How to Fix Penn Station

Brian Laird on WNYC. If you haven't heard, a Long Island Railroad strike could be heading our way as early as this weekend. What are the issues between the MTA? and the unions. If you haven't heard, President Trump is trying to put his stamp on redevelopment of Penn Station. What would that look like? Now we turn to some of the latest news in transit, especially on those things, as seen by the think tank that tries to center the interests of the whole Greater New York, New Jersey region, the Regional Plan Association. Back in April of last year, the Trump administration took control in a way of the Penn Station rebuild from the MTA, and they assigned Amtrak. And remember Andy Byford? They assigned Andy Byford. Somehow he's like the political, everybody loves him, you know, the universal donor of politics. Everybody loves Andy Byford. Seems like on the left, on the right, the former New York City transit president, he's leading the project. A master developer is expected to be chosen this month, some company or another. The Federal Railroad Administration has commissioned an 18-month service optimization study on this idea of through-running in order to unlock greater capacity within the extation footprint. What is through running? Well, instead of having NJ Transit and the LIRR and at Penn Station and turn around, they would pass through in a new regional system. You could go from, I don't know, Mineola to Montclair without getting off the train. So the Regional Plan Association is a nearly century-old nonprofit research and advocacy organization focused primarily on transportation and infrastructure policy in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut metropolitan region. They've been deeply involved in the Penn Station and Gateway Project debates for years. Their new report lands in a pretty heated debate. between those like Andy Biford who believe through running is a good idea, and those like the RPA who argue physical expansion is the key. We'll explain what that means. Meanwhile, the union representing Long Island Railroad employees and the MTA are set to resume talks to avoid a strike that could affect so many thousands of writers. The shutdown could begin as soon as this Saturday. We are told, so joining us now to talk about all of this. is Tom Wright, CEO, and president of the Regional Plan Association. Tom, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC. Thanks, Brian. It's always a pleasure to be with you. Would you remind us how, if I put it right in the intro, the Trump administration took control of the redevelopment of Penn Station from the MTA? Sure. I mean, so this is all connected, of course, to the new tunnels under the Hudson River. And I think just for your listeners, you should understand. People have been trying to fix Penn Station, you know, almost ever since it got torn down, you know, 50 years ago.

But really, it started heating up as the Gateway Project, which is building two new tracks under the Hudson River, which will then allow Amtrak to renovate the existing tracks and essentially double capacity under the Hudson River. That project is underway. It's a $16 billion project. The federal government is funding about three quarters of it now. And as that project is moving forward, The railroads, Amtrak, which owns Penn Station, the MTA in New Jersey Transit several years ago started a kind of two-step process to think about what are we going to do to try and renovate the existing Penn Station to make it a suitable place for more commuters? And what are we going to do about the capacity that we're going to need when we double the number of trains coming from under the Hudson River? And so there was a kind of process going forward with... advisory groups that I and others were on and the railroads had consultants working on them. Essentially what happened about a year ago was the Trump administration kind of stepped in, I guess I should say too, and the MTA was kind of leading the renovation plans for Penn Station. They'd done a very a successful job with the Long Island Railroad Concourse and fixing that up. And so they were kind of leading the charge and figuring out how best to try and renovate Penn Station and get whatever additional capacity could be gotten out of the existing footprint and the existing system there. Meanwhile, Amtrak and New Jersey Transit were kind of focused on, okay, how are we going to handle? twice as many trains coming in. And what happened a year ago was really that the Trump administration said, well, wait a minute, Amtrak owns Penn Station. It's a federal asset. Let's focus on that first. And they started this process that we expect we'll have some major milestones in just a couple of weeks where they started a kind of procurement process to invite private bidders, private companies to come in under what we would call a public-private partnership. to make proposals for how they would fix Penn Station or transform it. On this additional capacity that would be needed, you know, a lot of people who are not very involved have heard this term, the gateway tunnel. And maybe they know President Trump is using it as kind of a political football, right? It's this big project that's been in the work for maybe decades to increase capacity between New Jersey and Penn Station. And, you know, it needs federal funding. It's got some federal funding, Trump. pulls it, puts it back, pulls it puts it back, it goes to court, you know, trying to punish New York and New Jersey over things having nothing to do with transportation, DEI, whatever. But is it really up to 90 trains per hour once it gets completed or is the Gateway Tunnel just...

you know, and continue to grow. There are about five million jobs in New York City right now. About a million of them are occupied by people commuting from outside the five boroughs. And about half of those are now coming from New Jersey and most of the growth again. So it's really very important that we get all of the capacity we can. You threw out some numbers earlier. I'll just say right now the capacity is about 24 trains an hour under the Hudson River. There are more coming through the four tunnels under the east. But just if you look west from Penn Station, it's about 24 trains an hour under the 115-year-old Hudson River North River tunnels. So 24 are coming from Jersey and that will go to 90? No, that'll go. The goal is to double it to 48. I see. I think 90 you're probably combining the East River. tunnels to that. Ah, right. I see. Between the Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit, that would be 90 going to Penn Station. Okay, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, essentially the question becomes we're building a tunnel that will allow us to double the number of trains under the Hudson River. Do we have a station that can handle? twice as many trains under the river. And as you talked about in your introduction, in the next few weeks, we're going to see the results of the procurement process that Andy Byford has been, I think, doing a very admirable job leading. And a team will be selected. And they'll start to go through a public review process and environmental impact statement and all of that. At the same time, the Federal Railroad Administration has commissioned consultants to kind of look at regional connectivity and capacity and see what they can do. It was actually a two-part process they were commissioned. The first part was to figure out what improvements can be made to Penn Station to try and create, you know, essentially squeeze more capacity out of the existing footprint of it. And then the second part, which I believe they've just embarked on recently, is to look at the entire regional connection. and, you know, would additional rail yards improve capacity and what other kinds of things are necessary to make the system work better? All right, let's get to this debate. about the best path forward. This is you versus Andy Byford. I won't agree with that. I'm sorry. I don't think Andy and I are actually in violent disagreement about this. Okay, so let me tell you the way I've read it, and you can correct me. My understanding was that Andy Byford, the former New York City Transit Chief, who President Trump has tapped to be sort of the federal lead on redoing Penn Station. He thinks that they can squeeze more capacity out of the existing Penn Station through what's called through running. That trains would not end at Penn Station, both Long Island Railroad trains and New Jersey Transit trains. Maybe the distinction would be lost. You could go from Huntington to Hazlitt or Montauk to Montclair. I don't know, pick your alliteration. On the other side, so to speak,

I thought was your report that calls for a different kind of expansion, but that through running like that would force them to widen the platforms too much at Penn Station and stuff. So you tell me, what is it actually? Yeah, sure, sure. So here's kind of the thing. And I get that, like, I'm here the representative of the Regional Plan Association. people would kind of expect me to come in and say yes absolutely like connecting eastern long island to central new jersey is a huge priority and that's what we ought to do it wouldn't be that great to kind of connect the region together But here's the simple problem, kind of, and the challenge we face here. New York, the tri-state metropolitan region, the mother load of jobs, the greatest amount of prosperity, is still concentrated in the core of the region, in Midtown Manhattan and Lower Manhattan. And the job of our commuter rail system is still primarily to get... the many, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of commuters and travelers from the periphery of the region into the core each day to earn a living, to earn wages, and then bring that money back to their home communities. Intuitively, I have to say, that makes sense to me, because... You know, Manhattan is where presumably the commuters are going, both from New Jersey and Long Island. Who's really going from C. Talket to C caucus? You like that one? You know, does anybody actually do that? Right, right, exactly. New Rochelle to New Brunswick. The answer is very few people to us. That's Metro North. Don't confuse people. But that's exactly the question, Brian. Because, you know, for each person doing that reverse commute in the morning, you know, it's roughly looking at the numbers. It's probably about 100 to one ratio in terms of people who are traveling into the core of the region in the morning to take a job and then traveling in the east. evening back out. And so the demand on the system is not balanced. And if every train that started in, say, Trenton, New Jersey was traveling through the core of the region and then continuing on to eastern Long Island, you would be running a lot of empty trains out of New York City in the morning and a lot of empty trains into New York City in the evening because the demand just isn't there. And so what the railroads do is that, and by the way, you know, Metro North, Long Island Railroad and New Jersey Transit are all trying to squeeze every bit of capacity they can out of the existing rolling stock and the legacy systems that they own. And what they do is they prioritize.

those commutes. They prioritize getting as many people in in the morning on a one-seat ride as quickly as possible. And especially if they're coming from further out, they try and give them express service so that they don't have to make all the local stops. And in the evening, they do the reverse of that. So, and you asked, like, how many people would be doing? What was it you said? Satakot to Secauccas. The caucus or something like that. You know, there's a, there's just a handful of people trying to do that. Whereas today, there are, say, we'll look at the Raritan Valley line in New Jersey. That is an historic line that runs through a lot of kind of traditional downtowns, transit village locations, that has over 20,000 daily riders on it today, and they don't get a one-seat ride into Manhattan. And the reason they don't get it, they run off-peak, they run a few trains directly into Manhattan, but only when it's off-peak because they don't have capacity under the Hudson River. And when they build the Gateway Tunnel, the Cercus, the Raritan Valley line, the Bergen and Main lines up in northern New Jersey, the passengers on those lines who currently have to transfer, either in Secaucus or Newark, could be getting a one-seat ride into New York Penn Station where they're trying to go, but only if there's sufficient capacity under the river, which gateway will address and then at New York Penn Station. And so this is where the argument comes out. It's not really, I mean, through running is a great operational thing and it would be marginally an improvement. And it probably can get you a little more capacity. I mean, I do think that the emphasis that Andy is doing appropriately with this transformation, and I think that out of the bidding process, A team is going to come forward, and they're going to talk about ways to try and improve the station. They're going to take out the B level, so there's one big concourse. They're going to remove columns from the platforms to the extent they can so that there's more space on platforms. They're going to add staircases. And all of that is going to do is hopefully reduce the dwell time so the trains can get in and out more quickly. But at the end of the day, that's going to be a long way from doubling capacity at Penn Station. And that's why. why we wrote our report yeah so let me just give you one and a byford quote because because let's say uh before i read the quote you know let's say you do want to go from long beach to long branch good one right if He says if the trains spend less time on the platform, then you can run more trains through. There are a lot of reasons why I think through running should be explored. Our transportation reporter Stephen Nesson quoted Bifert saying that in November. Yeah, yeah. And I guess here's where I'll try to massage the difference. I think it should be explored too, and it may be a way of creating some more capacity. But you'd have to bring Andy onto your show to ask him. But my guess is that if you asked Andy Biford, point blank, do you think that through running can...

double the capacity at Penn Station. I'll just say, I don't think that that would come close to getting it. I think you'd still have a very large gap between the capacity that Gateway is going to create and what the station kit handle. Let me give you a couple. A lot of folks who are proponents of through running, they talk about international kind of best practices. And if they're doing it in London and Paris, why aren't we doing it here? And there are a couple of really important distinctions that I think people need to understand about those other world cities. I mean, for one thing, they tend to be the commutes in those other cities tend to be shorter trips so that their train lines, they're more like kind of subways where people can be standing. New Jersey Transit, Long Island Railroad commuter riders tend to be coming from quite far out on fairly long trips that can be 45 minutes or longer. They really, they don't want to stand that whole trip. They want to seat. They want to be able to work on their computer, other things. in all those other kind of world cities, there are, their CBDs, their downtowns are kind of distributed along a line. And so the trains come in and they make one stop and maybe 20% of the people get off and some other people get on. They make another stop, another 20% get off and on, etc. You know, they might be making five or six stops in the core. In New York City, you know, it's Penn Station, essentially. If we could create a stop on the east side for New Jersey transit riders, they'd love it. But basically, this isn't going to connect lower Manhattan. And Metro North and New Jersey and Long Island Railroad riders can already go to Grand Central on a different line. So... So it's a very different kind of animal because essentially it's one stop where the entire train is going to end up. And then, sorry, go ahead. No, well, did you want to finish a thought real quick? Then I have an interesting looking call or ready to go. Oh, okay. I'll just say that two other things about those international precedents. Another is that our lines are kind of... There are 10 different lines in New Jersey that come into Penn Station and then go out to between Metro North and Long Island Railroad, 11 different lines. And so whenever you kind of try to make a pairing up and say, well, Sukakis to Satakit or something else like that, well, that... that passenger only cares if that line starts where they on the line they care about and goes to the line they care about. The Elizabeth line in London, for instance, is one single line that runs kind of east to west across all of Greater London. And so anybody getting on it is going to go to all the other destinations on it. Whereas what you've got to think about is that the timetable for a through running operation in the tri-state metropolitan region,

the chance that your train is picking you up where you want to go and taking you where you want to go, it's really going to be a pretty poor service because, you know, 10 other trains are going to be going somewhere else and you don't care about those destinations. And so... Rather than one train every two or three hours, you're more likely to say, I'll just take the first express into New York, give me a nice clean transfer, and then I'll take the next train out to where I want to go. Let me take one kind of high concept, very high concept, I think, question from Jenny and Brooklyn. Then I'm going to ask you about the prospects for a Long Island railroad strike as early as this Saturday, and then we're out of time. Jenny, you're on WNYC. Hello. Hello, first time, long time. Thank you. I'm loving your guest, and I love this topic. My question, not so high concept, is just about how much we expect people to continue to commute into New York City for jobs as we look ahead. I work in HR. I think return to office is clinging to the past. I realize there are lots of kinds of jobs in New York, but it sounds like you're building infrastructure that you also projected 30 years ago we would need. Congratulations on being right three out of four. There's nothing like saying I told you so. But are we going to continue to need this degree of transit into New York? I think that's extremely about as high concept as you can get when you're talking about commuter transportation. Is Manhattan going to continue to be the jobs hug in the remote work era, in the general decentralization era that's started ever since the internet, made it more possible for finance or other sectors to work in multiple cities? Is it going to be like this going forward? Do you have a projection? We do, actually. And it's a wonderful question. And I'm going to cite from my colleague's work, it's a report on our website that folks can go to called commuter dividend. Because we asked exactly that as we were coming out of COVID. You know, essentially it's like, is the region going to flatten out? And people are going to work from home and so they don't travel as much. So do we not need, you know, the new gateway tunnel or any of this? What we found, so what we did was we all know that people are traveling, say, less frequently, that if you live in Long Island and your job is located in New York City, you may, you know, 10 years ago you were going in five days a week, and today you might be going in two, three or four days a week instead. And of course, the data reflects that in terms of the ridership on the system. In fact, you know, whether it's subway or commuter rail or even Amtrak. what we're seeing is kind of people ride more for leisure and other things, but still overall ridership is still down. But here's the key question we asked is, what's the economic relationship between like the suburban communities between southwestern Connecticut and New York City? Are fewer people going in and is there less of a connection between the two? And so we looked at payroll data, not a number of daily riders, say, on Metro North.

But how many people in southwestern Connecticut or Long Island or the Hudson Valley earned their living from a job that's located in New York City? And it was pretty shocking. What we saw, and this is 2022 data, we're trying to update it now, but I think it's probably still pretty strong, is that if you compared pre-COVID to post-COVID, The amount of household income in the suburbs that was derived from a job that was located in New York City increased, did not decrease, but went up in both absolute and relative terms, which is to say that more of the wealth in northern New Jersey today is derived from a job located in New York City. than it was 10 years ago in absolute and relative terms. And when you think about it, not from the New York City perspective, but think about it from the suburban perspective, if you live in Long Island and you're offered a job in New York City today, well, 10 years ago, that meant schlepping five days a week in and out. But today it may only mean three days a week. And that job is really quite attractive. And New York City continues to be the great... generator of prosperity, the greatest invention for human prosperity that our species has ever created. And creativity and innovation all flourish there. And so access to New York City is absolutely going to continue to be a priority in something very important. But I really love that question. We're going to have to pull that clip and play it like every day. How did you put it? New York is the greatest. Invention, can you recreate it? I think New York City is the greatest invention to create and generate human prosperity that our species has ever invented. Wow. All right. We have a minute left. We're going to probably have to do a separate segment later in the week on this prospective Long Island Railroad strike, perhaps on Saturday. And it actually ties to your through-running concept between Long Island and New Jersey, but it's also about labor, I mean about wages, but also involves the question of work rules. So give us the one-minute version, then we're out of time. Sure, I would say we're all very concerned in hoping that the MTA and the Long Island Railroad can strike a deal. We saw this last year with New Jersey Transit and the train engineers there too. And of course, commuters are the ones who suffer the most. I do think it's really important to try and see what can we do to try and make operations more efficient and make sure that we're kind of keeping. commuter rail and transit on a sustainable financial path is something really important to do. Tom Wright, President and CEO of the Regional Plan Association, Think Tank and Advocacy Organization. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me, Brian Lehrer on WNYC, Kimberly Williams Dan Crenshaw, who invented the term critical race theory and the term intersectionality.

Coming up after the news with a new memoir. First, we have the latest news with Michael Hill, including news, and I think it's not good, from the U.S. Tehran negotiations. How, Michael, what's happening? Good morning, Brian, the United States and Iran are in a deepening standoff after President Trump rejected Tehran's letter to end the war. Officials have told the Associated Press the proposal included some concessions on its disputed nuclear program. The stall diplomacy and recent exchanges of fire could tip the Middle East back into open warfare and prolong the worldwide energy crisis sparked by the conflict. Iran's chokehold in the Strait of Hormuz and America's blockade of Iranian ports are... still in place. President Trump is expected to use a trip this week to China to urge it to pressure Iran, but the U.S. and Iran remain far apart on a host of issues. The California man accused of storming the White House Correspondents Association dinner while armed with guns and knives has pleaded not guilty to trying to kill President Trump. Also, Cole Thomas Allen's lawyers have asked the judge to disqualify acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro from handling the case because there are potential witnesses. Republicans and Democrats are locked in a fight to redraw the U.S. congressional maps before this falls midterm elections. A growing number of Democrats are pushing for New York to get into the redistricting fight. Brooklyn Democrat and Congress member Yvette Clark tells ABC she supports that effort. We cannot unilaterally disarm in a situation like this. What we're seeing is a distortion of the political landscape in the United States of America. State lawmakers say redistricting is more cumbersome in New York than in some other states. That means the earliest voters here would face an election with new maps is 2028. New York City will convert blocks near 50 schools into car-free streets for kids to play soccer and enjoy other activities ahead of this year's World Cup. Mayor Zohran Mamdani says New Yorkers should be able to take part in the festivities for the tournament, even if they can't afford tickets to the games. City Hall officials say the initiative already has started and will run through the end of the school year on June 26. Schools interested in getting an open street can contact the nonprofit organization. Lab for more information. The New York Knicks are heading to the Eastern Conference Finals for the second straight year. They swept the Philadelphia 76ers with a barrage of three-pointers. Another dominating win for the Knicks, 144 to 114, and it really wasn't that close. The Knicks now wait the winner of the Detroit Cleveland Series.

Upper 50s now, some sunshine, some clouds too, mostly cloudy today in mid-60s for high temperatures. Tomorrow's sunny and 68 Wednesday, afternoon showers likely, mid-60s, and high gusting winds. Michael Hill, WNYC News.