Having recently ridden Amtrak, easily the worst thing about it is the fact that they've decided to go with an airline style boarding process where the platforms are treated as a secure area and everybody has to single-file get their ticket checked to get onto a platform.
The whole advantage of a train vs a plane is that a train has many doors, allowing a lot of simultaneous boarding to happen; and they also already have conductors who check your ticket to make sure you are getting into the correct car, and another ticket check once the train is in motion. It would be significantly better at major stations to just have conductors at every train car on the platform in parallel doing ticket checks, rather than just have one funnel.
Amtrak is run by the dumbest people in the country. Another gem:
> Today, Amtrak schedules the Acela, which travels express between Washington and Boston, to overtake the slower, local Northeast Regional at Penn Station. The organization claims that this requires scheduled dwells of 30 minutes for Northeast Regional trains
But why would anyone competent want to work for an organization like this?
Do you have any idea of the history of why Amtrak was created? What limitations both funding and regulations are put on it? It's a god damn miracle it runs so well with what it's given. The dumbest thing is that we the people don't fund it and invest in rail, not people doing their best with what limited resource they are given in a country that is half a century behind when it comes to trains.
Total price segmentation, slowing down the northeast regional so people pay out extra for the Acela, nevermind that the northeast regional trains can run just as fast as acela for the vast majority of the route.
Yes the bad airline mentality goes a long way to denying these things are possible.
Once one accepts that people are going to constantly leaving and entering the platform, that all ticket checking must happen on the train to not impeed circulation, running way more trains needing fewer platforms is revealed as (a) possible, and (b) the right way to do things.
I haven't been on an Amtrak in about six months, so it may have changed, but where were you boarding? Was it New York? Boarding in NY is slow and structured, but when I've boarded in Back Bay (Boston), Portland (Maine), and Providence, it's the better way that you've mentioned.
They make everyone rescan tickets for the North East regional in NY also, if you're just passing through. It's a bit annoying, but I wonder if the traffic getting on and off is too great in NY to be able to do that. I have no clue, though.
Yes their practice elsewhere is better. Amtrak seems to think that lazzaiz-faire platform ingress/egress doesn't scale to NY Penn, but that's exactly backwards — it's not letting people circulate freely which doesn't scale.
Also, fun fact, if you don't go in the main hall Amtrak waiting area at NY Penn, you can board the platform whenever you want. But it's hard to figure out what platform/track to go to in advance — hiding that information is how they discourage this.
That must be new or station specific because my experience has been to buy the tickets, stand on the platform, put away your bags yourself and take a seat. Tickets are checked on board. Very seamless and stress free.
I take it once or twice a year to visit friends in the Baltimore area. Penn NY is guilty of that airline single file BS and find it completely annoying. At Baltimore Penn you just go to the platform and wait.
It's been that way for decade(s?) in New York. Presumably because otherwise too many people try to take it a stop or two for free before the conductor comes around to check tickets.
It's not a thing at any other Amtrak station I've been to, where the next stop often isn't for 45 minutes or more.
And no you can't have conductors in every train car. That's way too expensive and not needed for the rest of the 12 hour journey or whatever it is.
I'm thinking more, gate agents rather than conductors checking tickets at each door, and they're just always at NY Penn since there's trains constantly leaving out of there.
I recently took Amtrak across the country. In both Seattle and Chicago I showed up about 10 minutes before my train departed. Sure, they checked my ticket before I got onto the platform, but the experience was absolutely nothing like taking a flight. I wonder if it was something about the particular day or station you were at that made this worse.
I saw airline style entry at both Seattle and Portland recently. So it's certainly not uncommon, since the train I was on (Cascades) runs multiple times daily.
I think the major difference between a subway turnstile and this is also the fact that it is single file. Gare du Nord has dozens of turnstiles, not a single turnstile per platform.
Huh? I ride amtrak every week and there are no ticket check until train has moved. And if you always come about 5-10 minutes before departure no lines either.
Here on Amtrak Cascades, Seattle and Portland both do "airplane style" entry with ticket checks and sometimes seat assignment in the station, but at more minor stops (eg Longview, Bellingham) you hop aboard one of the open cars and get checked by the conductor.
I think there's two things being conflated here – 1. the pre-queueing in the station vs going directly to the platform and 2. if they also check tickets during that stage.
In my experience 1 is very consistent – NYC and Philly at least. 2 I'm not sure about. But 1 is imo the big issue. The pre-queue wastes time and clogs up the station and we hate it.
I ride into NYC 3x/wk via Penn Station. I realize ETANY is not affiliated with NJTransit, but I dont see how a system with the level of incompetence that NJTransit has could possibly handle more complexity.
NJ Transit can barely seem to handle service w/o Through-Running, so any discussion of expanding service seems premature. Here are some highlights:
- Inability to tell consumers ahead of time that trains will be stopped (even though they know well in advance.) Now, entire private WhatsApp groups have been set up where commuters warn each other of stopped trains and clogged stations. This leads to people coming to Penn Station only to find out trains are not running/cancelled/delayed. This is with a hub/spoke -- imagine if they expand beyond Penn Station into CT/LI.
- Inability/Unwillingness to communicate sources of blockages. There are ways to bypass NYPenn/Secaucus and go directly to Newark (PATH train). But NJTransit wont tell you where the blockage is, so its impossible to work around delays
- Inability/Unwillingness to communicate which trains will depart first, when multiple trains are backed up and queued up. People guess and hope they choose the "next" train.
- Regularly cancelled trains, esp after 7pm. They randomly cancel scheduled trains. No point in a schedule if you wont follow the schedule.
I'd want to contain the chaos of NJTransit to NYPenn Station and not beyond. At most, a 2nd stop at GC (like with LIRR did). The system isnt currently mature enough to be granted more responsibility.
Mind you -- this would be valuable. Folks who move to NJ necessarily cut themselves off CT jobs (esp hedge funds, etc.) So of course, having thru traffic from NJ all the way to CT would open up huge pools of job applicants and job opportunities.
NJT is indeed quite awful with OTP (83%[^1]), train cancellations[^2], reliability[^3], and transparency. However, through-running is also an opportunity for this to improve because, while bad in many ways as well, the MTA is well a class above NJT.
The MTA publishes live GTFS-RT feeds of all of its trains, NYCT, LIRR, and MNRR. There is also https://radar.mta.info/, which shows a map of the entire MTA's commuter railroads' network with every single train, including both MTA passenger trains, Amtrak trains, out of service trains, and work trains. It shows their location, their current speed, their train number, their car length, how late they are, their past and future predicted schedule adherence, and how many people are in each car on the train. The MTA's TrainTime app, which shows much of this information, too, is also leagues better than the NJT app.
So while through-running and integration is an opportunity for NJT to degrade the MTA, it is also a massive opportunity for NJT to improve, especially with regards to data and transparency, which is less of a physical issue. For example, Amtrak's transparency is a lot worse than the MTA's, too, and yet they show up on radar.mta.info all the same, albeit with a bit less info (like passenger counts per car, as their cars don't have automatic passenger counters).
[^1]: The MTA's OTP for LIRR and MNRR are a lot higher (98.5% for MNRR, 95.65% for LIRR). However, these are based on heavily padded timetables, padded by as much as 50% on the New Haven Line (a GCT-Stamford express, Stamford-New Haven local takes about 2:00 today, but could do it in about 1:20 with normal 7% padding and no artificial (non-geometric) speed limits: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/02/19/new-york-new-h...). So they essentially add in expected extreme delays so that they never appear late. However, NJT does this, too, and still has much worse OTP.
[^3]: Besides the NEC catenary, which Amtrak owns and is in an awful century-old state, NJT trains themselves have terrible mean distance between failures (MDBF), averaging about 49k miles (https://www.njtransit.com/improve/on-time-performance/rail#:...) compared to about 800k miles for Metro-North's M8s, 16x worse.
> I realize ETANY is not affiliated with NJTransit
We are equally unaffiliated with all the railroads and transit agencies :)
We do have membership in NJ are very much as in the transit going-ons through the tri-state area. A big unifying idea is that the economic geography doesn't care about political boundaries, and so the transportation planning shouldn't either.
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> NJ Transit can barely seem to handle service w/o Through-Running, so any discussion of expanding service seems premature. Here are some highlights:
You do raise a good point that through-running does require some amount of competence --- simply have a more interconnected rail network (revenue service on both sides) inherently means there is more potential for failures to propagate throughout the network. But, we'd like to believe this is surmountable.
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1. First of all, NJT and the MTA have done it before! See "train to the game". See:
Of course, running some special event service is not the same as doing through running day-in and day-out, but it is something to build on.
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2. What's the alternative?
- If there is no new expansion and no through-running, than the billions spent on Gateway way be rather wasted. That would be a huge embarrassment to the agencies, and politicians that stuck their neck out for the funding, alike.
- If Penn Expansion is not pursued for bullshit reasons, but the kayfabe is dropped and its done for the honest reason that no one believes agency competency can be improved, that is also embarrassing. Would the station actually be funded at that point?
We therefore think even just changing the conversation to acknowledge that ops competency, and not station geometry, is the binding constraint, would be a major improvement.
------
3. We have time
In line with the above counter-factuals, the rubber only hits the road (excuse me, steel hits the tracks :)) once Gateway is done. For better or worse, that is a long way off. This gives the agencies time to get ready.
- The money that would be been spent on station improvements can be spent on NJT "tech debt" instead --- all the behind the scenes infra that enables higher reliability.
- Congestion pricing should be raised, and hopefully the next crop of NJ politicians will be more open-minded and accept some money for NJT.
- Penn Station Access sending Metro North trains to Penn station makes for a good opportunity to "train" the agencies through-running, prior to Gateway being finished. And don't forget "train to the game".
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> Mind you -- this would be valuable. Folks who move to NJ necessarily cut themselves off CT jobs (esp hedge funds, etc.) So of course, having thru traffic from NJ all the way to CT would open up huge pools of job applicants and job opportunities.
Yes, it is a huge opportunity! Our main report (https://www.etany.org/modernizing-new-york-commuter-rail) talked quite a lot about that. I wish our politicians were less provincial about state boundaries, and better able to visualize just how impactful expanding commute sheds is.
------
A final disclaimer: I am far less knowledgable on train things than the other ETA members, so take this all with a bit more grain of salt.
“Through-running involves operating trains across Manhattan and through to the other side of the city, instead of immediately turning them back to the suburb they came from, as is done today.”
Through running is to avoid an upcoming real estate grab / bodogale where Stephen Ross's Vonado wants to let the state of NY use emmenent domain, skip city land use review and demolish an entire block 8th ave to 7th fromst 31st to 30th street. This is for him to build mega office towers and build more terminus rail platforms.
The idea of through-running is to not have trains parked like that in an over crouded midtown. That way they can reduce the number of tracks and widen the platforms. It has beem done with great success in many big cities already. The idea would be to have NJ Transit trains run to platforms at their rail yard in Queens. This is a large ripe for development area between Long Island City and Sunnyside Queens. It could also go farther to Port Morris in the Bronx and link with Metro North and the further North East rail corridor. Long Island Rail could go to a new terminus rail yard in NJ which could have a bus terminal to reduce the amount of busses into NYC. The main issue I can see is some of those commuter runs are too long for crew rotations and may require crew shifts who just do last stop in NJ through to the outer boro NYC rail yards.
> Through running is to avoid an upcoming real estate grab [...] and build more terminus rail platforms
Could one craft a gold-plated through-running transit hub proposal which supports the grab? Then transit improves, grab or no grab. Given the dominant power of real estate in NYC, the TFA had for me the feel of a proposal from engineering to a c-suite with big divergent incentives. Could one tease apart the "don't build badly" from the "don't need to build" arguments? "There are better alternatives to that, but if that gets done anyway for whatever reasons, at least get it right by ...".
There are other real estate grabs through-running could support. Through-running plans often include a Sunnyside Yards station where Metro-North Penn Station Access (PSA) trains from Hell Gate meet LIRR trains to Penn and Grand Central Madison (GCM), which would also distribute some of the passenger loads out of Penn, which is more constrained. A station here would mean you could also deck over the 180-acre railyard and build skyscrapers (the MTA is exempt from zoning) for some 50k people (about the same population density of Yorkville in the UES) with direct commutes to Penn and Grand Central.
Consider a rail network connected like A-B-C . With terminating trains you'd have one train run A-B-A, and another train run C-B-C. With through trains you'd have one train run A-B-C and another train run C-B-A. Terminating trains have to stop and reverse, which takes quite a lot of time because the driver has to go to the other end of the train. Through trains can just continue in the same direction, so it is a lot faster.
Because a through train occupies the track for less time you don't need as many tracks to serve the same number of trains per hour.
more importantly, if A and C are suburban locations, they probably don't need as much expansion as dogpiling everything in B, which is even more expensive because B is a block of some of the most expensive global real estate in the world.
The former (terminating lines) needs more tracks/platforms at the station, because turning the train around takes more time than stopping and continuing (through running) and turning around at the end of the line.
Issue is cost, through running could happen for much less cost. It would actually just be through running a little further at first and maybe integrated later. The current plan is to demolish an entire city block, the true motivation is for private gain.
The reason trains are deprioritized in the American travel schedule is that the rails are rightly used for freight instead. Even if you're trying to optimize for CO2 production, rails are barely better than air travel [1], and adding more passenger service would require a ton less freight service.
That freight service would be pushed to trucks - already too high of a percentage of freight. [2] trucks are half the efficiency of trains per mile[3], and truck freight is already most of fuel usage[4].
If Europe converted their rails used for passenger service into freight only and everyone flew instead, we'd have solved the climate crisis.
Readit News
The whole advantage of a train vs a plane is that a train has many doors, allowing a lot of simultaneous boarding to happen; and they also already have conductors who check your ticket to make sure you are getting into the correct car, and another ticket check once the train is in motion. It would be significantly better at major stations to just have conductors at every train car on the platform in parallel doing ticket checks, rather than just have one funnel.
> Today, Amtrak schedules the Acela, which travels express between Washington and Boston, to overtake the slower, local Northeast Regional at Penn Station. The organization claims that this requires scheduled dwells of 30 minutes for Northeast Regional trains
But why would anyone competent want to work for an organization like this?
Once one accepts that people are going to constantly leaving and entering the platform, that all ticket checking must happen on the train to not impeed circulation, running way more trains needing fewer platforms is revealed as (a) possible, and (b) the right way to do things.
They make everyone rescan tickets for the North East regional in NY also, if you're just passing through. It's a bit annoying, but I wonder if the traffic getting on and off is too great in NY to be able to do that. I have no clue, though.
Also, fun fact, if you don't go in the main hall Amtrak waiting area at NY Penn, you can board the platform whenever you want. But it's hard to figure out what platform/track to go to in advance — hiding that information is how they discourage this.
It's not a thing at any other Amtrak station I've been to, where the next stop often isn't for 45 minutes or more.
And no you can't have conductors in every train car. That's way too expensive and not needed for the rest of the 12 hour journey or whatever it is.
I'm thinking more, gate agents rather than conductors checking tickets at each door, and they're just always at NY Penn since there's trains constantly leaving out of there.
It's unconvienent if a human needs to read a ticket. But tap-in or scan-in systems are pretty fast.
I'm 100% with you on this. It's idiotic.
Here on Amtrak Cascades, Seattle and Portland both do "airplane style" entry with ticket checks and sometimes seat assignment in the station, but at more minor stops (eg Longview, Bellingham) you hop aboard one of the open cars and get checked by the conductor.
In my experience 1 is very consistent – NYC and Philly at least. 2 I'm not sure about. But 1 is imo the big issue. The pre-queue wastes time and clogs up the station and we hate it.
NJ Transit can barely seem to handle service w/o Through-Running, so any discussion of expanding service seems premature. Here are some highlights:
- Inability to tell consumers ahead of time that trains will be stopped (even though they know well in advance.) Now, entire private WhatsApp groups have been set up where commuters warn each other of stopped trains and clogged stations. This leads to people coming to Penn Station only to find out trains are not running/cancelled/delayed. This is with a hub/spoke -- imagine if they expand beyond Penn Station into CT/LI.
- Inability/Unwillingness to communicate sources of blockages. There are ways to bypass NYPenn/Secaucus and go directly to Newark (PATH train). But NJTransit wont tell you where the blockage is, so its impossible to work around delays
- Inability/Unwillingness to communicate which trains will depart first, when multiple trains are backed up and queued up. People guess and hope they choose the "next" train.
- Regularly cancelled trains, esp after 7pm. They randomly cancel scheduled trains. No point in a schedule if you wont follow the schedule.
I'd want to contain the chaos of NJTransit to NYPenn Station and not beyond. At most, a 2nd stop at GC (like with LIRR did). The system isnt currently mature enough to be granted more responsibility.
Mind you -- this would be valuable. Folks who move to NJ necessarily cut themselves off CT jobs (esp hedge funds, etc.) So of course, having thru traffic from NJ all the way to CT would open up huge pools of job applicants and job opportunities.
The MTA publishes live GTFS-RT feeds of all of its trains, NYCT, LIRR, and MNRR. There is also https://radar.mta.info/, which shows a map of the entire MTA's commuter railroads' network with every single train, including both MTA passenger trains, Amtrak trains, out of service trains, and work trains. It shows their location, their current speed, their train number, their car length, how late they are, their past and future predicted schedule adherence, and how many people are in each car on the train. The MTA's TrainTime app, which shows much of this information, too, is also leagues better than the NJT app.
So while through-running and integration is an opportunity for NJT to degrade the MTA, it is also a massive opportunity for NJT to improve, especially with regards to data and transparency, which is less of a physical issue. For example, Amtrak's transparency is a lot worse than the MTA's, too, and yet they show up on radar.mta.info all the same, albeit with a bit less info (like passenger counts per car, as their cars don't have automatic passenger counters).
[^1]: The MTA's OTP for LIRR and MNRR are a lot higher (98.5% for MNRR, 95.65% for LIRR). However, these are based on heavily padded timetables, padded by as much as 50% on the New Haven Line (a GCT-Stamford express, Stamford-New Haven local takes about 2:00 today, but could do it in about 1:20 with normal 7% padding and no artificial (non-geometric) speed limits: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/02/19/new-york-new-h...). So they essentially add in expected extreme delays so that they never appear late. However, NJT does this, too, and still has much worse OTP.
[^2]: https://www.curbed.com/article/nj-transit-commuter-train-ser... (https://archive.is/smk68)
[^3]: Besides the NEC catenary, which Amtrak owns and is in an awful century-old state, NJT trains themselves have terrible mean distance between failures (MDBF), averaging about 49k miles (https://www.njtransit.com/improve/on-time-performance/rail#:...) compared to about 800k miles for Metro-North's M8s, 16x worse.
We are equally unaffiliated with all the railroads and transit agencies :)
We do have membership in NJ are very much as in the transit going-ons through the tri-state area. A big unifying idea is that the economic geography doesn't care about political boundaries, and so the transportation planning shouldn't either.
------
> NJ Transit can barely seem to handle service w/o Through-Running, so any discussion of expanding service seems premature. Here are some highlights:
You do raise a good point that through-running does require some amount of competence --- simply have a more interconnected rail network (revenue service on both sides) inherently means there is more potential for failures to propagate throughout the network. But, we'd like to believe this is surmountable.
------
1. First of all, NJT and the MTA have done it before! See "train to the game". See:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven_Line#Meadowlands_gam... - https://www.njtransit.com/press-releases/take-train-game-met...
Of course, running some special event service is not the same as doing through running day-in and day-out, but it is something to build on.
------
2. What's the alternative?
- If there is no new expansion and no through-running, than the billions spent on Gateway way be rather wasted. That would be a huge embarrassment to the agencies, and politicians that stuck their neck out for the funding, alike.
- If Penn Expansion is not pursued for bullshit reasons, but the kayfabe is dropped and its done for the honest reason that no one believes agency competency can be improved, that is also embarrassing. Would the station actually be funded at that point?
We therefore think even just changing the conversation to acknowledge that ops competency, and not station geometry, is the binding constraint, would be a major improvement.
------
3. We have time
In line with the above counter-factuals, the rubber only hits the road (excuse me, steel hits the tracks :)) once Gateway is done. For better or worse, that is a long way off. This gives the agencies time to get ready.
- The money that would be been spent on station improvements can be spent on NJT "tech debt" instead --- all the behind the scenes infra that enables higher reliability.
- Congestion pricing should be raised, and hopefully the next crop of NJ politicians will be more open-minded and accept some money for NJT.
- Penn Station Access sending Metro North trains to Penn station makes for a good opportunity to "train" the agencies through-running, prior to Gateway being finished. And don't forget "train to the game".
------
> Mind you -- this would be valuable. Folks who move to NJ necessarily cut themselves off CT jobs (esp hedge funds, etc.) So of course, having thru traffic from NJ all the way to CT would open up huge pools of job applicants and job opportunities.
Yes, it is a huge opportunity! Our main report (https://www.etany.org/modernizing-new-york-commuter-rail) talked quite a lot about that. I wish our politicians were less provincial about state boundaries, and better able to visualize just how impactful expanding commute sheds is.
------
A final disclaimer: I am far less knowledgable on train things than the other ETA members, so take this all with a bit more grain of salt.
This report is more narrowly tailored on refuting Amtrak's grossly mistaken reasoning in their recent study.
The idea of through-running is to not have trains parked like that in an over crouded midtown. That way they can reduce the number of tracks and widen the platforms. It has beem done with great success in many big cities already. The idea would be to have NJ Transit trains run to platforms at their rail yard in Queens. This is a large ripe for development area between Long Island City and Sunnyside Queens. It could also go farther to Port Morris in the Bronx and link with Metro North and the further North East rail corridor. Long Island Rail could go to a new terminus rail yard in NJ which could have a bus terminal to reduce the amount of busses into NYC. The main issue I can see is some of those commuter runs are too long for crew rotations and may require crew shifts who just do last stop in NJ through to the outer boro NYC rail yards.
Here is the group advocating this idea. Rethink Penn Station NYC https://www.rethinkpennstationnyc.org/
Could one craft a gold-plated through-running transit hub proposal which supports the grab? Then transit improves, grab or no grab. Given the dominant power of real estate in NYC, the TFA had for me the feel of a proposal from engineering to a c-suite with big divergent incentives. Could one tease apart the "don't build badly" from the "don't need to build" arguments? "There are better alternatives to that, but if that gets done anyway for whatever reasons, at least get it right by ...".
EDIT: Thank you to the commenters (who I can't answer because I'm rate-limited).
Consider a rail network connected like A-B-C . With terminating trains you'd have one train run A-B-A, and another train run C-B-C. With through trains you'd have one train run A-B-C and another train run C-B-A. Terminating trains have to stop and reverse, which takes quite a lot of time because the driver has to go to the other end of the train. Through trains can just continue in the same direction, so it is a lot faster.
Because a through train occupies the track for less time you don't need as many tracks to serve the same number of trains per hour.
Deleted Comment
That freight service would be pushed to trucks - already too high of a percentage of freight. [2] trucks are half the efficiency of trains per mile[3], and truck freight is already most of fuel usage[4].
If Europe converted their rails used for passenger service into freight only and everyone flew instead, we'd have solved the climate crisis.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/climate/trains-planes-car... [2] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-ton-miles-freight [3] https://railroads.dot.gov/sites/fra.dot.gov/files/fra_net/16... is the last authoritative study, but truck efficiency has greatly improved since then. [4] https://climate.mit.edu/explainers/freight-transportation