Right but you're talking about improving the system by taking current PABT bus commuters and putting them in NJ, and connecting them to Manhattan via some kind

Right but you're talking about improving the system by taking current PABT bus commuters and putting them in NJ, and connecting them to Manhattan via some kind of rail link. It's a common idea, but it won't work for the same reasons stated already - there isn't any capacity left in the tunnels. > "If you are going to build a maglev then you'd probably have express trains. That does without saying, right?" You'd need very wide station spacing for the speed gains to really matter, which makes the tech more appropriate for suburban commuter rail, not metros. So think LIRR/Metro North/NJT instead of the subway. The main problem there is that all commuter rail routes converge onto a single set of tracks coming into Manhattan - via the Hudson tunnels on the NJ side, or along Park Ave on the Metro North side, or via the East River tunnels on the LIRR side, and all the commuter routes are rather long, so there's no convenient 11-mile stretch to try this out like the Beijing S1. Sharing track is also going to be an impossibility I think - you're not going to be able to have standard gauge heavy rail sharing the exact same track as a maglev, so you can't, say, replace one branch of the LIRR with maglev. It's an all or nothing affair. I mean yeah, in a hypothetical world where we had infinite resources, maglev would be pretty f'ing cool, but in the actual world it's so far down the list of priorities for our money that it might as well not be on the list.