Governor Cuomo Proposes Penn Station Redesign. Does his plan go far enough?

A rendering of the James A. Farley Post Office as Moynihan Station, after its completion. (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/nyregion/penn-station-new-york-andrew-cuomo.html)

Recently, the Governor of New York State, Andrew M. Cuomo, announced a plan to revamp and revitalize Penn Station. His proposal includes moving Amtrak and a portion of Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) train traffic across the street to the station taking shape in the James A. Farley Post Office, which will be renamed Moynihan Station following its re-purposing. He also opened bidding for the redesign of Penn Station itself.

The Governor’s announcement represents a big step forward in a process that has consumed at least two decades’ worth of efforts, among them many false starts, to re-design and alleviate traffic at Penn Station. However, his proposal is still not a comprehensive fix to Penn Station’s problems, and affects just a small portion of the riders that travel daily through the station.

The neighborhood around Penn Station, which sits beneath Madison Square Garden. The proposed Moynihan Station sits across the street in the current James A. Farley Post Office building. (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/30/opinion/penn-station-reborn.html?_r=0)

Penn Station is the busiest transit hub in the Western hemisphere, serving approximately 650,000 Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), New Jersey Transit, New York City subway and Amtrak passengers daily, which is triple the number it was originally designed to accommodate. In the Governor’s proposal for the station, he indicated that not all LIRR service, accounting for 230,00 daily riders, will move to Moynihan. He has been unwilling to provide an estimate on the exact number that would. Amtrak, for its part, accounts for just 30,000 passengers daily. These figures represent a drop in the bucket as a portion of total daily ridership passing through the terminal.

With both the city and state on board to effect significant change to conditions at the station, and just a ten year permit issued to Madison Square Garden for the site atop Penn Station, there exists a perhaps unprecedented opportunity to put forth an even more forward thinking, comprehensive proposal to alleviate the ills plaguing Penn Station. In a recent New York Times Op/Ed, Vishaan Chakrabarti, founder of New York architecture firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, and a veteran of earlier Penn Station refurbishment proposals, succinctly sums up the dilemma posed by the current proposal: Can we go further than what the governor is doing? What would it take to truly transform Penn Station?

References:

Cuomo's Vision for Revamped Penn Station: New Home for Amtrak and L.I.R.R.

Penn Station Reborn