Heavy rail investment in the 21^st Century

The new Grand Central Madison Train Station is a success. The Moynihan Trail Hall is not. Why? Because GCM is a useful, efficient train station. Both had the challenge of fitting new railroad equipment in between decades of development of urban infrastructure – a near impossible task.

 Moynihan is an inconveniently located facility, with clunky access to the western end of the former Pennsylvania Railroad train platforms. By contrast, GCM can be accessed to the street from a number of nodes between 42^nd Street and 48^th Street. There are somewhat squirrelly passageways that lead both to Grand Central Terminal and the Times Square Shuttle Platform. There is a huge amount of space in the new station to accommodate commuter movement. The new GCM track cleverly goes to an East River tunnel through two double decker tubes, creating four new platforms with service to Jamaica Station in Queens, where one can make the proverbial “change at Jamaica.” It should be a boon to Long Island commuters, once they figure out how to use it, and overcome their innate resistance to change. It greatly expands access for Long Island commuters to Manhattan transit centers. 

It’s a stroke of brilliant engineering that much of this thing has been squeezed in underground to the WEST of the current Grand Central. I had always assumed that the East End Access project would be EAST of Grand Central. But, no, the engineers have put the concourse deep under Vanderbilt Avenue. Given that the track tunnels were dug into the Manhattan schist, there is no sunlight to the concourse, mezzanine and platforms – unlike the skylit Moynihan, which is that facility’s best feature. But the station is decorated with a number of mosaics and other displays from the MTA’s essential and successful Arts in Transit program – which pop and contribute greatly to the bright, active atmosphere of the project (as they also do somewhat less visibly at Moynihan).

And, no, it does not take a long time to get to the platforms – which is the first comment I heard from early users. I clocked it at nine minutes from the information booth in Grand Central to the platform, including the time to purchase a ticket from a concourse machine. That’s probably less than half the time it takes walk from 7^th Avenue to Moynihan (the worst feature of which is the cumbersome need to go down and then up stairs to get under 8^th Avenue to reach the train hall). GCM is smack in the middle of town. And the corridors and vertical transportation have been designed for relatively easy access to the capacious and well-lit platforms. 

The problems: there are quite a few. First is that after years, actually decades of delay, the project was delivered on the tail of the COVID pandemic which has decimated commuter rail ridership. Was this $11 billion investment wise given the changes in commuting patterns? It’s impossible to predict the trends in future LIRR customer use, so we can’t know now (and couldn’t have known about the pandemic before).  Given, that social patterns tend to regress to the mean over time, and the likely population growth in Queens, Nassau and particularly Suffolk counties the answer could be “yes.” We’ll have to wait it out. $11 billion is a big number.

As in Moynihan, there is almost no place to sit. That is a mistake. Public spaces should not be designed around an inability to program, maintain and police them. Adequate resources should be expended on programing, maintenance, social services and public safety sufficient to make waiting comfortably for trains possible. It’s just not that difficult – and is essential to make this gigantic investment successful.

Grand Central Terminal and Grand Central Madison are run by two different railroads, which should be invisible to the commuter – but it’s not. When I asked a Metro North ticket seller in Grand Central Terminal how to get to Grand Central Madison, he told me that there was no such place. The wayfinding signs and nodes of interconnection between the two stations are not obvious or seamless.  There are many street entrances to GCM, but to get from Metro North Grand Central to LIRR Grand Central, you go down the stairs on the west side of the Terminal to the food court. You do a 180 back behind the stairs you just came down, down a shortish escalator and through a set of the kind of skanky doors that one finds at Penn Station and Atlantic Terminal to get to the GCM Concourse under Vanderbilt. The big drop in depth is on the escalator from the Concourse to the Mezzanine and Tracks deep below Park Avenue. 

Another, personal gripe, is the small, hard to find entrance from the subway (and GCM) to S.L. Green’s new One Vanderbilt skyscraper adjacent to GCT on 42^nd Street, which was locked when I tried to use it. I reported same to the excellent MTA boss, Janno Lieber, who was very kind to look into it. Once, it was considered an amenity to have direct access from the subway to the Greybar, Chrysler, Chanin, Pershing Square and Lincoln Buildings – but I guess not to the asset managers of S.L. Green, who don’t want the hoi palloi in their cold, quadruple height, 30’s Italian design lobby. Of course, one change in the world due to Zoom and COVID is that very few people are visitors to office buildings they don’t work in.

As I write, the ever predictable, but factually unreliable New York Post, has stirred up complaints about the transfer situation in Jamaica. Commuters to Brooklyn have been quoted to be incensed about the changes in service between Brooklyn Terminal to Jamaica and points East. The new service is something former LIRR President Helena Williams called “The Scoot.” The idea was a frequent shuttle between Brooklyn and Jamaica’s downtowns to a dedicated platform in Jamaica, replacing more occasional service to Far Rockaway and a couple of other LIRR eastern terminals from Atlantic Terminal. On my visit to Jamaica from GCM, the Scoot system didn’t seem to yet be fully operational on the new platform serving tracks 11 and 12 (at the south of Jamacia Station near AirTrain), which are devoted to only Brooklyn service (there is also an art installation next to the stairs down to the new platforms. I had a great experience as a member of the committee that selected the artwork [about ten years ago!]). Brooklyn service was still leaving from track 3 going west-bound. Once this change is fully implemented it should be yet another improvement for LIRR riders with no downside; like the new Midtown East option at GCM.

So far the “Dashing Dan’s” of the LIRR (a long retired moniker) seem to be a pretty inflexible, change resistant and crabby bunch. Billions of dollars have been spent to ease their commute to Manhattan, including on the not yet completed third track of the main line, on top of their highly subsidized daily ride (more per ride than on the NYC subway). Long Islanders – talk less, smile more!

The big issues arising out of the billions spent on East End Access, Moynihan Station and the Second Avenue Subway (among other mega-projects) is what to do about heavy rail projects in the 21^st Century, given that heavy rail is a 19^th Century technology that has become absurdly expensive to build. An old friend of mine, one of the country’s leading railroad attorneys, coined the term “FRN” – fucking railroad nuts – to describe a species of human being with an irrational attachment to heavy rail. These people think that trains are the solution to every human problem from curing cancer to solving who killed Judge Crater. They want to build high speed rail from LA to San Francisco and solve upstate New York’s economic problems by expanding passenger service on old New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad rights of way. The numbers never work, mostly because squeezing new rights of way and tracks in between existing development faces tremendous (even overwhelming) political, cost and engineering challenges in a world that is already built out. They point to Europe which has great inter-city train service where there are dense networks of in-place rights of way that have either never existed in America or were replaced with highways decades ago. And they point to China, which has built out extensive systems of high-speed rail in recent years. The Chinese projects have been built without much regard to pre-existing property rights, sensitivity to environmental issues or concern about the welfare of construction workers. They have also experienced calamitous issues of construction quality once operational. Rightly, those circumstances will never fly here. Personal idiosyncrasy doesn’t make for good public policy – no matter how often and articulately expressed by otherwise “serious people.”

Heavy rail projects in the United States, particularly in the dense Northeast, seem to make sense either to maintain existing routes (like the Gateway project, replacing antiquated rail tunnels under the Hudson) or to efficiently expand on in-place assets (presumably like the LIRR third track). The decisions to proceed with such super-expensive service expansions need to be made with care after serious analysis of their projected economic (as opposed to political) benefits. Does Grand Central Madison pass this test? I, for one, don’t know. But that decision was made at least two decades ago, and the engineers for the MTA have made the best of it. Long Islanders, show a little gratitude, will ya?