I commute through Penn Station three days a week, I can't understate how terrible it is for commuters.
Every morning when I exit the train to a blast of heat on cramped platforms, wait in line for my turn to weave up a tiny staircase, into the aging waiting halls with hoses routing ceiling leaks into trash cans, zig zag through a labyrinth of low-ceiling corridors, giving a wide berth to half-naked mentally ill people, to a side exit (since the main exit has been closed for months, and finally, as icing on the cake, I jump over a permanent puddle created by construction barriers RIGHT at the crosswalk where THOUSANDS of people exit the busiest train station in the entire country, I think about the line:
“One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.”
I don't think the statistics about journey times on public transit anywhere are true. Or they are fundamentally dishonest, in the sense that they should be measured relative to cars, biking and walking.
Whether I was a suburban commuter in Chicago or cross-town commuter in Boston, public transit was so crazy slow. In San Francisco it is insanely slow. In New York it was so utterly baffling how long it took to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the subway. Like 3-4x a bike, 1-2x a car.
Bike consistently beat out everything in any locale they work in. You don't need any stats to understand why: (1) you never have to wait for one, (2) you very rarely need to walk further to your destination than a car, and (3) you never have to waste time parking it.
But here we are, still arguing about bike infrastructure, even San Francisco can't help itself and would, rather than a nice bike lane 7 days a week, it wants to give some mega church free parking 1 day a week. It loves little nurt nurt trains shlepping 0 passengers most of the day. Those red bus lanes...
Does it make sense to subject anyone to the misery of living in New Jersey to work in New York? Those suckers pay taxes higher than the French to live like a budget suburb in Los Angeles. It's just so stupid. Maybe work from home is the only reprieve for millions of Americans.
> In New York it was so utterly baffling how long it took to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the subway. Like 3-4x a bike, 1-2x a car.
I live in Brooklyn and commuted to Manhattan 5 days a week before 2020, primarily by subway, but occasionally by car and a few times by bike, and this was not my experience.
At rush hour the subway was consistently faster than a car, and I think comparable if maybe a bit slower than a bike, but certainly not 4x. For a road distance of 3-6 miles between various offices/home addresses I spent 25-45 minutes door-to-door on the subway.
I’m a big proponent of cycling infrastructure but I’m not sure I’d choose to commute by bike if I went back to working in an office, though I imagine a modern ebike would go a long way towards helping with the sweat factor.
> Bike consistently beat out everything in any locale they work in.
That’s absolutely not true and I say that as a massive cycling advocate. There are countless journeys in London which are fastest by public transport, especially since the coming of the Elizabeth Line.
Never going to risk my life commuting by bike in NYC. Dont push your lifestyle onto me. Or in the vernacular, “You do you.” I’ll stick with the subway.
> I don't think the statistics about journey times on public transit anywhere are true.
Journey times everywhere should come with variance data. Often times people will say you can get to Manhattan within x minutes from a certain location, except 1 standard deviation from the mean could be 30min+, and 2 standard deviations might be 60min+.
The station has hundreds of staircases and dozens of entrances. If you commute into it three days a week and haven't found a path that's workable, maybe the train station isn't the problem.
As a very occasional user, I think it would be fantastic if NJT could abandon their system of announcing the track number for a departing train at the last minute and thus causing a stampede for every train. (Not to mention a rather unsafe situation at the bottom of the escalator.). As a side effect, a decent fraction of passengers might happily wait on the platform for 10-15 minutes before departure, which might even reduce the degree to which the portions of the station above the platforms are overcrowded.
I suspect a viable plan for this could be arranged for less than $1bn :)
The two "easy" fixes (in the sense of not needing construction) are to through-run trains (which reduces the amount of time trains need to occupy tracks) and to assign and announce trains to the tracks on a permanent basis.
The main reason trains aren't assigned to tracks in advance is because American passenger trains are run by incompetent people who insist that practices that are normal outside of the US are completely and totally impossible and therefore it's impossible to assign trains to tracks. There is also a subsidiary reason that the platforms at Penn Station are too narrow to have good bidirectional passenger flow, so they want to keep people off of them as much as possible.
Yes, the width of the platforms is basically 'tech debt' in physical form.
Most of the layout of Penn Station is historical to its original construction (the destruction of Penn Station destroyed the hall, but the corridors below it are still there.) In the 1910s when Penn Station was built, commuting by railroad was miniscule and the future suburbs of New Jersey were still just woods and farms. So the layout gave large, wide platforms to the central tracks that hosted intercity trains, and narrow platforms to the commuter tracks that can barely host the width of a single escalator. This is a liability in 2023, because the share is overwhelmingly commuter traffic.
Through run trains also have a problem with this, because if we implemented through running, today, the platforms would not adequately clear before the next train arrived, creating crowd crush on the platforms. The station is also fully at capacity, so there isn't really a way to expand the platforms to allow through running that wouldn't cut Penn Station's capacity for the next few years, if not a decade. (To give some perspective, the Japanese do projects fairly well, and Shibuya Station reorganization/widening started in 2015 and has stuff to do until 2027.) The current plan to maybe get a start on widening the existing platforms is to demolish a block of Manhattan to build new platforms to take the load while the existing ones can go out of service. Funding to take a block of the most expensive real estate in the world is unclear.
There are a lot of platforms at Penn Station, and it seems to me that trains spend quite a long time at these platforms, in part due to issues related to passenger loading and unloaded.
What if the number of platforms was reduced? (By placing bogeys that’s are just platforms on every second or third track, for example?) This would reduce the number of usable platforms by 1/3-1/2, but it would massively increase availability space for loading and unloading passengers. If this enabled faster train turnaround, it could plausibly increase station throughput.
(Aside from being annoying and perhaps dangerous, the current scheme is absurdly inefficient. People can board a train far fast than they can go down the one or two (!) main escalators, and the train cars far from the escalators barely load at all until the nearer trains are mostly full.)
edit: I’m apparently not entirely off base. Here’s a proposal that increases throughput while reducing the number of tracks:
As someone who used the train in Japan extensively, it drives me crazy that Amtrak can’t do simple stuff like knowing what platform a train is going to come to, let alone get the train to line up so the doors are in the right place. A train system run in a foreign language should not be simpler and less confusing than one in my native language!
The crazier thing is that at Penn, the train is usually on the same stupid track. You realize this after you see the regulars lingering around certain areas of the mezzanine so they manage to get to the front of the line once it's formally announced.
So I think its more a keeping people off platform thing or overall zero care for customer service.
"people who insist that practices that are normal outside of the US are completely and totally impossible"
This seems to be the culture in the US as a whole.
Gun control? Completely impossible, even tho it's worked well in every first world country on the planet.
Paying employees instead of tipping? Completely impossible, would disincentivise work and the economy would collapse, even tho it works well in every first world country on the planet.
Public healthcare? Completely impossible, even tho it works well in every first world country on the planet.
It's downright nonsense because the NYC MTA and even the notoriously incompetent Boston MBTA can do it. Meanwhile Amtrak apparently can't do it either, but at least they have the luxury of long wait times between arrival and departure.
Union Station in Toronto has the same issue with narrow platforms— if people were waiting on the platforms to get on, there'd be no room for anyone to get off the trains.
The station does not have the space on the tiny platforms for a few hundred people to wait for the train, and they would obstruct those exiting the train if they did. The upstairs does.
I don't find it overcrowded, just inefficient. Folks sitting on steps, no other seating, etc. etc...
The announcements aren't at the last second, but they are usually after the train has final slot verification and may already be unloading. You will routinely have 5-7 min to board unless there is a schedule issue.
Perhaps in off-hours they could consider early announcement, but for high density times, the infra just isn't built for that efficiently or safely.
The trick is to not wait in the main NJT lobby area. All their tracks are accessible from the other Amtrak hallways and you will get timely notification from the video terminals.
The old trick was to watch the green Amtrak monitors, because the NJT trains would pop up there first a few seconds before the official NJT displays. That system is gone now so you can't get an early jump on the track assignment but being in the other hallways puts you at the other end of the train from the crowd and it's easier to get your preferred seat.
The platforms are too narrow to have everybody waiting for their train, but an NJT train should have been there about 12 minutes before departure, so you could wait on the train instead. :)
The LIRR is the same way. As an occasional user every time I've gone the track number gets posted a few minutes before it departs and it's usually between tracks 16-21. Even if it's during the late evening (off-peak at 8:30pm'ish) you often have to make a mad dash or you won't get a seat. I can't imagine how bad it must be during prime time peak hours.
can't get on the trains at Penn without assistance as I'm visually impaired and can't engage in the "see sign, bum rush train" system they've come up with. I don't have this issue literally anywhere else, as I can take my time finding the platform.
The problem is, after people like Robert Moses didn’t stupid stuff with their power, we’ve spread the keys to getting anything done to too many people. Fixing Penn station is pretty straightforward, but politically there basically needs to be a dictatorship on the regional level. The ability to do that doesn’t exist anymore
My dad is a huge train buff. HO scale model railroads dominated our basement and thus my childhood. He worked for Burlington Northern, now BNSF. He even developed a natural gas powered locomotive. During Perestroika and Glasnost he hosted Russians for tech transfer discussions because Reagan asked the CEO of BN to make it happen. He went to Russia multiple times, for discussions of railroads. Dinner conversations ranged from wax motors for bearing overheating conditions to FRA regulatory proceedings.
So, as an adult, I love trains and travel them preferentially when possible. I've been on train systems in Tokyo, Osaka, San Francisco, Bangkok, Philly, Boston, DC, Chicago, and NY. I've taken AMTRAK from DC to Boston just to do it, literally cost me more than flying, and took longer. Just did it. Not really counting the various light rail systems (e.g. Houston), the California coastal systems, the tourist lines, the airports, yada yada.
And then I took the train from Cambridge into Stratford for a West Ham vs Manchester game. That was mind-bending. They turned the ground into navigable Swiss cheese and then pack it with so many people I was getting a bit panicky. It's probably not larger than the Japanese stations, but the experience is nuts by comparison.
The New York system I remember just seems, rickety by comparison to Japan and the UK. DC is actually pretty solid. When it's not on fire.
All these various other proposals ignore the main problem: the original station never should have been demolished in the first place. The only proper solution is rebuilding the original, not designing some new thing that is slightly more acceptable than what's there now.
The New Yorker had a great article earlier this year, by Pulitzer Prize winner William Finnegan, about Penn Station [1]. It's filled with examples, in case we needed any more, of how a handful of insanely rich people in this country can thwart the public good.
I sometimes daydream of running for Mayor of New York on a single-issue platform: rebuilding the subway platforms at Penn Station so that express and local trains stop on the same platform, like every other express train stop. However many billions it may cost, it's gotta be worth it.
I think they wanted people to transfer at 14 and 42 because they only have adequate platform width for the people going to and from Penn.
It is a weird quirk built into the system but not too many situations where it slows anyone down since 42 is the next / previous station and you will almost always end up connecting to the same train you would have at Penn?
I guess there could be some situation where uptown local and express pull in to Penn at same time and you would be able to make a connection but then one is held and they don't connect at 42. But unusual and they run pretty frequently on 1-2-3?
> Those stops were built that way intentionally. [...] the designers wanted to coax passengers to switch between local and express trains at the Times Square — 42nd Street — Port Authority Bus Terminal complex, one stop to the north.
The worst is when you're waiting for the express and for some reason it shows up on the local track.
I still don't know -- was it intentionally designed to be idiotic? Or was it meant to operate some other way and they had to shoehorn local/express in?
If we follow the analogy the article gives for rebuilding the surface but not the tracks:
> It’s like having a big, clunky jalopy that doesn’t go more than 20 miles an hour, but instead of replacing the engine, we’re going to give it a paint job and hope that solves the problem.
then Moynihan was, unfortunately, more like a spit and polish. It's prettier to look at, but the main thing it did was move access for some trains a block further west (presumably away from the densest users as the article suggests of other plans). The basic experience is pretty unchanged (at least the Amtrak & subway experience, which I can speak to)
Readit News
Every morning when I exit the train to a blast of heat on cramped platforms, wait in line for my turn to weave up a tiny staircase, into the aging waiting halls with hoses routing ceiling leaks into trash cans, zig zag through a labyrinth of low-ceiling corridors, giving a wide berth to half-naked mentally ill people, to a side exit (since the main exit has been closed for months, and finally, as icing on the cake, I jump over a permanent puddle created by construction barriers RIGHT at the crosswalk where THOUSANDS of people exit the busiest train station in the entire country, I think about the line:
“One entered the city like a god. One scuttles in now like a rat.”
Whether I was a suburban commuter in Chicago or cross-town commuter in Boston, public transit was so crazy slow. In San Francisco it is insanely slow. In New York it was so utterly baffling how long it took to get from Brooklyn to Manhattan on the subway. Like 3-4x a bike, 1-2x a car.
Bike consistently beat out everything in any locale they work in. You don't need any stats to understand why: (1) you never have to wait for one, (2) you very rarely need to walk further to your destination than a car, and (3) you never have to waste time parking it.
But here we are, still arguing about bike infrastructure, even San Francisco can't help itself and would, rather than a nice bike lane 7 days a week, it wants to give some mega church free parking 1 day a week. It loves little nurt nurt trains shlepping 0 passengers most of the day. Those red bus lanes...
Does it make sense to subject anyone to the misery of living in New Jersey to work in New York? Those suckers pay taxes higher than the French to live like a budget suburb in Los Angeles. It's just so stupid. Maybe work from home is the only reprieve for millions of Americans.
I live in Brooklyn and commuted to Manhattan 5 days a week before 2020, primarily by subway, but occasionally by car and a few times by bike, and this was not my experience.
At rush hour the subway was consistently faster than a car, and I think comparable if maybe a bit slower than a bike, but certainly not 4x. For a road distance of 3-6 miles between various offices/home addresses I spent 25-45 minutes door-to-door on the subway.
I’m a big proponent of cycling infrastructure but I’m not sure I’d choose to commute by bike if I went back to working in an office, though I imagine a modern ebike would go a long way towards helping with the sweat factor.
That’s absolutely not true and I say that as a massive cycling advocate. There are countless journeys in London which are fastest by public transport, especially since the coming of the Elizabeth Line.
Journey times everywhere should come with variance data. Often times people will say you can get to Manhattan within x minutes from a certain location, except 1 standard deviation from the mean could be 30min+, and 2 standard deviations might be 60min+.
I can assure you, Penn Station is definitely the problem.
I suspect a viable plan for this could be arranged for less than $1bn :)
The main reason trains aren't assigned to tracks in advance is because American passenger trains are run by incompetent people who insist that practices that are normal outside of the US are completely and totally impossible and therefore it's impossible to assign trains to tracks. There is also a subsidiary reason that the platforms at Penn Station are too narrow to have good bidirectional passenger flow, so they want to keep people off of them as much as possible.
Most of the layout of Penn Station is historical to its original construction (the destruction of Penn Station destroyed the hall, but the corridors below it are still there.) In the 1910s when Penn Station was built, commuting by railroad was miniscule and the future suburbs of New Jersey were still just woods and farms. So the layout gave large, wide platforms to the central tracks that hosted intercity trains, and narrow platforms to the commuter tracks that can barely host the width of a single escalator. This is a liability in 2023, because the share is overwhelmingly commuter traffic.
Through run trains also have a problem with this, because if we implemented through running, today, the platforms would not adequately clear before the next train arrived, creating crowd crush on the platforms. The station is also fully at capacity, so there isn't really a way to expand the platforms to allow through running that wouldn't cut Penn Station's capacity for the next few years, if not a decade. (To give some perspective, the Japanese do projects fairly well, and Shibuya Station reorganization/widening started in 2015 and has stuff to do until 2027.) The current plan to maybe get a start on widening the existing platforms is to demolish a block of Manhattan to build new platforms to take the load while the existing ones can go out of service. Funding to take a block of the most expensive real estate in the world is unclear.
There are a lot of platforms at Penn Station, and it seems to me that trains spend quite a long time at these platforms, in part due to issues related to passenger loading and unloaded.
What if the number of platforms was reduced? (By placing bogeys that’s are just platforms on every second or third track, for example?) This would reduce the number of usable platforms by 1/3-1/2, but it would massively increase availability space for loading and unloading passengers. If this enabled faster train turnaround, it could plausibly increase station throughput.
(Aside from being annoying and perhaps dangerous, the current scheme is absurdly inefficient. People can board a train far fast than they can go down the one or two (!) main escalators, and the train cars far from the escalators barely load at all until the nearer trains are mostly full.)
edit: I’m apparently not entirely off base. Here’s a proposal that increases throughput while reducing the number of tracks:
https://www.rethinknyc.org/through-running/
So I think its more a keeping people off platform thing or overall zero care for customer service.
This seems to be the culture in the US as a whole.
Gun control? Completely impossible, even tho it's worked well in every first world country on the planet.
Paying employees instead of tipping? Completely impossible, would disincentivise work and the economy would collapse, even tho it works well in every first world country on the planet.
Public healthcare? Completely impossible, even tho it works well in every first world country on the planet.
They are very competent at keeping their jobs. Especially the guy who announced what track to go to.
I don't find it overcrowded, just inefficient. Folks sitting on steps, no other seating, etc. etc...
The announcements aren't at the last second, but they are usually after the train has final slot verification and may already be unloading. You will routinely have 5-7 min to board unless there is a schedule issue.
Perhaps in off-hours they could consider early announcement, but for high density times, the infra just isn't built for that efficiently or safely.
The old trick was to watch the green Amtrak monitors, because the NJT trains would pop up there first a few seconds before the official NJT displays. That system is gone now so you can't get an early jump on the track assignment but being in the other hallways puts you at the other end of the train from the crowd and it's easier to get your preferred seat.
My dad is a huge train buff. HO scale model railroads dominated our basement and thus my childhood. He worked for Burlington Northern, now BNSF. He even developed a natural gas powered locomotive. During Perestroika and Glasnost he hosted Russians for tech transfer discussions because Reagan asked the CEO of BN to make it happen. He went to Russia multiple times, for discussions of railroads. Dinner conversations ranged from wax motors for bearing overheating conditions to FRA regulatory proceedings.
So, as an adult, I love trains and travel them preferentially when possible. I've been on train systems in Tokyo, Osaka, San Francisco, Bangkok, Philly, Boston, DC, Chicago, and NY. I've taken AMTRAK from DC to Boston just to do it, literally cost me more than flying, and took longer. Just did it. Not really counting the various light rail systems (e.g. Houston), the California coastal systems, the tourist lines, the airports, yada yada.
And then I took the train from Cambridge into Stratford for a West Ham vs Manchester game. That was mind-bending. They turned the ground into navigable Swiss cheese and then pack it with so many people I was getting a bit panicky. It's probably not larger than the Japanese stations, but the experience is nuts by comparison.
The New York system I remember just seems, rickety by comparison to Japan and the UK. DC is actually pretty solid. When it's not on fire.
Christ, it must be really bad then. Though at least they got rid of the Pacers... Well over a decade after Iran junked theirs.
https://www.rebuildpennstation.org/
All these various other proposals ignore the main problem: the original station never should have been demolished in the first place. The only proper solution is rebuilding the original, not designing some new thing that is slightly more acceptable than what's there now.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/13/the-fight-over... (Archived: https://archive.ph/HSsxD )
It is a weird quirk built into the system but not too many situations where it slows anyone down since 42 is the next / previous station and you will almost always end up connecting to the same train you would have at Penn?
I guess there could be some situation where uptown local and express pull in to Penn at same time and you would be able to make a connection but then one is held and they don't connect at 42. But unusual and they run pretty frequently on 1-2-3?
> Those stops were built that way intentionally. [...] the designers wanted to coax passengers to switch between local and express trains at the Times Square — 42nd Street — Port Authority Bus Terminal complex, one stop to the north.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/16/nyregion/weird-subway-qui...
The worst is when you're waiting for the express and for some reason it shows up on the local track.
I still don't know -- was it intentionally designed to be idiotic? Or was it meant to operate some other way and they had to shoehorn local/express in?
New North-South lines between Brooklyn and Queens, however :-)
https://moynihantrainhall.nyc/
> It’s like having a big, clunky jalopy that doesn’t go more than 20 miles an hour, but instead of replacing the engine, we’re going to give it a paint job and hope that solves the problem.
then Moynihan was, unfortunately, more like a spit and polish. It's prettier to look at, but the main thing it did was move access for some trains a block further west (presumably away from the densest users as the article suggests of other plans). The basic experience is pretty unchanged (at least the Amtrak & subway experience, which I can speak to)