By Yoav Hagler, Associate Planner, RPA
I recently found myself outside on a cold platform in Newark Penn station waiting for a train to bring me the ten miles home to Manhattan. I had a ticket in my hand when a half empty train pulled up. The doors opened and a couple of people stepped off, but neither I nor the handful of other people also waiting on that platform, got on. Ten minutes later another train pulled into the station, and we all boarded it.
This isn't the beginning of a riddle. It's a description of rail service on the Northeast Corridor (NEC).
Right now, there are three rail options that take passengers from Newark Penn station to Manhattan. For a buck seventy-five, you can take the PATH train from Newark to the financial district in Manhattan, stopping in Harrison and Jersey City along the way. For four bucks you can take a New Jersey Transit train from Newark Penn station to New York Penn station, non-stop. It takes about 20 minutes. The final option is to make that same 20-minute journey between the two Penn stations on Amtrak for about 40 bucks.
That was the first train that pulled through the station. I, along with everyone else on the platform that evening, decided to save the $36 and wait for a New Jersey Transit train. This made sense for us, but is it sensible in a wider sense to leave people sitting on a platform watching a half empty train enter and leave the station?
Several weeks after my experience on that cold Newark platform, I was standing in the other Penn Station, the one in midtown Manhattan, waiting for a delayed Amtrak train to DC. It was delayed due to a stalled New Jersey Transit train in the tunnel under the Hudson. After waiting in the station for over an hour, and making the calculation that I didn't have a chance to make my meeting in DC, I decided to head downtown to work, arriving two hours late. While I was heading to my office, no doubt there were countless commuters on the other side of the river sitting idly on trains, losing valuable hours of productivity.
Isn't there a better way to run and utilize such a valuable asset as the Northeast rail corridor?
Turns out, the answer is yes, there are ways we can start ending these quizzical situations.
Targeted investments in choke points along the corridor, which reduce speeds to a crawl, are a great first step. Eliminating these choke points is a more productive use of Amtrak's dollars than focusing on European-style high speeds.
Here's one example: There are rail tunnels in Baltimore that were built before the turn of last century, with a grade that's too steep and turns that are too sharp. The top speed in these tunnels is 30 mph. Now let's do some math to show something that may be counter intuitive. Upgrading a 2-mile stretch of track from 30 mph to 90 mph will save almost 3 minutes in travel time. Making that same 60 mph improvement from 90 to 150 mph (the speed Amtrak plans to upgrade most of the southern half of the corridor) would require upgrading 10 miles of track (5 times the length of upgrading the Baltimore bottleneck) to reach the same time savings. Going from 150 to 210 would require upgrading 27 miles of track (nearly 14 times the length) to achieve that same 3-minute reduction.
These types of investments can also be found in the approaches to Philadelphia's 30th Street station and in Elizabeth, NJ. And why does it take 20 minutes to go 10 miles from Newark to New York? These investments in a fraction of the total track length can make significant reductions in intercity trip time, while expanding capacity for intercity and commuter services.
What does this have to do with me waiting on a cold platform in Newark or in a crowded waiting room in New York? Well, if we invest in these bottlenecks, we can also improve reliability and provide redundancy, ensuring that when a train does break down, its does not cripple the entire corridor and the economies of all the cities that depend on it.
But it will take more than opening up the physical bottlenecks. We need to unclog the institutional ones as well.
This brings us to the second way to improve the NEC: streamline connectivity of the existing routes.
What if I were able to board the first train that came by no matter what logo it had on the outside? This would effectively add capacity to the commuter system of the New York metro region without adding a single extra train. What if the intercity and commuter trains on the corridor were a single system that ran at transit headways in the metro areas offering local service (with multiple stops within metro areas), intermediate service (stopping at most population centers) and express service (only stopping at the major centers). What if this integrated commuter/intercity service ran only on the corridor, and there were timed connections to offer seamless transfers at the branch line interchanges, like Philadelphia and New Haven? This would simplify the schedule, add capacity to the corridor, and improve connectivity to places off the corridor, like Harrisburg, Hartford, and Springfield - all with minimal capital investment.
There are well over 200 Metro-North trains each day between New York and Connecticut on the NEC destined for Stamford, Bridgeport, and New Haven, plus an additional 42 Amtrak trains. There are more than 300 NJ Transit trains between New York and Newark, more than 100 of which make it all the way to Trenton, plus an additional to 111 Amtrak trains. We may not even have to add a single train to the system to achieve this type of service; we just need to rethink how we operate the most valuable assets we already have.
The financing structure of this arrangement is complicated and best kept for a separate discussion, however, the important point is that for users of the system, the local, intermediate, and express services would be seamless. The passenger would merely select their desired destination from a single ticketing system and let the agencies deal with how that revenue gets allocated behind the scenes. For business travel between New York and DC, there would be the express. For travel between Bridgeport, CT and New Brunswick NJ, users would no longer have to take Metro-North to Grand Central, then the cross town shuttle to the 1 train to Penn Station where they could pick up a New Jersey Transit train to their destination. They would just hop on the intermediate. And to get from Newark to New York a passenger could just hop on the first train that came by.
What we need to do is begin with the bottlenecks - the physical ones, and more importantly the institutional ones that condemn us to dealing with a fragmented system and condemn me to an extra 10 minutes on a cold platform in Newark.
This vision of a free-running and efficient transit system on every level may seem either romantic or unachievable, but it is neither. It simply requires belief that rationality is stronger than the status quo.
I recently found myself outside on a cold platform in Newark Penn station waiting for a train to bring me the ten miles home to Manhattan. I had a ticket in my hand when a half empty train pulled up. The doors opened and a couple of people stepped off, but neither I nor the handful of other people also waiting on that platform, got on. Ten minutes later another train pulled into the station, and we all boarded it.
This isn't the beginning of a riddle. It's a description of rail service on the Northeast Corridor (NEC).
Right now, there are three rail options that take passengers from Newark Penn station to Manhattan. For a buck seventy-five, you can take the PATH train from Newark to the financial district in Manhattan, stopping in Harrison and Jersey City along the way. For four bucks you can take a New Jersey Transit train from Newark Penn station to New York Penn station, non-stop. It takes about 20 minutes. The final option is to make that same 20-minute journey between the two Penn stations on Amtrak for about 40 bucks.
That was the first train that pulled through the station. I, along with everyone else on the platform that evening, decided to save the $36 and wait for a New Jersey Transit train. This made sense for us, but is it sensible in a wider sense to leave people sitting on a platform watching a half empty train enter and leave the station?
Several weeks after my experience on that cold Newark platform, I was standing in the other Penn Station, the one in midtown Manhattan, waiting for a delayed Amtrak train to DC. It was delayed due to a stalled New Jersey Transit train in the tunnel under the Hudson. After waiting in the station for over an hour, and making the calculation that I didn't have a chance to make my meeting in DC, I decided to head downtown to work, arriving two hours late. While I was heading to my office, no doubt there were countless commuters on the other side of the river sitting idly on trains, losing valuable hours of productivity.
Isn't there a better way to run and utilize such a valuable asset as the Northeast rail corridor?
Turns out, the answer is yes, there are ways we can start ending these quizzical situations.
Targeted investments in choke points along the corridor, which reduce speeds to a crawl, are a great first step. Eliminating these choke points is a more productive use of Amtrak's dollars than focusing on European-style high speeds.
Here's one example: There are rail tunnels in Baltimore that were built before the turn of last century, with a grade that's too steep and turns that are too sharp. The top speed in these tunnels is 30 mph. Now let's do some math to show something that may be counter intuitive. Upgrading a 2-mile stretch of track from 30 mph to 90 mph will save almost 3 minutes in travel time. Making that same 60 mph improvement from 90 to 150 mph (the speed Amtrak plans to upgrade most of the southern half of the corridor) would require upgrading 10 miles of track (5 times the length of upgrading the Baltimore bottleneck) to reach the same time savings. Going from 150 to 210 would require upgrading 27 miles of track (nearly 14 times the length) to achieve that same 3-minute reduction.
These types of investments can also be found in the approaches to Philadelphia's 30th Street station and in Elizabeth, NJ. And why does it take 20 minutes to go 10 miles from Newark to New York? These investments in a fraction of the total track length can make significant reductions in intercity trip time, while expanding capacity for intercity and commuter services.
What does this have to do with me waiting on a cold platform in Newark or in a crowded waiting room in New York? Well, if we invest in these bottlenecks, we can also improve reliability and provide redundancy, ensuring that when a train does break down, its does not cripple the entire corridor and the economies of all the cities that depend on it.
But it will take more than opening up the physical bottlenecks. We need to unclog the institutional ones as well.
This brings us to the second way to improve the NEC: streamline connectivity of the existing routes.
What if I were able to board the first train that came by no matter what logo it had on the outside? This would effectively add capacity to the commuter system of the New York metro region without adding a single extra train. What if the intercity and commuter trains on the corridor were a single system that ran at transit headways in the metro areas offering local service (with multiple stops within metro areas), intermediate service (stopping at most population centers) and express service (only stopping at the major centers). What if this integrated commuter/intercity service ran only on the corridor, and there were timed connections to offer seamless transfers at the branch line interchanges, like Philadelphia and New Haven? This would simplify the schedule, add capacity to the corridor, and improve connectivity to places off the corridor, like Harrisburg, Hartford, and Springfield - all with minimal capital investment.
There are well over 200 Metro-North trains each day between New York and Connecticut on the NEC destined for Stamford, Bridgeport, and New Haven, plus an additional 42 Amtrak trains. There are more than 300 NJ Transit trains between New York and Newark, more than 100 of which make it all the way to Trenton, plus an additional to 111 Amtrak trains. We may not even have to add a single train to the system to achieve this type of service; we just need to rethink how we operate the most valuable assets we already have.
The financing structure of this arrangement is complicated and best kept for a separate discussion, however, the important point is that for users of the system, the local, intermediate, and express services would be seamless. The passenger would merely select their desired destination from a single ticketing system and let the agencies deal with how that revenue gets allocated behind the scenes. For business travel between New York and DC, there would be the express. For travel between Bridgeport, CT and New Brunswick NJ, users would no longer have to take Metro-North to Grand Central, then the cross town shuttle to the 1 train to Penn Station where they could pick up a New Jersey Transit train to their destination. They would just hop on the intermediate. And to get from Newark to New York a passenger could just hop on the first train that came by.
What we need to do is begin with the bottlenecks - the physical ones, and more importantly the institutional ones that condemn us to dealing with a fragmented system and condemn me to an extra 10 minutes on a cold platform in Newark.
This vision of a free-running and efficient transit system on every level may seem either romantic or unachievable, but it is neither. It simply requires belief that rationality is stronger than the status quo.
@RegionalPlan