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Penn Station Could Get Worse
- booleandilemma 9y agoBefore clicking I thought the article was going to be about the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
- malchow 9y agoA non-profit architectural foundation of which I am part is proposing to rebuild the original beaux arts Penn Station: https://www.civicart.org/rebuilding-new-yorks-original-pennsylvania-station/ https://www.civicart.org/rebuilding-new-yorks-original-penns... More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/campaigners-step-up-fight-to-restore-new-york-penn-station-1511433000 https://www.wsj.com/articles/campaigners-step-up-fight-to-re... If there's demand, I could ask the team/architects to do an ama of some kind.
- kindatrue 9y agoBut that's the problem - people are excited about building a new station on top. But people aren't excited about rebuilding the 2 highly damaged tunnels underneath the river (or build some new ones). Stuff like that is hard to sell because it doesn't capture people's imagination or attention - nor does it provide for great photo-ops. :(
- jbob2000 9y agoWoah, after reading this article, my eyes have some lingering "lines", really messing with my head right now. Note to journalists/designers: DO NOT use black background with sharp contrasting white text.
- glenneroo 9y agoYeah that formatting was atrocious. Scrolling while reading was causing me to see flickering white "blobs" flowing between the text. Even afterwards I'm still seeing remnants of those white blobs. Time for a computer break!
- magic_beans 9y agoIt was actually painful to read. Literally painful.
- rayiner 9y ago> A few weeks later, a sewage pipe spewed waste onto a heavily trafficked concourse—an honest-to-God shitstorm. “I’m like, ‘Literally, it’s raining in Penn Station,’ ” recalls Marigo Mihalos, a booking agent from New Jersey who witnessed the fecal deluge on her way to work. For those who have never been to Penn Station, this is an accurate description of it on a typical summer day.
- acjohnson55 9y agoI commute via Penn Station, and while I think it's a labyrinthine and Kafkaesque human cattle pen, I've never seen anything like that, let alone routinely.
- CaptainZapp 9y agoPenn, the Western Hemisphere’s busiest train station, serves 430,000 travelers every weekday—more than LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports combined That would surprise me. According to Wikipedia Zurich main station served on average 441,400 per working day. And that's in a city of roughly 400'00 people (or 1.2M if you count the metropolitan area). That's peanuts compared to monsters like Shinjuku in Tokyo, which was used on average by 3.64 million people per day in 2007. So I'm wondering where they come up with the "western hemisphere busiest train station"
- arethuza 9y agoZurich, Tokyo and pretty much every other large train station aren't in the "Western Hemisphere": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere
- CaptainZapp 9y agoI stand corrected. Thanks
- alaxsxaq 9y agoSomeone was really reaching to find meaningless superlatives. Wouldn't it be better to compare this station to stations handling similar passenger numbers? I frequently use Penn Station, Union Station (DC), and 30th Street Station (Philadelphia). All of them are overloaded, but things like waiting areas, bathrooms, food, ticketing aren't really that much worse in Penn Station. Aesthetics, on the other hand...
- icegreentea2 9y agoI think it's fine. While the article spends some time talking about how shitty looking Penn Station is, I felt like it delivered its emphasis on how the actual transit part of it is slow motion dying. Like tunnels literally creeping towards collapse. The comparison to airports I think is fine for envisioning scale in an American context. Like all of the station level stuff is important, but I felt like the article was more of a plea to make sure that we'd at least fix the actual track and tunnel level problems before NYC gets strangled.
- konschubert 9y agoTo state the obvious: Build two new tubes besides the existing ones, the take the existing ones out of service, renovate them, bam. Now you've got 4 (?) tubes and much fewer delays.
- tootie 9y agoI don't know if you read the article at all, but the governors of NY and NJ had an agreement with the Obama admin to jointly fund just one tunnel (total cost $30B) and Trump pulled the rug out from under them. Building tunnels under a river isn't simple.
- dhuramas 9y agoWe should get Elon to do it.
- InitialLastName 9y agoElon doesn't believe in public transit. Too many plebes packed into too little space. He'd rather move people in their cars instead, and if there's anything New York City does not need it's more cars.
- nashashmi 9y agohyperloop?
- InitialLastName 9y agoI can't find it at the moment, but he's been talking up hyperloop as a way to move pods with private cars in them. The Boring Company (a step towards Hyperloop, potentially), is talking about drilling holes small enough that only those pods would work.
- kalleboo 9y agoElon won't save you here. You gotta wait for his magic gridlock-reducing self-driving cars. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-transit/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t... “I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.” “It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.” When the audience member responded that public transportation seemed to work in Japan, Musk shot back, “What, where they cram people in the subway? That doesn’t sound great.”
- grecy 9y agoIt's staggering to spend time in some of the US's biggest transit hubs - LAX, Penn, the NYC airports, and then go and spend time in some around the world. The US has a lot of catching up to do on it's basic infrastructure.
- lazerpants 9y agoThe NYC airports are strange because certain terminals are fantastic at all three airports, and other are glorified Greyhound stations.
- arnon 9y agoIn general, most US airports are pretty bad, but I'll avoid Terminal 1 at JFK at whatever cost. It's by far the worst airport terminal I've been to in my life. I read this week that each of JFK's terminals is run as it's own separate entity. If your flight goes to Terminal 4, and Terminal 4 has some issue or is overloaded, you can't go to any other terminal because they don't talk to each-other.
- hessproject 9y agoLaGuardia is funny because you go to terminal C and D, newly renovated with nice restaurants and fancy tablets at every table ...Or you could walk 10 feet to terminal A and B and get drenched by the gallon of water leaking out of the ceiling
- ravitation 9y agoThose leaking ceilings are almost to the point where they could be classified as NYC landmarks...
- thedarkginger 9y agoReminds me of the Joe Biden speech a couple years back: > If I took you and blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you'd think, ‘I must be in some third-world country.’
- briandear 9y ago> In the era of climate change, hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent. ? [1] [1] https://www.wunderground.com/education/webster.asp https://www.wunderground.com/education/webster.asp
- briandear 9y agoWhy don’t they raise ticket prices? Or add a “Penn Station Facilities Fee” to tickets? I’m still paying a ridiculous “9-11 Security Fee” on airline routes that land in the US and I also pay a ridiculous “solidarity fee” for airline tickets in France. Why not make Penn users pay for using Penn?
- lakechfoma 9y agoPeople think it already costs too much to use and the prices keep going up as it is. So then it comes back to political situations like Christie ending a project in the name of lower gas prices.
- vonmoltke 9y agoA similar fee already exists for NJ Transit's Newark Airport station. Trips with that station as a terminus have an extra fee attached, which in turn pays for the train that takes people from the station to the airport terminals.
- lazerpants 9y agoThe Airtrain is the worst though, it's slow, and narrows to one lane while crossing the freeway (so you have to wait for trains to pass), it's excruciating to take if you're worried about being late for a flight. And it costs $5.50. Which is about what a taxi from the NJT station to the airport should cost.
- zornb 9y agoSomewhat surprized that the article didn't touch on the expanse and glory of the old Penn Station that was torn down in the 60's. More information here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/penn/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/penn/
- flanbiscuit 9y agoIt's sad they tore down what looked like a beautiful station to build the ugliness that is there now. Hopefully the forever-upcoming Moynihan station will bring some of that back.
- nikanj 9y agoIt did mention it, although it didn’t go into details: ”His tourgoers are among the many New Yorkers—and others with an interest in urban planning—who know that today’s decrepit facility sits beneath what used to be a gorgeous hall, inspired by the Roman Baths of Caracalla. It was demolished in the 1960s, to the dismay of preservationists. Rivers leads his flock through modern-day Penn, pointing out vestiges of the old place: an original staircase leading down to the tracks; a Long Island Rail Road waiting room; a ghostly, red-lettered sign for the long-gone Pennsylvania Railroad.”
- OliverJones 9y agoThis is all part of the long-standing "taxation is theft" meme that infected the USA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. There are many reasons we can't have nice things. One such reason is our collective unwillingness to pay for them.
- RestlessMind 9y agoExcuse me, but USA pays a lot. But apparently due to some cost disease, we need to pay a lot more than other countries to achieve the same goal. There was a fascinating NYT article [1] about spiraling costs of NYC subway, but you can observe the same phenomenon in other places (defense spending, healthcare spending, California high speed rail etc). So yeah, as a taxpayer, I will be super weary of approving any bond measure for infrastructure projects unless there is an ironclad proposal to control the costs. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
- ryguytilidie 9y agoYeah, paying for BART in the bay area is like: property taxes go to BART. BART uses it to pay gate agents $150k+ and do no infrastructure improvements. Another measure goes on the ballot because BART desperately needs money to fix infra. Bond is approved. BART employees strike for more money, get it. Infra improvements never happen. I guess we gotta pay those gate agents the big bucks to stand there and watch people walk through the emergency exit gates instead of paying the fare. Seems like a six figure job to me!
- pishpash 9y agoOr, the 50%+ of the eligible people who don't vote, can vote, and do something about it. At current voting rates, every race is competitive.
- empthought 9y ago> BART uses it to pay gate agents $150k+ citation needed
- bob_theslob646 9y agoI applaud bloomberg for writing about this. The more these problems are talked about, hopefully, will result in some for of change. (The NY Times has done a great job in the NY region shining a light on subways, MTA, see below for stories linked.) It is always incredibly challenging to have to design solutions ontop of exisiting,immovable, infrastructure and old stubborn corrupt people. Regarding the article, these statements are absurd. > K. Jane Williams, deputy administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, sent a curtly worded letter to New York and New Jersey officials that snidely made the deal sound made-up. > “We consider it unhelpful to reference a nonexistent ‘agreement’ rather than directly address the responsibility for funding a local project where 9 out of 10 passengers are local transit riders,” she wrote. With New York residents rated 44 out of 50 on Wallet Hub's "2017’s Most & Least Federally Dependent States " state residents being dependent on the federal government, meaning NY residents give more than they get back ( Scale : 1 = giving less and being more dependent on federal funds versus 50 being more independent and giving more than it receives, being less dependent on federal funds[1] ) as well as other nearby states, such as Massachusetts(46), New Jersey(49) and Delaware(50), I find it incredibly irritating for them to make it as if people who rely on that form of transit do not matter especially with transportation being a way to get out of poverty. [2][3] So much for infrastructure spending.... [1](https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal-government/2700/ https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...) [2] (https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/upshot/transportation-emerges-as-crucial-to-escaping-poverty.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/upshot/transportation-eme...) [3] (https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/05/25/public-transportation-can-ride-out-poverty/KtzBMWFo1Xpsqks7NfbYxL/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/05/25/public-transp...) Regarding Amtrak,the author in my opinion should have explained how the Amtrak works/run. They suffer because they do not have funding, but lack the ability to be forced to innovate because of virtually zero competition.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Controversy) To understand how Amtrak works, I suggest reading this. (https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/amtrak-when-political-absurdity-meets-government-inefficiency/ https://rctom.hbs.org/submission/amtrak-when-political-absur...) >NY Times on MTA (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/opinion/nyc-leaders-subway-mta.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/opinion/nyc-leaders-subwa...) (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/magazine/subway-new-york-city-public-transportation-wealth-inequality.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/magazine/subway-new-york-...) (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...) (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/22/nyregion/what-would-it-take-to-fix-new-yorks-subway.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/22/nyregion/what...) (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/nyregion/system-failure-new-york-subway-maintenance-misery.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/20/nyregion/system-failure-n...)
- dundercoder 9y agoThe US’s record of reliable and efficient public transit is abysmal. Out west here you’re lucky to even catch a bus that takes an hour and fifteen minutes to get you where a 15 minute car ride would.
- friedButter 9y ago> Out west here Dont have a lot of experience with US, but Seattle and Redmond (which are on the west coast) had pretty awesome public transport.. I was able to navigate it pretty easily even though it was my first time in US, and it went pretty much everywhere
- barsonme 9y agoThat's because it's a major city center, and even then people usually have a lot of complaints about Seattle's public transportation. Go an hour south in your state (or over to the eastern half) and you'll see what GP means.
- electricslpnsld 9y agoHell, when I was living in Portland the public transit was totally reasonable. Getting to the airpot was a peace of cake, taking the bus from North Portland to my job on the other side of the river was easy, my coworkers who took light rail in from the burbs rarely had issues. Overall it was pleasant experience.
- nikanj 9y agoSomehow this reminds me of the previous story on NY infrastucture ( https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&referer=https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subw... ) We were able to both fund and construct these tunnels a century ago, but somehow they now seem hopelesly out of our reach.
- jandrese 9y agoWell yeah, we had to give that money to the "job creators". Presumably they will be stepping up to rebuild the infrastructure any day now.
- pstuart 9y agoDon't forget our military misadventures abroad -- they ain't cheap.
- pishpash 9y agoJob creators don't ride public transit, so they don't care. Having two parallel universes is a problem.
- wavefunction 9y agoThey'll be selling us public/private infrastructure funded by the 1.5 Trillion USD levy on the deficit via the recent 'tax reform.'
- djsumdog 9y agoA couple of predator drones could probably pay for infrastructure repair. Probably a couple of overpriced Fighter Jets as well. Does America really need 10 ~ 11 active aircraft carriers? Most of our allies only have 1 or 2. War is a machine, and it is eating away at America. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." -Dwight D. Eisenhower "Here's what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace." -Bill Hicks
- kindatrue 9y ago"Let's build a new shiny station" (that would make everyone walk even further to transfer to the subways to get them to work) - tons of interest! tons of excitement! "Let's rebuild 2 tunnels. And maybe build 2 more." (Before they collapse and destroy the economy.) - Boring. Not sexy. No photo-ops. And that's the problem with humans. :(
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mancerayder 9y agoIt's a problem with American politics. While Penn Station falls apart, London and Paris have seen nothing but infrastructure improvements and upgrades. There are of course many reasons for this, but I assure you not all human societies are clearly hostile to public infrastructure spending and anything that isn't private and for-profit. In the years I lived in London I observed the Tube going from constant outages and weekend shutdowns, to later trains, more frequent trains, and new infrastructure projects like Crossrail. DLR, a conductorless system I rode daily,was only a few decades old. As a NYer I'm deeply embarrassed by having seen first hand over 20 years the slow decline of the transportation system here. It's embarrassing when family and friends visit from overseas and display disgust and shock. NY comes off as wealthy and clean in popular media there, but the reality is closer to a Third World one.
- acjohnson55 9y agoLondon does prove that it can be turned around. So there's that, at least.
- mancerayder 9y agoIt's more centralized in the UK, while an old-fashioned American belief in small, local government lives on. If you read the article, the ARC tunnel project needed (or initially thought it would obtain) collaboration between governors of New York, New Jersey, Transit Authority, and the Fed government. If you work in systems, that's like a disk array striped across several disks, the failure of any one causing the array to fail. First Corzine proposed it (the second or so in as many decades), then Christie replaces him and uses its cancellation for political gain (a fact with such frustration that I can't express it politely), then the project comes alive again at higher cost and with Obama Federal funding promises overturned by Trump. Whoever said that decentralized control of infrastructure in a short-term-minded political environment was a good idea needs to wake up and visit countries in Europe or Asia with vastly superior infrastructure and ponder the idea that 18th century ideas could perhaps be wrong in 2018.
- mattbuilds 9y agoI currently commute in on the LIRR everyday and man is it rough. I'm pretty sure my train is delayed more often than on time. I usually give my mom a call in the morning just to say hi and check in. When my train does arrive on time she will go, "Oh you're early today". I fear it could really hurt the economic activity of NYC. Take me for example, I like my job and I like the city, but I'm looking to work remotely or on Long Island rather than commuting. It's long but not so bad if everything is going well. The problem is the lack of consistency makes it unbearable. You never know when your train is going to be delayed and you're stuck on a packed train, or worse, stuck in Penn Station for an unknown amount of time. Life is too short to spend it like that.
- lr4444lr 9y agoCheer up. You could be taking the subway. :-)
- mattbuilds 9y agoIt's all still the MTA. I used to live in NYC and took the subway everyday so I have some experience with both. Neither are great, but let's just say I miss my old commute.
- whiddershins 9y agoI really have no idea what you are talking about. The LIRR works ridiculously consistently for me.
- 1_2__4 9y agoI eagerly await the HN comments about how this demonstrates that mass tea sit is a failure and cars are our future. Except I know we’ll only ever see complaints about “overloaded transportation systems” when referring to freeways and roads yet somehow obvious evidence that infrastructure of all kinds needs expansion and upgrades to keep up with demand will be ignored.
- perseusprime11 9y agoPenn Station really sucks. It feels like the third world where trains are always delayed, passengers are shoving and pushing each other. Imagine the plight of employees working in Manhattan having to tell their upper east sides bosses why they are late every other day.
- acjohnson55 9y agoFrom the title, I knew it could be one of two things: New York Penn Station or Port Authority Bus Terminal. Both are nightmarescapes.
- meri_dian 9y agoIn order to avoid death by 1,000 cases of crumbling infrastructure, the US should redirect $100 billion in military spending per year to infrastructure spending. We don't even need to make that redirect last longer than a few years to fund most of our pressing infrastructure projects. And our military would still have a budget $300 billion greater than the next biggest military spender (China)!!!
- pishpash 9y agoLet the contracts have as much graft as exists in Afghanistan and Iraq and the contractors might be interested.
- ShabbosGoy 9y agoLuckily, when I lived in NYC back in 2012, I never had to cross paths with Penn Station. Mainly, I’d use the PATH train from Jersey City to 33rd Street, which ran frequently and mostly on-time. The one time I had to visit a friend in Long Island, Penn Station wasn’t the horror show the article suggests. Then again, it was nearly 6 years ago, so it’s plausible that it has degraded. Fingers crossed that The Boring Company can actually execute.
- nerfhammer 9y agoNote that you were going east and didn't have to go through the North River Tunnels, and I'm guessing, not at rush hour. PATH uses a different set of tunnels, and actually has four of them instead of just two.
- baud147258 9y agoAs for the train picture that's supposedly packed and dreary, it's still miles ahead of some of the oldest trains operating in some of the lines around Paris, which are ~50 years old and when they are packed, it's people standing up from one end of the wagon to the other. At least they're in the process of being replaced (the first new trains were delivered last month). Still I'm glad that Paris has a good public railway system, even if the improvement work in the summer can be really annoying (like when they are cutting the West-East line for one month in Paris).
- baud147258 9y agoI was criticizing the disconnect between the picture and the caption. I'm pretty sure Amtrak has trains that are just as bad as some of those in France.
- Bahamut 9y agoTo contrast with Penn Station, just ~10-15 blocks to the northeast you have Grand Central, an iconic train station that is much better in almost every way.
- nashashmi 9y agoAnd yet relatively speaking, it works a lot better than PABT. Penn Station has its short comings but it functions well enough that I can still say it is more convenient to go to Penn Station than it is do drive to NYC. I have been using Penn Station since 2010. The first problem that started was trains backing up because of tunnel traffic. The second problem started happening in 2014 where trains were backing up in the tunnel because of platform traffic. The third problem started coming when the tracks (not trains) started breaking down and then you had derailments, collisions, breakdowns, etc. Penn station just never got a break in usage. And never got a reprieve with accidents. It always worked at 110% and whenever repairs were being made, travelers complained because it caused daily delays. What we really need is a whole brand new station, a whole brand new tube, and a whole bunch of brand new trains to put the other ones out of service and under repair. Only then will commuters and NYC goers be happy.
- mhb 9y agoLet me help: PABT == Port Authority Bus Terminal
- taion 9y agoThis is a fairly poorly-informed piece, especially in light of the recent NY Times piece on construction costs in the New York area: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... Alon Levy, who was the source for many of the initial investigations into high costs here, argues quite convincingly that, at the current projected price tag, Gateway is not a justifiable project: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2015/11/13/when-theres-nothing-left-to-burn-you-have-to-set-money-on-fire/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2015/11/13/when-theres-no... The real problem here is that ARC, Gateway, &c. all have unjustifiably huge multi-billion-dollar price tags. We only have this problem in the first place because of the absurd construction costs in New York. Additionally, the writer does not appear to have reached out to any independent transit people. Penn Station is actually less busy than, say, Châtelet-les-Halles in Paris, which has many, many fewer tracks. The biggest reason that it doesn't work well is just organizational – Penn Station would be able to handle its current capacity just fine if it did things that were standard elsewhere like through-running. Lastly, neither Moynihan Station nor many of the Penn Station revamp ideas are well-regarded in transit circles. As noted, Moynihan Station makes people walk an extra long block. The original Penn Station, meanwhile, was not particularly well-regarded for things like pedestrian flow. It had a beautiful waiting room and some great architecture, but it's generally been regarded as being mediocre functionally, especially compared to Grand Central, which is both beautiful and has very good pedestrian flow.