Wrong Trains Running
Buffalo, New York City, and Boondoggles
This is a new blog. I briefly considered an introductory post, but in the interest of getting to the good stuff faster, have boiled it down into two sentences: The United States is at its best when we are a global leader, but our cities and infrastructure remain a haphazard testament to factious decision-making. This can change, this should change, and this must change.
For better or for worse, I am a product of New York State — born in White Plains, raised (more or less) in the Albany suburbs, and presently residing in New York City — so naturally much of my writing will focus on this state. Today, as it happens, provided an excellent opportunity to talk about the our two largest cities (Buffalo is the other one, so you don’t have to Google it) and their new train stations.
New York City needs no introduction. Home to more than 8.5 million people, it is a global economic juggernaut, to the point where Upstate secession is considered a semi-plausible concept. Its transportation needs are accordingly huge; Grand Central Terminal has more platforms than any other train station in the world, Penn Station is the busiest train station in the western hemisphere, and the airport system is second only to London in terms of passenger volume. The IRT Lexington Avenue Line (carrying the 4, 5, and 6 trains) is busier than Chicago’s entire “L” system. Combined. New York City is a growing, dynamic place, and our infrastructure needs reflect that.
Economic problems, of course, remain in a state who’s largest city accounted for, and I promise this is not a joke, 98.7% of population growth between 2010 and 2016. Throw in the immediate suburbs and you’ve got a whopping 115.5% of New York State’s growth:
Buffalo is toward the less fortunate end of that spectrum. While the city‘s population decline has slowed relative to, say, Detroit or Youngstown, it is still well off its mid-century peak, even after the State poured vast sums of ethically-questionable money into the region. But it remains a regional center, and the second-biggest city in the state, and accordingly has its own infrastructure needs. (Not to mention the only rail-based transit Upstate!) Of most immediate concern is downtown’s Exchange Street Amtrak station, where a partial roof collapse in September rendered Buffalo’s second-busiest Amtrak station only partially usable.
You read that right, too.
Buffalo has had two intercity train stations since the late 1970s. The other station, located in suburban Depew, has nearly triple the ridership, since it has a direct connection to Chicago.
So that’s absurd. Grand, decaying Buffalo Central Terminal sits just east of where the current Chicago route branches off, and was considered as one of two possible sites for the new station, alongside a downtown location. To cut to the chase, downtown won out, in an 11-to-4 vote. In spite of opposition from the City Council. And two of the three legislators who represent the area. And the County Executive. And Amtrak, which explicitly said they would not run service that required backing up trains through Buffalo’s East Side. Surprising no one, Governor Andrew Cuomo is believed to support the downtown location, and known to have given Buffalo officials an ultimatum to make the decision by this month, lest they be on the hook for a $1 million retainer for Parsons Brinckerhoff. And even if we imagine that this process will get Buffalo the best of all possible train stations, that won’t make service any more reliable. Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that the meeting happened behind closed doors. (But don’t fret, it was streamed!)
There is one honest-to-God upside to all this: cost. In an era when major infrastructure projects are measured in the billions, estimates put the cost of a new station — even in the unlikely event it is built from scratch at the Central Terminal site — in the tens of millions. So restraint is possible. Moreover, completing preliminary work in a timely fashion is also possible, even if ransom is involved. Compare that to Moynihan Station.
First, a caveat: I understand that any construction project in New York City is going to be more expensive than one in Buffalo, on scale and land cost alone. Second caveat: That isn’t what this is about.
Plans to replace the fluorescent-bathed Thunderdome that is New York Penn Station date back to the early 1990s (which is something we have in common), as a pet project of the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In the realm of sentences that shouldn’t exist, Senator Chuck Schumer introduced a bill to name the station for Moynihan the day Star Wars Episode I came out. A successive series of renderings, plans, and schematics has issued forth from interested architects and engineers in the ensuing years. But anyone who has spent time in New York City may notice that more than 20 years on, Penn Station has transformed into…a fluorescent-bathed Thunderdome with a Shake Shack. The most recent iteration of deadlines says we’ll have new entrances to the west side of the station later this year and a new train hall for LIRR and Amtrak passengers in late 2020.
Somewhat more troubling is the funding for this scheme. As of Fall 2016, developers are set to contribute $600 million to the project, in addition to $570 million from Empire State Development and $435 million from the federal government, for a total cost of $1.6 billion. Which is perhaps not unreasonable, but is a bit odd for a project that for years has been talked about in the $2–3 billion range, though it started off a mere $930 million in 2005. More relevantly, this takes a rather optimistic view of the current administration’s willingness to fund cities and public transit. And this being New York State, the $600 million include $370 million of preferential tax treatment over the course of 30 years, pending city approval. But if that’s the cost of Hogwarts-inspired LED ceiling projections, so be it.
Of course, there’s more. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio have the most famously inane feud in American politics right now, and once you throw New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in the mix, you have ready-made Shakespearean drama. If Shakespeare chronicled the power struggles of a poorly-supervised dog park. Clicking on the previous link, you may have noticed that this new station is for Amtrak and Long Island Rail Road only. Which is odd for a station that also services NJ Transit, which will apparently get the Thunderdome all to themselves. Please feel free to insert the New Jersey joke of your choice here. Once you bring Christie and de Blasio and into the picture, the layers of the onion start to peel away. Maybe this has something to do with the Port Authority pulling out of a lease they signed 16 years ago. Maybe this has something to do with the ceaseless bickering about how to accomplish the criminally overdue Gateway project. Maybe this has to do with Cuomo’s self-obsessed fealty to Nassau County voters, which is the only way to explain the absurdity of the LaGuardia AirTrain proposal. We can reserve East Side Access for its own post or seven or twenty. Point is, it’s very difficult to see the melodrama of Moynihan Station as anything other than a power play, with these three at the center.
Especially since it doesn’t even address the big issues. As mentioned above, the biggest crisis facing rail service in the Northeastern United States is the derelict state of the Hudson River tunnels. It also doesn’t help the biggest crowding and scheduling issue at Penn and Grand Central Stations. Take a look at the map below.
This is Paris’s Châtelet-Les Halles train station, where three RER (commuter rail) and five Métro lines all stop. The largest station of its kind in the world, Châtelet-Les Halles sees about 50% more passengers on a day-to-day basis than Penn Station, even when you include the Subway. And yet none of the infamous delays and crowding. Eagle-eyed observers will see that only one transit service, Métro Line 11 in brown at the bottom, terminates here. The rest of them are through trains, which eliminate at-grade crossings and other attendant difficulties. At the moment, only some Northeast Regional and Acela trains can pass through Penn Station. NJ Transit has to turn back around through the crumbling tunnels, and LIRR trains need to make their own set of complex u-turns. Meanwhile, you can’t take a train from Albany to points south of New York City without turning around in Sunnyside, Queens. It’s hardly a new observation that through trains would massively improve the situation at Penn, but it bears repeating.
So what precisely do we do now? New York State’s rail situation slides between incompetent, corrupt, wildly overpriced, and fun combinations of all three. This is an area where we should be leading the country, not shooting ourselves in the face. But that’s kind of the point of this blog: Solutions exist. Human-centric, rational answers can be found, and with dedication can be implemented; the kernels of these solutions already exist, everywhere from Buffalo to Brookhaven. The best and worst part of this is that these problems are hardly New York-specific, which is to say we aren’t uniquely bad at solving city problems, and there are partners in finding our way out of the dysfunction. Based on my knowledge, I’ll be focusing on New York and Illinois for most of this blog, but it’s absolutely a national issue. (Huh. Apparently this is an introductory post.)
Our country was built on the foundation of local laboratories for democracy. We owe it to ourselves, to our forebearers, and to our descendants to make the most of that and build a truly American vision for the future. So let’s build that train and ride it together.
