills to fully implement the projects. Some European systems (France, Spain) are much better about integrating consultants with permanent staff, and they deliver more transit at lower cost as a result. We did this in the past - the New York IND system was city-owned and design and construction was managed by city engineers. Nearly all of the 8th Avenue and 6th Avenue Systems were built in just over a decade. A different world, I know, but still.
I'm not opposed to a grand entryway to a city, but building one is putting the cart before the horse.
It made sense for Penn station to be grand because the Pennsylvania Railroad was a grand system! It had state-of-the-art infrastructure (electrification, tunnels under the Hudson while other railroad used ferries from NJ, etc.) and ran it's NEC trains faster than Amtrak does today!
Yes, having an aesthetically pleasing station is worth something to its users, but you know what's worth even more? Faster and better train service. Improve that first, then improve the station. Make the railroad worthy of a grand station.
There were plans to build another tunnel under the Hudson river which would have helped. But that was killed by Chris Christie. It would have been great to have that, but it's still worth it to have a nicer station.
Sure, there are plans for a lot of things. But none of them matter if they're not implemented. Christie killed ARC because of cost --- in particular he suspected that it would go way over budget. (And he was almost certainly right about that!) Not building this train hall (and allocating the $1.6 B to more important parts of ARC) plus simplifying ARC in general would have helped address his (arguably reasonable) concerns.
And yet, Christie also deprived New Jersey residents of a once-in-a-century opportunity for much more and much more reliable service in their own terminal (much more than a "train hall") that extended all the way to Sixth Avenue. He was spooked (or claimed to be spooked) by what was essentially an accounting issue, the FTA's new risk evaluation methodology. It was shovel ready (in fact, shoveling was already happening and New Jersey had to pay the money back). The costs were much better known than they were in the planning stage. It could have been done design-build with most of the risk on the contractors. A huge wasted opportunity.
If you think the almost certain cost overruns were a mere "accounting issue", then I have a bridge to sell you --- one that is overpriced, over budget, and significantly delayed.
There was no chance for cost overruns because the project was barely in construction. This is not what Christie cited when he caused the project to be cancelled. The project was canceled after the FTA changed its risk assessment methodology to produce much higher outer-bound cost estimates, which had the effect of potentially shoving more cost onto New Jersey after the funding deal (favorable to New Jersey) had already been struck. I don't think it would have gotten to $14B but on balance I think it would still have been worth it for $14B. Certainly much more than the East Side Access project. We will likely discover this to our cost, if the Hudson River tunnels collapse or are taken out of service for years which now seems likely.
Yeah, I often find myself torn about things like this. I can see some value in having a statement central station for a city or rail network. But, the price here just seems hard to justify, though it's not clear how much of that is the office space or retail areas that would be expected to pay for themselves.
Matt mentions dingy high schools and such. In general, I think that there's a value in kids not having to go to dingy depressing school buildings, even if the educational benefits don't always show up on test scores. On the other hand, there are a lot of unnecessarily expensive luxury style high schools being built that would seem to push well beyond the marginal benefits.
Yeah, the value isn't $0, but if we're evaluating aesthetic value or civic pride value, we should also assess the alternatives along those terms. If building two ugly stations for the price of this pretty station generates $n in economic activity and x% of $n goes to private-sector improvement projects that make people's surroundings more beautiful, how does $n•x/100 compare to the aesthetic value of Moynihan Train Hall? A priori, why shouldn't we assume $n•x/100 is greater, because there's no principal/agent distinction between the person buying the aesthetic improvements and the person appreciating them?
There's real monetary value in aesthetics. Nearby Grand Central Station is much nicer and has quite a bit of high end retail like the apple store. I'm guessing they pay quite a bit to be there. Penn has some retail, but a lot less in both quantity and niceness.
I was unaware of the vast power of the NYT's architecture critic Michael Kimmelman before this. I was aware that the LA Times architecture critic (Christopher Hawthorne) was appointed the Chief Design Officer of Los Angeles.
Yeah I can't think of anything in Hong Kong that could be counted grandiose. Even the main rail hub of what used to be the Kowloon Canton Railway (connecting the Kowloon peninsula direct to Guangzhou two hours north) is just a big concrete block. But the stations are above all else clean and efficient.
The point of the project is to employ people in and around New York City. That's it. That's the goal. Literally nobody with influence cares about other deliverables in New York State politics. You get the federal money out of TGA and into as many New Yorkers' accounts before the federal money goes somewhere else.
Then you put on a show about "great public works," an empty symbol for the Democratic Party to gesture at to justify its own routine failures of governance. Maybe you win an Emmy while you're at it.
Even NYC elections are a jobs program for unemployable relatives. The show must go on, after all.
This is all very logical, but millions of people pass through Penn Station every year. If this nicer building creates millions of moments of additional happiness compared to the dismal old building, what's the price tag on that? It's worth something.
It's definitely worth *something*, but why wouldn't we assume the things we can't pay for due to the opportunity cost of this station have comparable effects in terms of intangible happiness measures? For instance, if you had a faster commute due to the government spending its transportation dollars most efficiently, you might get hours extra over the course of the year at home with your family, which is surely also good for some moments of additional happiness. Or the economy grows faster and you have to worry about money that much less.
Yes, agree there's also value on that side of the equation, but was saying there's value on the Penn/Moynihan side that this article is ignoring.
If you're going to appoint some commissar to decide which projects are the most worthy, as this suggests, maybe we need something like a transportation or public works QALY to compare the intangible values of projects, apples to apples. Or just use the democratic process, I guess.
This would be true if the new building were replacing the old Penn Station, but it's not.
"When the hall opened, officials anticipated it to be used primarily by Amtrak passengers, which accounted for about five percent of daily ridership prior to the pandemic."
It's a weird add-on to the existing terrible space, one that most commuters will not benefit from. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's Amtrak users that will benefit the most from it, either, as opposed to NJT or LIRR commuters.
The quote about the “320 seat waiting room” caught my eye because so far in every picture I’ve seen of the inside of the new hall there is no seating visible anywhere at all. Did the seating area actually get built, and if so…where?
Meanwhile of course, we’ve spent over a billion dollars on a train hall that will only be used by the unwary and by newcomers, since everyone who actually lives in the city will continue to board by means of the lower level at old Penn, since that is apparently still the only way to actually get to the platform without being forced through a completely useless airplane-style single file boarding queue.
Also worth noting is the fact that Moynihan Hall objectively makes the process of _disembarking_ worse than the old Station. Old Penn was ugly as sin, but it was literally on top of the A/C/E lines: the new hall is now a much longer walk from them and longer still to the 1/2/3. But of course since no one in a position of political power in NYC ever takes the subway, this was considered an afterthought.
There is a seating area off to the side and it’s very nice. But with good infrastructure, the trains run frequently enough that waiting space isn’t important.
At the risk of contradicting our host, I’m going to strongly disagree: waiting space is _hugely_ important. If the schedules are predictable, ticketed passengers will spend less time waiting to depart, but people often _meet_ at transit hubs: this is why there are benches in nearly every airport disembarkation area. And some of the people waiting for arrivals will be older, or have kids. They need to be able to sit down.
A public space without seating is a space designed to look good in opening-day ribbon cutting photos and otherwise to keep the public as far away as possible.
Correct and this is actually a weakness of London and Paris.
The problem with the Moynihan train hall isn't that stations don't need waiting areas (they do, and London Euston's lack of them is that station's big weakness which is going to become very evident when HS2 arrives), but that what they really need are circulation spaces.
Put in a bunch of extra escalators and elevators, make all the passageways wider, add in moving sidewalks in some places, open up tunnels to all the subway and PATH stations in the neighborhood, and add some damned windows so there's some natural light.
As a postscript to the disembarkation issue I’d like to point out that we somehow spent over a billion dollars “improving” Penn Station and managed to _not_ reopen the pedestrian tunnel that leads from Penn to Herald Square and the NINE subway lines plus the PATH train that stop there. Great job everyone!
I'm obviously a big fan, but as a native New Yorker that grew up using Penn Station heavily, and still use it frequently to this day, I really disagree with this take.
You seem to present an implicit false dichotomy — that transits projects can either be function or focus on "unnecessary" things like aesthetics. I think it is clearly a spectrum, one this is obfuscated by Cuomo & co. going way over to the flashy side of the spectrum (e.g. the unnecessarily huge 2nd Ave subway extension stations). I do think beauty matters though, especially for a central piece like Penn Station. It's a matter of civic pride, which I think has a lot intangible benefits to society.
At a more tangible level, Penn Station is just awful to use. That's no secret, but it's bizarre for you to act like moving an idiotic sports from atop the busiest & most cramped train station on the continent to another location with easy mass transits access (7 line terminal) was a crazy idea. I encourage readers to read the 2019 Politico "This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful" by Marc Dunkelman; it's an interesting case study of the actual bureaucratic issues that bedevil Penn/Moynihan, such as why Amtrack didn't actually didn't want the station. It's also a shame even Cuomo couldn't force MSG to move, when it would have been in the public's best interest.
I don't mean this as a defense of the actual Moynihan that came to be, or of NYC's insane costs or many stupid projects.
Yeah. There are a million realpolitik reasons why this was never going to happen, but it was absolutely the right plan. Train stations are not complicated.
As a New Yorker who frequently travels to Boston via Penn station, I gotta disagree. You're usually right on this stuff – the T green line criticism was spot on – but this is different.
Waiting for a long distance train is different than waiting for a rapid transit train. You don't just hop on a platform and stand around for the next train. You usually wait longer, you don't know which platform it's going to be on and it's not something you do every day. It's more like an airport in that respect.
A nice space isn't just a nice to have feature. Even if your train isn't delayed, you're likely to wait for a bit and maybe grab some food. Doing that in a pleasant space has real value. Being able to navigate and orient yourself is also valuable. I've been using Penn Station for nearly 20 years (yes, I know the mezzanine trick), but since it isn't my daily commute, I often get turned around. These are exactly the issues architecture is supposed to address.
You bring up the Union Station subway stop. I used to commute there. I was in and out quickly. Since I was there nearly every day, I learned both where the Q and 6 trains leave from which, crucially the same platform every time. And the signage is much better than Penn. It's a different experience.
At Penn, the tracks always change and I have to wait longer. I only use Penn Station a few times a year so don't learn it as well. Even if I commuted there, I'd only know the very specific way to get to the LIRR or whatever.
I've long been frustrated that we spent billions to put a mall around the PATH train, rapid transit that hops less than a mile to New Jersey, and we had such a dingy station for our long distance trains to Boston and DC.
> You usually wait longer, you don't know which platform it's going to be on and it's not something you do every day.
This is because America is bad at train station design. In Japan, every platform has a number. The big board says the name of the trains and what number the train will be at. You go to your numbered platform and if you have reserved tickets, you then go the spot where you line up your particular car, which is also marked. Along the platform and in the halls are places to eat food and buy magazines.
None of this stuff is hard to do, but America's train infrastructure is so bad that Americans can't imagine what good looks like.
This is more or less how it works at Penn Station – big board, track numbers and places to eat are all there. It's just it was so cramped it was often hard to find all of these things. Only quirk is that they don't announce the track number until about 5 minutes before the train arrives since there are too few tracks and they're too cramped to have people waiting on them for long. That's an infrastructure issue this redesign won't solve.
I sometimes sit down at Penn Station, but usually not when I'm waiting for the subway (even when there's a bench available). At a big station, trains should run frequently, like the Shinkansen.
"...a catastrophe of low ceilings, bad lighting, weird passages, and giant rats."
You keep complaining about high unit costs. But with giant rats, you get a lot more rat, per rat, and at the same cost. The cost is actually going down, pro rata. And yet you're still complaining!
Dysphemistic treadmill, I'm glad you're here
I genuinely laughed out loud at the use of "pro rata" here.
Matt, man, I love you, but I've read all of your articles on city planning and YIMBYism and high-density cities and suburbs and I don't think I've ever been less convinced by a vision. Your ideal city seems to be ugly, overcrowded, has no sense of history, and is populated by hapless and powerless citizens with little to no input into the form and function of their own neighborhoods. It’s kind of nightmarish.
I lived in NYC for 20 years. I got married, moved to Long Island and am raising a family. I commute into the city for work (or did before the pandemic, and will again soon). I'm one of the people greatly impacted by your schemes. In all these months, I haven't read much specific from you that I would want. I mean, you point out that because of tech limitations and a nightmare of hostile agencies looking to protect their fiefdoms, you can't take a train from New Jersey to Long Island, and we should focus on that. But you never address WHY someone would want to take a train from New Jersey to Long Island. It's not a thing that people do. Not a huge deal, but it sets off alarms.
Penn Station in its current incarnation is a dumpster fire (I haven't seen much of the Moynihan reno yet, though I saw the work every day pre-pandemic). For those of us trying to navigate it twice a day it is a depressing, broken, somewhat dangerous shithole. The argument that "yes, they shouldn't have destroyed the old, beautiful Penn Station, but they did, so now you're just going to have to live with this awfulness until you retire" just doesn't resonate. Even the Soviet Union managed to build beautiful public spaces.
It will be nice - more than nice, great - to climb out of Penn Station and not instantly hate everything. Being in an uplifting building for a bit each day would be lovely. It matters. I worked for many years near Grand Central Station, and the difference between climbing out of a nasty subway into beautiful Grand Central Station and climbing out of a nasty train into a nastier Penn Station is tremendous.
What I’m saying is that your plans rarely offer much that might make life nicer for those of us actually stuck doing these things. They always seem to be things that theoretical people might want in the aggregate and rarely what those of us actually living and acting in the spaces you want to commandeer are interested in. You need to ask the people impacted and involved what they want and need, and then do that - not what you think we want and need (please don’t ever write again that people actually want to live in high density neighborhoods even when we say we don’t. Just trust us, Matt.)
This is too long already, so I’ll close with a Penn Station anecdote that I think really captures the magic of a daily commute through the station. This happened to me a year or two before the pandemic, in one of those awful New York Augusts.
I was neck deep in the usual morning Penn Station scrum. Penn Station isn’t anywhere near large enough to accommodate the number of daily commuters, so when you get off the train during rush hour you’re packed in like a factory-farmed chicken, shuffling forward a few inches at a time, usually in no particular direction. There aren’t really lines; just a mass of sweaty people pushing towards the tiny, inadequate handful of escalators that get you outside. It’s terrible; it takes forever to move fifty feet; you’re constantly accidentally being touched and breathed on by people in a way that I don’t think will be tolerated anymore after the last 18 months.
I made it to the escalator. The escalators are also packed. Someone is standing on almost every riser, so you’re inches away from the person in front and in back of you. It’s difficult to balance and not smack into people, so you have to be careful with your bags. In front of me is a woman I’d noticed even before we got on the escalator. Mid-forties, fit, confident with an optimistic look on her face, dressed in a lovely dark red suit that hung perfectly and somehow wasn’t the wrinkled wreck that the rest of us were wearing. It occurred to me how rare it was that I actually saw someone during my commute that didn’t look angry and defeated. She was the opposite - whatever she was doing in the city, wherever she was going, she was upbeat and going to do great, and people were going to be happy with the results. While I was mulling this over – a rare bright spot of positivity during my morning commute – this lovely woman farted in my mouth. Like, I could taste it.
Yeah, let the old Penn Station burn and then salt the earth.
> please don’t ever write again that people actually want to live in high density neighborhoods even when we say we don’t. Just trust us, Matt.
He's not saying that *you* want to live in high density neighborhoods. He's saying that millions of millions of other people do, and because you won't let them, they are paying through the nose to outbid each other for those few opportunities to do so.
In NYC, the millions of people in the million rent stabilized units aren't letting other people live in high density neighborhoods and making others pay out the nose to outbid for scant opportunities to do so. The mess here is hardly just up to zoning and development policies, the entire city is benefitting from the racket.
Right. And somehow those few people are supposed to be in charge?
No. He's just saying that the 60% of people that *don't* want this shouldn't be allowed to force us into this miserable price war. Those people can stay out in the suburbs and do their thing, just don't ban central neighborhoods from becoming urban because you like having us subsidize your suburban lifestyle on the most desirable central urban neighborhoods.
> don't ban central neighborhoods from becoming urban
We're talking about Midtown Manhattan bruh
Wow. Welcome to the vicious internet.
I apologize for the heat that came out in my comment. I overreacted to the idea that legalization of minority options amounted to putting the minority in charge.
It's the people who live in central neighborhoods who don't want them further developed (or overdeveloped). I'd argue that suburbs (at least in large cities like New York) are suppressing an equally considerable amount of housing demand by forcing apartment buildings to be small, or not allowing them to be built. I might well say, let's open up the zoning in my urban neighborhood, but not until the suburbs open up the zoning in theirs. Or maybe they should go first, since my neighborhood is already much, much denser than theirs.
I'll leave the questions of aesthetics aside and just focus on one thing here: "Why would anyone want to do a one-seat/one-fare ride from the eastern half of a large metro area to a stop in the western half?" is, to me, a frankly bizarre question to ask: there are literally dozens of major cities where thousands of people do just that on a daily basis! Go ask them why they do it!
It is one of my least favorite aspects of NYC parochialism that people here look at some of the very obvious ways in which our city is run incompetently compared to our peer cities and declare that it's secretly a virtue.
Plus, even if every LI commuter and every NJ commuter disembarked at Penn and never once took the train one stop past it in either direction, Matt already pointed out why it would still be a good idea: the trains would move _faster_, because you wouldn't be trying to turn them around (which is also where shift changes and cleaning crews happen) inside the busiest train station in North America.
I hear you on the second point (regarding the efficiency of having trains being able to pass through LI to NJ), but you're wrong on the first part. Long Island isn't on one half of a large metro area with New Jersey on the other half - we aren't in the metro at all! There are huge numbers of commuters to NYC from both areas, but both areas are independent entities, both de facto and de jure. You're going to just have to trust me, as someone who spent his whole life in these areas, that there is no significant number of people commuting between New Jersey and Long Island. I've just never even heard of someone who knows someone who does a daily commute like that. It would be way more efficient just to move.
Of course it's more efficient just to move if there's no transportation across it. But that's just like telling the railroad executives in 1900 that there's no reason to dig a huge tunnel under the Hudson because no one commutes across it!
There are two pools of several million people and several million jobs and many other destinations, that are just a dozen or so miles apart, and there are tracks connecting them. Of course there are many things that many people would want to do if it weren't so hard to get there. It's only hard to get from one to the other because no one runs service. If you ran service across, then even if no current person does that commute, there will be many families over the next several decades where one person moves jobs and they *don't* have to decide to uproot the entire household, or where someone decides to start visiting friends or museums or whatever it is that's in the other location.
Say you live and have a job in Nassau County and your partner has a job offer in Union County. Unless you can afford to live right next to Penn Station, one of you is going to have a nightmare commute, so either you go find yourself a job in Jersey or Manhattan and you move to NJ, or your partner turns the offer down.
Open up through-running and your partner can take the job and just ride the train every day and your kids can stay in the same school.
It will take a decade or so for enough people to rearrange their lives because the service now exists, because you obviously have to wait for them to choose to do so. But it will happen and there will be plenty of passengers eventually. And, in the meantime, you just have a better train service for the people who commute into Penn Station.
I'm really not certain what to say about the assertion that Long Island is not part of the greater NYC metro area. Your definition of this must be very different than mine.
And your argument here is nearly a tautology: of course very few people commute from LI to NJ or vice versa! We've gone out of our way to make that impossible! This is very different from a prediction that people would never do it if it were an option.
What would be the point of going to LI if you didn’t live there? Its beaches? The Jersey Shore has more. Its shopping malls? NJ has better. Its Italian food? Fuggedaboutit.
This kind of thing isn't helpful. The point isn't whether _you_ personally find the idea of going to LI attractive. Again let's please stop pretending that the ways in which NYC's civic infrastructure is obviously and clearly broken don't matter or are secretly good. We know what a functional metro-wide transit system looks like because they exist in other metros. This ain't it.
Where is there a “functional metro-wide transit system” where the overwhelming majority of rides are into and out of the city center? Are there people who live in Far Rockaway who commute to Riverdale? Maybe. But let’s not pretend there are or ever will be a significant number of them.
You're not addressing his point at all. I'd be willing to be 75% of LI-NJ riders today are Long Islanders going to Jersey City, which wouldn't really be helped by Matt's proposal anyways. Ken is completely right that yes there will certainty be some riders, it is absolutely not some big issue in the scheme of things. I think the burden of proof is on someone advocating this for the cost/benefit given it's not clear to me this would be worth it at all.
I guess it is, but since I live here and grew up here, I probably have a better idea of it, no?
What will this mythical New Jersey to Long Island commuter do once he gets off the train? Hail one of the two cabs available in Uniondale? What if John's sick that day? Uber every day and hope one is near enough to get you to work on time? Get on a bus? It'd be some coincidence for a LI bus line to actually take you anywhere near work. They mostly take people directly into the city, to places where they can catch a train, subway, or need to be picked up by car. Should he leave a car at the station year round and pay off the parking tickets? Where exactly does he work? Are you thinking of Long Island and New Jersey train stations like you think of NYC subway stops - that once you get out of them you can just walk to where you need to go?
And the commute right now isn't even close to impossible. It requires changing trains once. It will suck something terrible, but it will suck because Penn Station sucks, the LIRR is falling apart, and New Jersey transit... isn't bad, actually. That part would be fine. In any case, it doesn't suck like crossing the Alps sucked for Hannibal. People don't do it because it's weird and unnecessary, not because of the outrageous difficulty.
I also live here and have for decades, and see my earlier comment about NYC parochialism and worse-is-betterism. Just because you personally can't imagine why someone would take advantage of a basic feature of a working metro-wide transit system is no reason to pretend they don't exist and don't work.
Richard Gadsen, above, pointed out an obvious scenario where prompt through-running trips would be useful to people. You don't have to posit a trip from Montauk to Montvale here: just the ability to reliably get from, say, Jamaica to Newark reliably and on a single seat would be incredibly useful.
"You don't have to posit a trip from Montauk to Montvale here"
Indeed... some of the other folks here seem to be forgetting that over half of New York City's population, in Brooklyn and Queens, lives on Long Island.
In the big picture, it would only be "incredibly useful" if really a lot of people had reason to do it. And the only way that could happen is if you had large-scale trip generators and destinations in those places. What we have now is not remotely big enough. Think Hudson Yards on steroids in Secaucus and Jamaica, or perhaps on a platform over Sunnyside Yard. And now this straighforward business of through-running turns into a really enormous megaproject.
Matt grew up in New York City, so it's not like he's some villager mouthing off from the Great Plains.
Through running is now best-practice train development/operation across the world. When was the last time any major city (outside the US) built train networks that stop in the central area and don't run through?
"that there is no significant number of people commuting between New Jersey and Long Island. I've just never even heard of someone who knows someone who does a daily commute like that. It would be way more efficient just to move."
Maybe because they can't right now, because it would be utterly miserable?
Meanwhile in the London area:
https://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/maps/regional-map
No need for a bridge over this river, no one ever crosses it.
Usually bridges are built when there is an expectation of heavy use that will pay off the costs of construction, either through tolls or tax revenue. There is no such expectation here.
Agreed with regards to Penn Station, but the rest of this post is just incredibly self-absorbed.
You already live in one of the most desirable locations on earth, with the greatest economic opportunities for yourself, greatest educational opportunities for your kids, greatest cultural amenities for the whole family…
Millions of people want to live there and will NEVER be able to do so precisely because your “input into the form and function of your neighborhood” instantly precludes the sort of development that would allow others to afford the locale.
Excuse the language, but the current system of local control over zoning absolutely, unutterably FUCKS everyone younger than or poorer than the existing homeowner class in desirable areas.
I’m well-off; my household is in the 98th percentile for wealth in the 25-29 age cohort. To move to comparable housing in your area I would have to liquidate all my investments, sell my primary residence in a major metro, sell my 3 investment properties (also in a major metro), and probably borrow money from my 401(k).
The federal government absolutely should ram German-style, rules-based, shall-issue permitting down the throats of every municipality in every major metropolitan region in the United States, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Local control has been an utter failure, and it’s literally impossible to overstate the degree to which that is true.
"Comparable housing" in NYC is not the point of living in NYC. You downsize dramatically and lie to yourself about being okay with it. You tell yourself the reason you live in NYC is that there's so much to experience you won't even be in your apartment very often. You stay long enough to see waves of friends come and go and after two waves say "I'm a real New Yorker now" but know deep down it's supposed to feel different. You become neurotic, angry or both. You get a therapist. If you're lucky, you can find one that takes insurance.
Besides, it's laughable to pretend zoning is why NYC housing is expensive. It's the densest place in the US and expanding its maximum capacity requires trillions of spending. At our recent population peak, you'd wait on platforms for multiple subway trains because every car was full-to-bursting on the first couple trains. We have over 1m rent stabilized units held below market rate. We have most of the country's trust fund kids. The real estate market in Manhattan is basically Too Big To Fail. You think local community boards - and not our entire national failed economic policies for decades - are why NYC housing sucks? GTFOH!
I'm already accounting for the fact that I would lose the garden plot, small yard, and every room would be 20-30% smaller when I say "comparable".
And if you despise living in the city this much, why in God's name are you there?
I lived in Beijing for years. Makes NYC crowding, impatience, traffic, and general hazardousness look like rural Iowa. I loved it, it was booming all the time and there were a million places to get lost for a day to explore. The reality is that there are a lot of people who would love to be in the NYC region and would tolerate or enjoy the fact that it's crowded, very few of whom can ever afford to do more than visit for a weekend or two.
Why? Because the various people who hate the place but need to be there for work have overrun the inner suburbs and successfully fought a war to make sure Nassau and Westchester Counties never permit another high-rise. And most of Brooklyn and Staten Island for that matter.
I am aware that there are actual, physical constraints on NYC's development. But zoning is a huge part of the problem, because people like you simply don't care about people like me, let alone those worse off than me.
> I'm already accounting for the fact that I would lose the garden plot, small yard, and every room would be 20-30% smaller when I say "comparable".
You say "every room" and not "studio" or "1 bedroom." I guess you don't really want to live here that badly, do you?
> And if you despise living in the city this much, why in God's name are you there?
You said it yourself: "the greatest economic opportunities for yourself, greatest educational opportunities for your kids, greatest cultural amenities for the whole family." I got a job and came from hundreds of miles away from the economic wasteland I grew up in. Same as lots of people when they first got to NYC. What planet have you been living on since the Great Recession where everybody gets to live and work in a place that makes them happy?
> because people like you simply don't care about people like me, let alone those worse off than me.
I got here in 2011 from a *far* less well-off family because it's where I could get a job that could pay off my education. I came here because the alternative was the California Bay Area, and quite frankly, in my opinion that part of California is pure bullshit.
Do I care about other people like you? Sure, I care enough in the abstract. But you seem to have done incredibly well *without* access to NYC's opportunities in a way that was never an option for me, and you clearly aren't willing to put in the sacrifices that it takes to make it in NY, like living in a 200 square foot studio shoebox for a few years or take on a few roommates.
From the people I've met here, those who *are* worse off than you *are* willing to risk everything and live in a shoebox to try to make it here. So no, I'm not losing sleep over your particular inability to make this place even more fucking crowded so you can *checks notes* get even richer or enjoy cultural amenities.
"I had a shitty, difficult experience coming New York due to decades of corruption, mismanagement and outright incompetence, so all potential newcomers should have to go through the same thing" is a hell of a take. Consider the possibility that NYC's disastrously broken housing market is something other than a test of personal virtue?
Lol.
I have no interest in living in the New York area because I'm better off where I am, earn more money than I would there, and I'm all of 120 miles to your south, so I can come visit whenever I want without incurring the fixed expenditures of living there
My concern in NYC is the same one that has led me to fight in my neighborhood planning meetings to allow a 200-unit mixed-income development on a 5-acre lot down the street even though it will probably slow my equity growth. Prices where I live have gone up 50% since I purchased 4 years ago, and I don't want to be the last young family ever to afford this place.
So stop accusing me of having selfish motivations when I'm actually going out of my way to hurt myself to fight for this exact thing at home.
As for the rest of this... the whole point of having policy, at all, is to solve problems. If you don't see how the suffering you and others underwent to live in your neck of the woods is a problem, I don't know what to tell you.
The whole issue with locally-controlled zoning is that the only people who get a say are the ones who are already well-served by existing, restrictive policies.
Everyone in the area who hasn't yet managed to get a foot on the ladder would love to be able to buy a small 3 bedroom flat in New Rochelle or Great Neck, near a train station, for $250k, but they can't, because they don't exist, because it's impossible to build them.
That's a policy decision, one that makes the lives of everyone except people who already own homes in the area worse off.
The fact that a vast amount of the nation's economic dynamism and opportunity is concentrated in 12 metropolitan areas is a completely different policy issue. I have an old post from elsewhere that I'll dredge up and copy/paste here when I find it.
Here, the post I was referring to:
"There's a long list of policies we need to embrace to restore US economic competitiveness:
1. We need a genuine industrial policy, one that supports a Mittelstand-style belt of mid-sized, world-class firms.
2. We need a sizable bout of infrastructure investment, to restore existing infrastructure and build for the future.
3. We need major healthcare reforms, to lower costs and end rent-seeking.
4. We need anti-trust action to fight industry consolidation everywhere from IT to heavy industry.
5. We need to subsidize the "reshoring" of strategic supply chains for crucial goods from PPE and pharmaceutical precursors to hardened electronics.
6. We need to start shifting high-skill public-sector employment from the Eastern Seaboard's major cities to mid-sized ones scattered across the nation.
Every single one of these, with very minimal modification, could start to breathe life back into smaller and mid-sized cities, the Allentowns, South Bends, Topekas, and Montgomerys of the US. In fact, I would argue that if we're going to get value for money, they need to be structured in such a way that the employment and economic benefits are widespread.
It would be ruinously expensive to allow the resulting economic activity to get sucked into the "gravity wells" exerted by the Bos-Wash or Coastal Californian urban conglomerations. Do we really want to have to institute hukou-style internal passports so we can keep the teeming masses out of the top-tier cities where all the economic opportunity is?
Now this won't directly help rural regions... except that, if you look especially throughout the Northeast, there are a great number of economically vibrant rural areas. The thing they have in common is that they're within the economic orbit of a mid-sized or major city that has managed the transition to the knowledge economy well. Specifically, I'm thinking of the rural hinterlands of places like Harrisburg, Lancaster, Fort Wayne, Des Moines, Madison, Grand Rapids, or Worcester.
A huge fraction of what we consider "rural areas" are within easy reach of such cities. When those cities thrive, they anchor their hinterlands. When they fall to pieces, everything around them does as well.
Unfortunately, a large fraction of rural areas and their populations are out of reach of such a program. Those areas are mostly going to bleed out. And no amount of money will stop that, because if you look at Iowa, or Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, the economic decline of such places is wildly, ridiculously overblown, but their demographic decline isn't. The people who still live in them do so because they want to; they have jobs, there are still public services. What there aren't, in my experience, are children, not in anything like replacement quantity.
Take my family, for example; my mom grew up in a town of about 1000 in Central Pennsylvania. Her parents and grandparents had grown up there. She and her sister moved to the Philadelphia region, while her brother alone stayed. The same was true among her cousins. Now, of all of their kids (my cousins) except one are gone, and definitely not coming back. So they went from having several generations basically all live and die there, to having a third of the next stay, to having well under 10% of my generation end up there. That town still has 700 people, but the schools have consolidated several times, and almost no children stay. There will come a day when it no longer exists, in all likelihood.
We can, of course, spread around enough opportunity so that the people who wish to stay can do so. We'll always need resource inputs from rural areas, most especially forestry products, agricultural produce, and energy. We can make sure that there's enough "slack" in the system that we get power using windmills and solar cells scattered all over, rather than paving AZ and NM in solar farms and piping the results elsewhere. But that won't really solve the issue, which is that to most people, the cultural amenities, creature comforts, and wider social opportunities of the cities and suburbs are attractive when they're within reach.
We can and should devote money to making sure that the hundred million people who live in mid-sized and small urban areas have a good life, and that includes the rural regions that they anchor, but we also need to acknowledge that there are limits to such policies, and many small communities, the one-street towns a hundred miles from anywhere, are going to fade away because they no longer serve a need. Their voters may not be happy about it, but we are not able to bribe them into happiness, nor do we have any moral obligation to do so.
The unfortunate reality is that the US is now seeing the beginning of demographic trends which are already widespread in Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe. We just so happen to be stuck with a political system that gives massively outsized voice to rural areas and are coming off of a four decade-long period in which half of the political elite used grievance- and fear-mongering to prop up its share of the vote. This transition will be significantly bloodier in the United States than it will be elsewhere because of it."
So yea, this isn't all on NYC. But wouldn't you prefer to live in a world where your job is in suburban Albany and Great Neck has enough high-density housing to meet demand from the tens of thousands who can't afford to be there now?
I disbelieve this account. Are you a troll? How was breathing in Beijing during the time you were there? Learn much about KN95 masks then? Yes, we can have the CCP run NYC after they finish with Hong Kong. By the way, is it zoning in NYC that is the problem or Nassau & Westchester.
Yes, I've recently paid the annual rate for the privilege of trolling this highly impactful community of roughly 10,000 commenters.
Is it that inconceivable that people drawn to commentary and a community like this have had different experiences in their lives?
I was in Beijing for most of the period from mid-2010 to late 2016. The air pollution initially was a minor inconvenience, rising to reach a crescendo around 1H 2013 before being increasingly brought under some degree of control by a harsher regulatory regime.
At no point was it a constant thing; the climate ensured it was worse in winter and better in summer and fall, but the vagaries of the weather were such that no more than maybe 20 days a year were truly oppressive even at the worst of it.
Most days, it was just a background haze that one couldn't even feel or smell. On the flip side, one day shortly after getting back in Jan 2013, I couldn't see anything of the apartment building opposite my own, no further than 50 yards away, except the lights on top.
"Yes, we can have the CCP run NYC after they finish with Hong Kong."
Very effective argument, one might almost call it a bit trollish. One can, and you'll find that I do, strongly oppose the Chinese government while still finding the people, culture, dynamism, and history impressive and attractive.
"By the way, is it zoning in NYC that is the problem or Nassau & Westchester."
I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of a metropolitan area. The city as an economic unit and home to millions... that does not stop at the border between Queens and Nassau.
There’s like 80 commenters here. At most.
"By the way, is it zoning in NYC that is the problem or Nassau & Westchester" - This is the nub of the problem to me. I live almost on the city line in NYC, so observe the sudden transition between the apartments in my neighborhood, to the single-family houses in Westchester County a few minutes drive over the border. It is hard to find an apartment in Westchester, they are quite expensive, and only exist in certain inner towns. If NYC were to do major upzoning while the suburbs maintained their severe zoning regime, NYC neighborhoods would be inundated with high-density development that would wholly degrade the quality of life in those areas. A lot of people, especially poor people, would be displaced, and given the anti-gentrification feeling in the City, the whole enterprise would be DOA. YIMBY is a cartoon, it is not useful policy guidance. An alternate approach must be found.
如果你还是不相信的话，你可以把这个话输入Google Translate去看看。
“The federal government absolutely should ram German-style, rules-based, shall-issue permitting down the throats of every municipality in every major metropolitan region in the United States, no ifs, ands, or buts.”
Based on what constitutional authority?
None whatsoever, unfortunately.
"Should" and "can" are two very different things, and I like hyperbole.
I am very, very supportive of the states, to whom such powers can be reserved, doing it, though.
The power exists - we must merely phrase it in the form of a tax, and refuse any federal funding to any municipality for any reason which refuses to comply.
Lol, I’d forgotten about this time-honored tradition. Probably easier to ram through if you aim it at states, though.
Constitutionally, states are sovereign when it comes to zoning and land use. All local land use authority derives from state enabling acts. So states could affect this situation by taking back the authority partially or entirely. Whether they will or not, to an extent that matters, is another question. What arguments would you use to promote such legislation?
There are constitutional barriers to that as well. Look at the Supreme Court rules on Medicaid and ACA.
I dunno. I think that you are being a bit elitist here. You want your lovely public space and if that means you have an inefficient building so be it. MY is arguing for efficiency of use over aesthetics.
Sure aesthetics matter but I think what you really need is cleanliness. And if you spent less time in that scrum (because the building was more efficient) you would be less frustrated with the experience.
East Asian metro rail systems are insanely crowded. I can't recall having my mouth farted in ever in 14 years in Hong Kong, but I was not a daily commuter. I'm sure it happens. But the MTR is fast efficient and only reaches truly awful waits when the weather forces everyone underground.
"I can't recall having my mouth farted in ever in 14 years in Hong Kong,"
Sorry. Did you try Bangkok?
A++ username/comment synergy
Here to serve all your East Asian kink or blubber-related needs.
Haha. Yeah but it's not free there. Also good lord is the traffic there terrible. Toss in always hot and the metro there, ugh.
I don't think it's either/or. Getting more bang for the buck in terms of efficiency, service levels, and throughput is important. So is having grand and glorious spaces that lift the soul even if but for a moment.
Partly what Matt is describing is dumb inefficiency apart from the money spent. Like why have those dull pieces of art above the ticketed waiting room instead of a single integrated (and very large!) train notification board? That's not about money; it's just about thoughtlessness.
I dunno. Grand and glorious spaces can happen in other venues and settings. Train stations can achieve a lot more functionality if they don't have to worry about being grand & glorious as well.
Good point. Our national cathedrals, which induce awe and a feeling of personal puniness compared to the ultimate in human imagination, are found elsewhere:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sofi+stadium&rlz=1C1CHBD_enUS856US856&sxsrf=ALeKk0257iGrZ5RAq7AsY-kdu86yqFrVgQ:1625245598592&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjtnM7U78TxAhWpHzQIHVOgAyAQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1920&bih=937
Yes! The half of my brain I was using this morning couldn't think of a better example but this is it. Make these things grandiose. But NOT on the public dime.
'These things' *are* paid for by the public, far too often.
I get where you're coming from, but it really, really isn't elitist to want a train hub that accommodates millions of people to be nice. It's OK to want nice public spaces, even if they're inefficient.
You're point about efficiency and cleanliness in Penn Station as an alternative is understandable, but it reads like you've never been there. It's not improvable. It's possible for a space to degrade to the point where it can't be rescued (it's hard to convey how awful the rat warren set up is. NYC's subway systems, as nasty as they can be, are also way better. At least the ceilings aren't as low). I've only been on the Hong Kong metro a few times, so grain of salt and everything, but: It's fucking packed, yeah, and STILL manages to be way more pleasant than Penn Station. There's AIR.
It's ok to want nice spaces. If you're going to build a new space, you should make it be nice. But if you have a choice between spending a billion dollars making an existing ugly transit hub that serves a million people nice, and spending a billion dollars creating a modest new transit hub that will serve another million people, do the second one every time.
What modest new transit hub do you have in mind, in New York?
I wasn't thinking anything specific. But you could easily spend a billion dollars on some useful part of Alon Levy's plan: https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/07/17/regional-rail-for-new-york-city-part-ii/
Since we're arguing in a few other areas of this thread, I feel like I should mention that you're right: it's not unreasonable to want our public spaces to not be horrifically ugly and dysfunctional. Penn v2's ugliness is very much one of it's problems: it sends a clear message that nobody in a position of power gives a single crap about the people who have to use the space.
That said I think that given the huge price gap between "functional" and "monumental", we should start with functional _first_ and then see how pretty we can make it. Penn v2.5 is very pretty, but didn't solve any problem of Penn v2 _except_ for the fact that it was fugly. If I had to make the choice between Moynihan Station at $1.25 Billion and Berlin Hauptbanhof at what was roughly a third the price (EU409M), I'd pick the latter in a heartbeat: it's pretty _enough_ and it's actually a functional train station.
I am probably conflating your viewpoint (user of commuter rail who may / may not be elitist) with the architectural critic in the post (certainly elitist). But I do think that what Kenny said below is what I'm trying to say, and that is, modest & efficient should be chosen over beautiful & inefficient. PS nice story about farts. Loved it.
LOL Penn Station (the existing station between 31/33/7th/8th) is absolutely improvable, and with much less money than was spent on Moynahan. The idea that it's so irredeemable that the state should spend $1.6B on a waiting room farther from offices/subways is completely bizarre and 100% wrong.
Penn Station anecdote:
Monday, February 25, 2008. I know because I looked it up: The 100th anniversary of the PATH Train. An unusually pleasant day as well: Mid-40s in the morning, sunny, and a high in the mid-50s. I used to take the NJ Transit NE Corridor line from Metropark into NY Penn and walk to my office on Park & 32nd. Not a bad commute, generally.
It sounds as though you come in later during rush hour than I generally did. I am an early riser and prefer to avoid the traffic and crowds if I can, so I would take a 6:30ish train, getting into Penn a little after 7:00. Before continuing into NYC the train stopped at Newark Penn Station across the platform from the origin of the PATH Trains. A lot of people on the NJ Transit trains would transfer in Newark to catch the WTC Path to their jobs downtown and smaller number of people would then board to go to NY Penn.
On this particular day, just before arriving in Newark the conductor made an announcement that it was the 100th anniversary of the PATH system and to celebrate the Port Authority had made the PATH fare-free for the day. There was some murmuring among the transferring passengers, and a few smiles (hey, free stuff!), and people put their Metrocards back in their pockets or wherever.
Once in NY Penn, heading through the main concourse toward 7th Ave., I passed a couple homeless people, both pushing shopping carts. They were headed in opposite directions, and as they passed one called out to the other, “Hey, did you hear? The PATH is free today. Me and some of the other guys are going to go over to the waterfront in Hoboken and sit in the sun and smoke some some cigarettes. You wanna go?”
The other homeless guy paused, considered for a few seconds, and replied, “Naw. I got stuff to do.” And he shuffled off, pushing his shopping cart.
The end.
Huzzah. Delightful comment and story. I agree with everything you're saying on a human level and think the reason Matt can't back you up comes down to politics.
> Your ideal city seems to be ugly, overcrowded, has no sense of history, and is populated by hapless and powerless citizens with little to no input into the form and function of their own neighborhoods.
This is called "technocracy" and is kind of MY's shtick.
> Even the Soviet Union managed to build beautiful public spaces.
I mean... a command economy is great at building physical structures. It also proved structurally insolvent.
> please don’t ever write again that people actually want to live in high density neighborhoods even when we say we don’t. Just trust us, Matt.
Look, Matt is here to shill for the Democratic Party. He makes no bones about it. And the Democratic Party's version of trickle-down economics only works in high-density locations.
Matt is not in the business of figuring out the future of the Democratic Party, he writes every single day, he's here to provide suppressive fire for the Party he's got today. It's not really his fault that the future the Democratic Party has for us is "hapless and powerless citizens with little to no input into the form and function of their own neighborhoods."
You’re right. Matt’s wrong.
Penn Station is squalid, cramped & astonishingly ugly and people deserve better.
What’s more, the argument that it’s all just about efficiency ignores a half century of NYC history.
Matt should ask someone twenty years older about what the Mens rooms were like in the Port Authority, Grand Central Station and the subways in the 1970s and much of the 1980s. Or about the pimps in the Port Authority. Though, yeah, the trains & buses still ran.
There’s a point where it gets so bad that it becomes about more than moving bodies. (As when the elderly dreaded graffiti-ridden subways.)
Okay. The oppressive ugliness, inconvenience, claustrophobia & grime of Penn Station put it there.
Penn Station may be a sore spot for Matt as its fate compared to the still spacious & astonishingly nice Grand Central (which was saved by a preservation movement led by Jackie Onassis in the 1970s) is quite the powerful argument for preservation.
When Matt’s next home, he should look at Grand Central and then compare it to Penn Station.
(OK, was reading this thoughtfully, and then burst out laughing at the anecdote. Nice. Didn't see that coming.)
Did you say anything? Did she apologize?
You never say anything in the commute. Everybody is already humiliated by your shared circumstances, why would you add to that?
Nah, of course not. I'm sure it wasn't intentional or even thoughtless. It's just a product of a lousy situation.
I mean Maddox's shtick is horribly misogynistic but your story made me think of these images: http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=women_smell!
"On a technical level, the reason you can’t do this is that New Jersey Transit uses overhead catenaries for electricity while the Long Island Rail Road’s electrified portion uses a third rail."
London had this problem in the 1980s; the Midland Railway lines use catenaries and the Southern Railway lines use third rail. The two are connected by the Snow Hill tunnel which was closed for passengers in 1916 before the electrification was put in, which is why different systems were not seen as a problem.
In the 1980s, British Railways managed to work out how to build dual-voltage trains (Class 319) and reopened the tunnel to allow through-running. In 1988, when these were new, it was a complex technical achievement to get a train that could switch between third-rail and catenary. The first "Thameslink" service was something BR was very proud of.
However, technology has improved in the last 30 years, and that is now an option offered by all electric train builders. Indeed, the internal electronics are always included, so all it would take to convert a train is to add the relevant external pickup (a shoe or a pantograph).
What was a reasonable argument for not doing it in 1980 is now 30 years out of date.
I mean, yeah, but there are only 2 mainline electrification systems used in the UK.
I count *5* in use just in the Northeast United States:
* 25kv AC @ 60hz overhead line, used on the NEC north of New Haven by Amtrak, and also on many NJ Transit lines. The most modern system.
* 12.5kv AC @ 60hz overhead line, used on Metro-North's New Haven line (part of the NEC), essentially this is just reduced voltage version of the above.
* 12kv AC @ 25hz overhead line, used by Amtrak on most of the NEC and the Keystone corridor to Harrisburg. SEPTA also has this system for most of their lines around Philadelphia, they're not in phase but I think compatible. And outdated lower frequency AC system.
* 750v DC third rail top running (LIRR)
* 750v DC third rail under running (Metro-North except New Haven line)
It's obviously a complete mess and really should be rationalised.
It's not that the various American rail systems in the area have not invested in multi-voltage trains though.
Metro-North's M8 cars can run on 4 of the above, they just can't handle the Amtrak 25hz system:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M8_(railcar)
There are three, 25kV AC @ 50Hz overhead and 750V DC top contact for most, but the 1500 V DC overhead is used by the Tyne and Wear metro and on a few bits of mainline that are shared between the metro and diesel-hauled mainline.
But also there were three more systems which British Railways converted to one of the two standard systems, mostly in the 1980s.
6250V AC @ 50Hz overhead on the LTS and Great Eastern lines east of London and the Glasgow suburban system, 1500V DC overhead in many more places (Manchester-Altrincham, Woodhead Pass, Shenfield Metro), 1200V DC side contact (Manchester-Bury).
Converting from third rail to overhead can be a major engineering exercise as you can have to raise bridges or expand tunnels, but there's no excuse for not just converting all the overhead to the same voltage and frequency and having just one third rail contact type.
You want three basic types: high voltage (25kV, 50/60Hz) AC overhead for mainline, third rail DC (750V) for metro systems and DC overhead (750V) for light rail.
For anyone wondering why: high-voltage AC systems have more power so can move larger and faster trains. Also, third rail can't be safely and reliably used above 100 mph, so mainlines that carry fast trains or freight need the high-voltage AC.
Third-rail takes up less space so you can use smaller tunnels, which is valuable for metro systems that are mostly tunnelled.
750V DC is what is used by the motors on light rail vehicles, so you save on the weight and space of a transformer (much more of an issue on a 20 ton light rail vehicle than a 100+ ton mainline loco) and overhead is necessary for safety with light rail which isn't fully-segregated from pedestrians and cars.
This man knows trains. :)
The M8's are expensive cars, though.
They are expensive and heavy. Still I took RG's original post to imply that the Americans had not considered using dual or multi voltage trains, which is a little unfair. Most of the EMUs and electric locos in the Northeast can handle more than 1 electrical system, there's just so damn many in use. Rationalising the systems would help, but given the high cost of infrastructure vs. rolling stock procurement in the US, maybe just purchasing quintuple-voltage trains is the best solution.
Sorry to necropost, but I was pulled back to this thread by Matt linking to the article.
I was responding to Matt Y saying that the reason that NJT/LIRR don't have through-running is because they don't have dual/multi voltage trains. And it's true that those specific railroads don't. My point was that that's not a good excuse and that Matt shouldn't accept that excuse from those railroads.
Examples from of dual/multi-voltage trains from the US would have made the point more effectively, I admit, but I didn't have those to hand because I don't know US railroads as well as I know British ones.
I wasn't saying that Americans hadn't considered doing it, I was saying that if NJTR and LIRR are trying to use that as an excuse and to demand massive infrastructure investment, then they're lying and journalists like Matt should call them out on it.
Hate to break it to you, but 1980 was actually 40 years ago...
1980's being 30 years out of date is now 11 years out of date.
Ugh, that was badly phrased, oh for an edit button.
It was a reasonable argument in 1980, 40 years ago. It stopped being reasonable in 1988/9 when Thameslink started operating, which is 32-33 years ago, which I can still round off to 30.
Another argument to be made for MattY's focus on cost and efficiency in NYC (and other large cities) public works programs: it takes away a potent argument against progressive political policies. As a conservative, I am skeptical of big government programs, for reasons of both disposition and experience. Seeing governance dysfunctions in Democratically-run cities with no opposition party is a part of my reluctance to experiment with new government programs.
Examples abound: NYC train costs; CA high speed rail; Baltimore crime; NYC voting tabulation errors; homelessness in Seattle; filth in San Francisco; Portland anarchy; Chicago murders; Detroit in most forms. I'm sure there are counter-examples, and cities offer numerous benefits from economic to cultural, despite their poor governance. I merely point out that if Democratic-led cities were bastions of good & ethical governance with effective cost management it would be a boon to progressive policy proposals.
I have a similar critique of Republican's aversion to any use of government and its unwillingness to embrace good programs like SS, Medicare, SNAP, etc. But that is a rant for another day.
I would be remiss to point out there's an underlying fallacy here since nearly all big cities are Democratically-run and most of the problems you identify are either unique to big cities (e.g., construction cost overruns at commuter rail stations), more amplified because the big city is important (e.g., small jurisdictions have vote administration issues too, but no one in the media cares), or may be easier to analyze statistically--and therefore amplified--due to the law of large numbers in big cities (e.g., murder rates). And in the few cases where there are Republican mayors, they aren't exactly doing better on issues like crime--a search for "Jacksonville murder rate" and "Oklahoma City murder rate" shows dramatic increases in 2020-21, just like everywhere else.
That said, I tend to agree with your underlying point. As a resident of a Big Blue city, I find it incredibly frustrating that there isn't space in the local discourse to address governance problems in a reasonable way. As it is, the few right wing voices tend to bring up obvious governance flaws (murders are bad) in a completely trollish way that makes everyone in the majority defensive, and then nothing gets done. It's really obnoxious.
Tabulation problems aside, Kathryn Garcia's apparent success in consolidating votes through ranked choice voting makes me optimistic about its potential as a reform measure in one-party states/cities.
I'm chuffed that Los Angeles didn't make the list. Maybe we're just that perfect.
He was trying to be fair by listing Democratically-administered cities that have at least some redeeming characteristics.
Note enough attention is paid to efficiency and quality of government functions. It seems to be far more attractive to do the fun horse-traded legislative stuff, than to put real thought into efficiency, simplicity, and fairness of administration. "Cut off the air" might be the solution in some cases, but not uniformly. We still have to grasp the problem.
It looks great but it doesnt do anything. That’s what every one says about stamos
Architects are weird. My grandfather was an architect. He refused to have an antenna on his country house because it would have hurt the aesthetic. Cable was not available. He also thought that the 9/11 attacks were punishment for the architect’s hubris in throwing up such a tall, drab, ugly building.
A city like New York should have a few show pieces, but generally we need fewer architects and more engineers.
The best summary of the architect attitude I've seen was when the American Institute of Architects named Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater "best all-time work of American architecture", at a time when it was so structurally deficient that it was near collapse (and if the initial contractor on the project hadn't added extra reinforcement over Wright's objection it would have collapsed decades ago).
I always thought putting the word "Falling" in the name of a building was tempting the fates.
I grew up attending a church that Wright had designed. It was a breathtakingly beautiful building but a maintenance nightmare. His design skills ran ahead of the engineering available at the time, so the work arounds to make the aesthetics work created problems down the line.
But it is pretty
I understand that Usonian houses, intended to be simple, can be a maintenance nightmare. The only way to fix the underfloor heating tubes, when they decay, is to jackhammer and replace the concrete pad. Construction details were not his area of concern.
Buildings collapsing in America? Perish the thought!
Speaking as an engineer, yes, architects are a monumental pain.
Speaking as an engineer, no, we don't need more of us. The consulting engineering model of billable hour allotments for public sector projects is quite badly broken, and miserably inefficient.
What we need is to actually build an incentive structure for engineering firms to efficiently utilize their time and for public sector project owners to move away from incredibly proscriptive and overly complex delivery standards towards encouraging the use of technology in design and capital in construction.
+1000 from a public sector planner!
I guess I'm not the only one who occasionally wants to shoot everyone in the room and start over after a long meeting with consultants and DOT personnel?
Public sector procurement standards often have the effect of putting maximum risk on the contractor/consultant while minimizing their ability to manage that risk. So the prices soar.
I suppose you are right and the efficient ratio of engineers to workers is quite low. Which is disappointing because I wish more people got to use their brains in rigorous, practical ways.
Unlike your grandfather's country house millions of people go through Penn Station every day and at least some of us might like it to be a more pleasant experience.
Yes, and it's too bad that New York decided to spend over a billion dollars on Moynihan Train Hall, expected to be used by a small fraction of Penn Station commuters, rather than improve the existing facilities at Penn.
Improving existing facilities at Penn is almost impossible. It would be many billions and decades. The scale is not comparable.
Some of the physical improvements mooted are, to be sure, really insanely expensive to even contemplate, especially at NYC's 10X cost premium. I'd love to say that we could widen the platforms and fix the boarding problems there, but it's clearly not going to happen in our lifetimes: the die was cast in concrete before any of us were born.
But a lot of the things that would improve the experience at Penn and in NYC generally are ridiculously cheap, they just would require getting three paranoid, dysfunctional bureaucracies to do their jobs and minimally cooperate. A departures board that includes Amtrak, LIRR and NJT trains. Readable wayfinding signs in multiple languages. Coordinated schedules. Regularly washed floors. It's impressive (in a bad way) that we spent ten figures on Moynihan hall and got none of these.
Yes, the die is definitively cast. Widening the platforms means moving the tracks, moving load-bearing columns, and either reducing the number of tracks or excavating the yard footprint at the sides. Construction under traffic for decades, at very high cost for no improvement in train operations. Much better to build an extension or an entirely different terminal.
One of the things I never understood was the opposition to ARC on the grounds that it was separate from Penn Station. Separate from Penn Station was the point. It was buildable, and when it had been built it would have been entirely under control of NJ TRANSIT dispatchers, producing more reliable commuter service for all those riders, and freeing tracks in Penn Station for other uses. And, the rider environment would have been world class.
It is true you could buy a new departure board that integrates LIRR trains (but why?). The true cost of which would be the integration of the different control systems at PSCC (itself a tremendous achievement). It wouldn't be ridiculously cheap, but it would be less than a billion dollars.
The old PRR used to run coordinated schedules between the locals, regionals, and expresses west of New York, but Amtrak doesn't run those trains anymore, so I don't know what you'd coordinate there. Long Island trains and PRR trains were never coordinated (LIRR has its own section of Penn Station, by design) so, again, what are you coordinating? I don't think there is much latent demand for coordinated trips that nevertheless would involve sprinting across Penn Station from one side to the other. People do commute from LI to NJ but they use cars to do it not least because both ends of the trip are likely to be in low-density suburbs.
Trains are great, but they are heavy and inflexible and very capital-intensive. Our good ideas are severely constrained by that.
(okay, the floor inside Moynihan Hall proper is pretty clean. For now.)
Are commuters at Penn just screwed, then?
Probably. Its basic problem is that it's running over capacity in all its elements, and that's only addressed by adding capacity which makes it a megaproject. Maybe if you could get rid of Madison Square Garden and opened up the footprint, you could at least make what's there meaningfully nicer, but only if you diverted some of the train and foot traffic.
There are a lot of good jokes in this piece. Huzzah.
One question I'd like to see you work out is what the rule is for determining when agencies should be apolitical/technocratic and when they should be the opposite. On one hand, you think transit agencies should be apolitical and lots of lower-level elected offices should be converted into appointive positions. On the other hand, you think the Federal Reserve should no longer be insulated from politics and that much of the Supreme Court's power should be turned over to the political branches. I can make some guesses as to how all of this fits together, but it could use some spelling out.
I found this piece fascinating for a different reason. Like a lot of people growing up in the West and living in rural areas most of my life, to this day, I never think of trains as a means to travel. Ever. Going from x to y, the word “train” never pops into my mind. When I’m back East or Europe, it’s only when somebody says, “Hey, it’s easy to catch the train,” that I even remember it’s a form of transportation. I’m sure many of you see this as a mental defect, but I’m just honestly remarking that such is the nature of I think many Americans’ lives that getting on a train just seems odd. I’m fully convinced it’s a great way to travel, but I’ll bet quite a few elected officials also find it in the realm of, “oh, yeah, that’s right, people still use trains.” No doubt this factors into why it’s hard to get a train built in California. Anyway, just an observation.
Los Angeles to San Diego, and Sacramento to Oakland/San Jose are the two lines outside the Northeast Corridor where Amtrak actually runs a profit. To and from Chicago is the one market outside of these three that has any significant amount of service, but no particular destination is served well enough to make it worthwhile for many people other than a few commuters. (And Sacramento to the Bay Area is also mainly commuters.)
A number of their state-supported lines --- including the Chicago area ones --- have been running a profit. Not huge ones, but also not losses: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/corporate/reports/Amtrak-General-Legislative-Annual-Report-FY2019-Grant-Request.pdf
Many of these shorter lines have been doing pretty well. For example, the Chicago-Milwaukee service has been steadily growing, and pre-pandemic, they were thinking to up it to 10 round trips a day: https://biztimes.com/amtrak-hiawatha-line-hits-record-ridership-in-2019-fiscal-year/ Not a lot by international standards, but a lot by Amtrak standards.
(See page 58 of the pdf for profit information.)
My limited understanding of passenger trains further West is that they're unreliable due to the conflict with freight train traffic. Legally, Amtrak's passenger trains are supposed to have priority, but they're riding rails owned by the freight railroads who ignore the law.
I just refreshed my memory and in 2008, Congress passed a law to clarify the situation but that clarification was found to be defective. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/29/getting-there-on-time-who-goes-first-amtrak-or-a-freight-train-a-court-rules/)
It's not just delays (which are definitely a problem) --- it's that the system is so sparse in most of the west that it's generally useless unless you're a tourist whose goal is to ride a train;* even if you're in a major city and want to go to another major city, there's probably no passenger service (especially if you need to go north or south --- most Amtrak lines out there run east or west). For example, take the four largest cities in each of the four-corner states (Albuquerque, Denver, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City). The only route connecting any pair of those is Denver and Salt Lake City. Heck, there currently isn't even any service to Los Vegas at all! And those are major cities. If you're in the boonies, it's even more worthless.
* There are exceptions. I met a guy who lived in Flagstaff and worked a few days a week in LA. Amtrak runs one train a day between the two, and the timing just happened to work out perfectly for his purposes. I once had a business trip that I could complete by Amtrak, so I jumped at the opportunity. But it only happened once. I also once had to travel from the east coast to the midwest for personal reasons, so I took a train just because I could. There happened to be a major snowstorm that killed air travel, so traveling by rail actually proved to be faster!
Thanks for that. I wonder if this doesn't underline my observations, though. If people in the West actually cared about rail transportation they would have paid more attention to such a debate, wouldn't they? That the delineation of rail lines were eventually decided in favor of joint use sort of shows how much passenger rail mattered. There's a very nice railroad museum in Sacramento that I have been to multiple times. The whole theme of that museum is a romanticized bygone era when people "used to" ride the rails. I wonder if Easterners would bother building a railroad museum like that, or at least with such a theme? You can walk through restored rail cars and see how people "used to" dine on trains and "used to" sleep on trains and "used to" travel to wonderous places like Hollywood and the Beach all while old timey music plays and characters dressed up as porters say "ticket please." Anyway, it's just an observation that some of us don't think about the rail as a thing. I know, I know, we should. I think it's just a cultural difference in the west that, as you point out, is probably endogenous with policy.
I mean you're right - people in the western US starting choosing air travel first, which led to the railroad companies losing money on their scheduled passenger trains, which led to Amtrak's creation.
At no point did folks in the western US seem to regret this state of affairs despite the poor Amtrak service they got in the end. Air travel won.
They picked air travel first because the cities in the West are spread out further apart and makes air more competitive relative to rail for intercity travel.
Californian here (Sacramentan now, actually). I think there are plenty of Westerners who do think about trains. Growing up in Santa Clara County, people rarely took trains, but Caltrain was a common option to get to San Francisco for sporting events. People were aware of BART as well although it didn't come to our part of the Bay Area.
I have talked to a fair number of people that have never taken a train, and I think that is much more normal than the Northeasterners think...not just people who don't commute on trains but have never set foot on an active one. So I do think that reminding people they exist is useful. The Capitol Corridor Amtrak line between Sacramento and the Bay Area is pretty good, albeit somewhat slow (then again, so is traffic...)
Have you gone to the Railroad Museum?
I have, but only as a child. Not since I moved here as an adult. I'm sure I will when I have children.
Seems like people in the Northwest care about trains. The light rail in Seattle is nice. Same in Portland.
I'm sure they are nice. Do you know if they get used as much as their cost would justify? I ran across this, it's old, 2014, I wonder if it still holds. https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2014/05/has_the_portland_areas_growing.html
I used to take the Empire Builder from Pasco to Portland and back fairly often (the net effect was basically an extra day in the city, since the train left Pasco early and Portland late, compared to when I liked to drive), and my parents never knew when to pick me up because it was so unreliable. That section, though, was often pretty packed, especially in the winter.
Long distance trains often provide only theoretical service because they come through major locations at 3 in the morning.
What about the LA-San Diego link? Certainly it’s more of a “real” railroad experience than the Caltrain line on the peninsula.
That said your basic point seems fair.
Here is the thing… If this didn’t get built where would the money actually have gone? One Moynihan Station is after all only 5 F-22 Raptors.
Realistically, I don't think the money would have gone anywhere. It just wouldn't have increased the national debt.
“ which are useful”
You don’t know anything about the F-22, do you? It’s a trillion dollar debacle. And that trillion with a t. Not billion with a b.
I'm 100% on team Moynihan Station was a White Elephant, but I'll take ten of them over buying more useless toys for the most useless of our armed forces.
The logic is that Midtown West will be intensively developed in the future.
I usually agree with MY on these topics. For the first time, I find the pendulum has swung too far the other way in his analysis.
From the perspective of transportation function the improvements here seem to be minimal to nonexistent. But nobody said otherwise! The NY Times had their architecture critic write on this, not their business desk. This is not even attacking a strawman; it's analyzing a project on entirely different terms than its proponents and defenders.
It's a good point that the transportation improvements are nil. But, as the proponents of the project claim to be interested in its aesthetic value, it seems incumbent at least to assess it on that level as well. This is like reading an economist's critique of an outstanding French meal pointing out we could have gotten the same calories and nutrients for much less from staples from our local grocery - true, but also missing the point.
What's the value of such aesthetic improvements? There are various studies that try to tie aesthetic improvements to improved outcomes in practical areas, like health and crime.
I do not know if those hold up at the end of the day, or even if in light of them this project would have been better than, say, improving public housing or building parks.
Even so, the proponents of the project do not seem focused on those issues, but on the value of giving NYC a grand entryway for arriving passengers and a pleasing place for its rail users to commute through. Again, what's the value of that? I have no idea - I can think of many cities whose beautiful architecture support vast parts of their economy and culture, from Paris to Prague, but also many counterexamples - but it's not $0.
Again, I don't mean to defend this project; it could be a terrible waste of money, and the signage and similar issues identified by MY should be rectified.
The frustrating thing is that this is happening as a transportation project. The North East United States is a place that would reap huge gains from improved transit infrastructure. There's a tremendous amount of political energy around it, so much so that it has acquired partisan valence and is now a part of the never-ending culture war. And then, when we do get a billion dollars to spend on improving transportation, we build something that doesn't actually improve transportation!
Repeat that often enough and what happens is that voters rightly start associating "transportation project" with expensive boondoggles that don't actually make their commute easier. You could instead imagine a virtuous cycle where we build and operate transit cheaply and efficiently, more people start riding it because it materially improves their lives, and the increased constituency for transit leads to more projects being built.
Again, you don't need to being opposed to beautiful works of public architecture to be frustrated here. If NY State had announced a billion-dollar initiative to fight the opioid epidemic and then used it to turn the post office into the Moynihan Rehab Clinic, people would be mad! But because we already have such low expectations of transportation projects, just building the damn thing is counted as a success.
This is why the national Democratic Party is trying to shove everything they possibly can into an "infrastructure bill." Because the branding of "infrastructure" means "will never pay for itself so don't even ask."
Great point. It seems like all recent new NYC transpo projects are super expensive flashy looking buildings with deeply suboptimal functionality (see also Fulton Transit center and [ugh] the Oculus).
Having some funding continuity might help. Right now we have a boom-and-bust cycle, with masses of money dumped on the market periodically, that ends up in the hands of consultants because the transit agencies don't have permanent staff with the skills to fully implement the projects. Some European systems (France, Spain) are much better about integrating consultants with permanent staff, and they deliver more transit at lower cost as a result. We did this in the past - the New York IND system was city-owned and design and construction was managed by city engineers. Nearly all of the 8th Avenue and 6th Avenue Systems were built in just over a decade. A different world, I know, but still.
I'm not opposed to a grand entryway to a city, but building one is putting the cart before the horse.
It made sense for Penn station to be grand because the Pennsylvania Railroad was a grand system! It had state-of-the-art infrastructure (electrification, tunnels under the Hudson while other railroad used ferries from NJ, etc.) and ran it's NEC trains faster than Amtrak does today!
Yes, having an aesthetically pleasing station is worth something to its users, but you know what's worth even more? Faster and better train service. Improve that first, then improve the station. Make the railroad worthy of a grand station.
There were plans to build another tunnel under the Hudson river which would have helped. But that was killed by Chris Christie. It would have been great to have that, but it's still worth it to have a nicer station.
Sure, there are plans for a lot of things. But none of them matter if they're not implemented. Christie killed ARC because of cost --- in particular he suspected that it would go way over budget. (And he was almost certainly right about that!) Not building this train hall (and allocating the $1.6 B to more important parts of ARC) plus simplifying ARC in general would have helped address his (arguably reasonable) concerns.
And yet, Christie also deprived New Jersey residents of a once-in-a-century opportunity for much more and much more reliable service in their own terminal (much more than a "train hall") that extended all the way to Sixth Avenue. He was spooked (or claimed to be spooked) by what was essentially an accounting issue, the FTA's new risk evaluation methodology. It was shovel ready (in fact, shoveling was already happening and New Jersey had to pay the money back). The costs were much better known than they were in the planning stage. It could have been done design-build with most of the risk on the contractors. A huge wasted opportunity.
If you think the almost certain cost overruns were a mere "accounting issue", then I have a bridge to sell you --- one that is overpriced, over budget, and significantly delayed.
There was no chance for cost overruns because the project was barely in construction. This is not what Christie cited when he caused the project to be cancelled. The project was canceled after the FTA changed its risk assessment methodology to produce much higher outer-bound cost estimates, which had the effect of potentially shoving more cost onto New Jersey after the funding deal (favorable to New Jersey) had already been struck. I don't think it would have gotten to $14B but on balance I think it would still have been worth it for $14B. Certainly much more than the East Side Access project. We will likely discover this to our cost, if the Hudson River tunnels collapse or are taken out of service for years which now seems likely.
(I should say that it ran it's NEC trains faster than Amtrak runs its non-Accela trains. The Accela trains are faster.)
Yeah, I often find myself torn about things like this. I can see some value in having a statement central station for a city or rail network. But, the price here just seems hard to justify, though it's not clear how much of that is the office space or retail areas that would be expected to pay for themselves.
Matt mentions dingy high schools and such. In general, I think that there's a value in kids not having to go to dingy depressing school buildings, even if the educational benefits don't always show up on test scores. On the other hand, there are a lot of unnecessarily expensive luxury style high schools being built that would seem to push well beyond the marginal benefits.
Yeah, the value isn't $0, but if we're evaluating aesthetic value or civic pride value, we should also assess the alternatives along those terms. If building two ugly stations for the price of this pretty station generates $n in economic activity and x% of $n goes to private-sector improvement projects that make people's surroundings more beautiful, how does $n•x/100 compare to the aesthetic value of Moynihan Train Hall? A priori, why shouldn't we assume $n•x/100 is greater, because there's no principal/agent distinction between the person buying the aesthetic improvements and the person appreciating them?
There's real monetary value in aesthetics. Nearby Grand Central Station is much nicer and has quite a bit of high end retail like the apple store. I'm guessing they pay quite a bit to be there. Penn has some retail, but a lot less in both quantity and niceness.
I was unaware of the vast power of the NYT's architecture critic Michael Kimmelman before this. I was aware that the LA Times architecture critic (Christopher Hawthorne) was appointed the Chief Design Officer of Los Angeles.
So *that's* where power is concentrated. Got it.
>>>That being said, plenty of dingy transportation facilities are perfectly functional<<<
I was surprised at how non-grand most train/subway station in Tokyo are. Beijing's (because in the main they're newer) are far fancier.
Yeah I can't think of anything in Hong Kong that could be counted grandiose. Even the main rail hub of what used to be the Kowloon Canton Railway (connecting the Kowloon peninsula direct to Guangzhou two hours north) is just a big concrete block. But the stations are above all else clean and efficient.
The point of the project is to employ people in and around New York City. That's it. That's the goal. Literally nobody with influence cares about other deliverables in New York State politics. You get the federal money out of TGA and into as many New Yorkers' accounts before the federal money goes somewhere else.
Then you put on a show about "great public works," an empty symbol for the Democratic Party to gesture at to justify its own routine failures of governance. Maybe you win an Emmy while you're at it.
Even NYC elections are a jobs program for unemployable relatives. The show must go on, after all.
This is all very logical, but millions of people pass through Penn Station every year. If this nicer building creates millions of moments of additional happiness compared to the dismal old building, what's the price tag on that? It's worth something.
It's definitely worth *something*, but why wouldn't we assume the things we can't pay for due to the opportunity cost of this station have comparable effects in terms of intangible happiness measures? For instance, if you had a faster commute due to the government spending its transportation dollars most efficiently, you might get hours extra over the course of the year at home with your family, which is surely also good for some moments of additional happiness. Or the economy grows faster and you have to worry about money that much less.
Yes, agree there's also value on that side of the equation, but was saying there's value on the Penn/Moynihan side that this article is ignoring.
If you're going to appoint some commissar to decide which projects are the most worthy, as this suggests, maybe we need something like a transportation or public works QALY to compare the intangible values of projects, apples to apples. Or just use the democratic process, I guess.
This would be true if the new building were replacing the old Penn Station, but it's not.
"When the hall opened, officials anticipated it to be used primarily by Amtrak passengers, which accounted for about five percent of daily ridership prior to the pandemic."
It's a weird add-on to the existing terrible space, one that most commuters will not benefit from. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's Amtrak users that will benefit the most from it, either, as opposed to NJT or LIRR commuters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moynihan_Train_Hall#Service
The quote about the “320 seat waiting room” caught my eye because so far in every picture I’ve seen of the inside of the new hall there is no seating visible anywhere at all. Did the seating area actually get built, and if so…where?
Meanwhile of course, we’ve spent over a billion dollars on a train hall that will only be used by the unwary and by newcomers, since everyone who actually lives in the city will continue to board by means of the lower level at old Penn, since that is apparently still the only way to actually get to the platform without being forced through a completely useless airplane-style single file boarding queue.
Also worth noting is the fact that Moynihan Hall objectively makes the process of _disembarking_ worse than the old Station. Old Penn was ugly as sin, but it was literally on top of the A/C/E lines: the new hall is now a much longer walk from them and longer still to the 1/2/3. But of course since no one in a position of political power in NYC ever takes the subway, this was considered an afterthought.
Great use of a billion dollars everyone!
There is a seating area off to the side and it’s very nice. But with good infrastructure, the trains run frequently enough that waiting space isn’t important.
At the risk of contradicting our host, I’m going to strongly disagree: waiting space is _hugely_ important. If the schedules are predictable, ticketed passengers will spend less time waiting to depart, but people often _meet_ at transit hubs: this is why there are benches in nearly every airport disembarkation area. And some of the people waiting for arrivals will be older, or have kids. They need to be able to sit down.
A public space without seating is a space designed to look good in opening-day ribbon cutting photos and otherwise to keep the public as far away as possible.
Turned out you're completely right! https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1414409105930915842?s=21
In London or Paris you do your waiting on the train because the next train to depart is on the platform and open before the one before it leaves.
Isn't that because most of the major stations in London and Paris are termini?
Penn is a through station, you wouldn't really want trains waiting at the platforms there that long.
Correct and this is actually a weakness of London and Paris.
The problem with the Moynihan train hall isn't that stations don't need waiting areas (they do, and London Euston's lack of them is that station's big weakness which is going to become very evident when HS2 arrives), but that what they really need are circulation spaces.
Put in a bunch of extra escalators and elevators, make all the passageways wider, add in moving sidewalks in some places, open up tunnels to all the subway and PATH stations in the neighborhood, and add some damned windows so there's some natural light.
As a postscript to the disembarkation issue I’d like to point out that we somehow spent over a billion dollars “improving” Penn Station and managed to _not_ reopen the pedestrian tunnel that leads from Penn to Herald Square and the NINE subway lines plus the PATH train that stop there. Great job everyone!
Matt,
I'm obviously a big fan, but as a native New Yorker that grew up using Penn Station heavily, and still use it frequently to this day, I really disagree with this take.
You seem to present an implicit false dichotomy — that transits projects can either be function or focus on "unnecessary" things like aesthetics. I think it is clearly a spectrum, one this is obfuscated by Cuomo & co. going way over to the flashy side of the spectrum (e.g. the unnecessarily huge 2nd Ave subway extension stations). I do think beauty matters though, especially for a central piece like Penn Station. It's a matter of civic pride, which I think has a lot intangible benefits to society.
At a more tangible level, Penn Station is just awful to use. That's no secret, but it's bizarre for you to act like moving an idiotic sports from atop the busiest & most cramped train station on the continent to another location with easy mass transits access (7 line terminal) was a crazy idea. I encourage readers to read the 2019 Politico "This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful" by Marc Dunkelman; it's an interesting case study of the actual bureaucratic issues that bedevil Penn/Moynihan, such as why Amtrack didn't actually didn't want the station. It's also a shame even Cuomo couldn't force MSG to move, when it would have been in the public's best interest.
I don't mean this as a defense of the actual Moynihan that came to be, or of NYC's insane costs or many stupid projects.
I liked Alon Levy's plan to improve Penn Station by eliminating most of the building, rather than building anything fancy: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2015/07/15/eliminate-penn-station/
Yeah. There are a million realpolitik reasons why this was never going to happen, but it was absolutely the right plan. Train stations are not complicated.
As a New Yorker who frequently travels to Boston via Penn station, I gotta disagree. You're usually right on this stuff – the T green line criticism was spot on – but this is different.
Waiting for a long distance train is different than waiting for a rapid transit train. You don't just hop on a platform and stand around for the next train. You usually wait longer, you don't know which platform it's going to be on and it's not something you do every day. It's more like an airport in that respect.
A nice space isn't just a nice to have feature. Even if your train isn't delayed, you're likely to wait for a bit and maybe grab some food. Doing that in a pleasant space has real value. Being able to navigate and orient yourself is also valuable. I've been using Penn Station for nearly 20 years (yes, I know the mezzanine trick), but since it isn't my daily commute, I often get turned around. These are exactly the issues architecture is supposed to address.
You bring up the Union Station subway stop. I used to commute there. I was in and out quickly. Since I was there nearly every day, I learned both where the Q and 6 trains leave from which, crucially the same platform every time. And the signage is much better than Penn. It's a different experience.
At Penn, the tracks always change and I have to wait longer. I only use Penn Station a few times a year so don't learn it as well. Even if I commuted there, I'd only know the very specific way to get to the LIRR or whatever.
I've long been frustrated that we spent billions to put a mall around the PATH train, rapid transit that hops less than a mile to New Jersey, and we had such a dingy station for our long distance trains to Boston and DC.
> You usually wait longer, you don't know which platform it's going to be on and it's not something you do every day.
This is because America is bad at train station design. In Japan, every platform has a number. The big board says the name of the trains and what number the train will be at. You go to your numbered platform and if you have reserved tickets, you then go the spot where you line up your particular car, which is also marked. Along the platform and in the halls are places to eat food and buy magazines.
None of this stuff is hard to do, but America's train infrastructure is so bad that Americans can't imagine what good looks like.
This is more or less how it works at Penn Station – big board, track numbers and places to eat are all there. It's just it was so cramped it was often hard to find all of these things. Only quirk is that they don't announce the track number until about 5 minutes before the train arrives since there are too few tracks and they're too cramped to have people waiting on them for long. That's an infrastructure issue this redesign won't solve.
I sometimes sit down at Penn Station, but usually not when I'm waiting for the subway (even when there's a bench available). At a big station, trains should run frequently, like the Shinkansen.