bobtehpanda

Ups and downs. On the one hand, don't just change tech for the sake of changing tech, on the other hand, you don't want to be a bank paying 500k+ a year for some COBOL guy to come out of retirement because all the programmers who can maintain your shit are retired or dying. (Banks and government institutions have this particularly bad.)

IIRC at least some of the headache from the CBTC (not sure about the ) was because of the integration with the wayside signalling. If you have a fancy new computer it means jack shit if your internet is still through some crappy rat chewed phone line.

There pretty much isn't any good way to get to street level from a proper station due to all the meandering into warehouses it did. In fact, the relative lack of street access points is a problem for it as a park as well. Also, it was built to service a warehouse district and docks that largely stopped after containerization, but that also had the effect of removing any real reason to go there.

...do people switch from the to Penn in significant numbers? I can't imagine that'd save a whole lot of time if you account for walking and waiting time, over say to 7th Avenue, and it would cost a lot more as a zone 1-3 fare.

That doesn't really solve what people are trying to aim for here, which is a better Queens connection than 63rd turning off just before it reaches Queens Plaza. Moving it north would make that problem worse. The IND had, at one point, a proposal all the way north to 79th St, which would've hooked into the line under Broadway.

I believe that was one of the (many) iterations of the Queens Blvd Bypass. There was also a variation that would have only used the Lower Montauk east of Woodhaven, so that would also bring back (nonstop) subway service along the northern part of RBB, to hit a bunch of foamer things with one stone. And as far as I can recall there are no grade crossings east of Woodhaven. The MTA was fairly good at doing grade separation; they grade separated the entire Babylon Branch in the '70s. This is the sad part of the MTA's current situation; at one point it did do things like double tracking, electrification expansion, and grade separation on a regular basis.

Anyone know how big the maps in the trains or station platforms are?

> On February 23, 2021, following the conclusion of one year negotiations with CSX and Norfolk Southern, Amtrak officials announced that Gulf Coast Service between New Orleans and Mobile would start as early as January 2022.[26] Amtrak plans to pay for repairs along the route.[27] - Wikipedia The main holdup is that the PRIIA requires new services to be partially paid for by the states, and MS, AL and FL are not exactly super free with the money.

Literally the new bridge has a website.

The numbers are quite severe, something like 75% of jobs in Manhattan are a 15 minute walk from Grand Central, and that was from a study in 2004; it's almost definitely shifted further away from Downtown since then. If you're heading to Downtown Brooklyn you'd be better off hoofing it to Platform F at Jamaica.

It was studied in the plan that preceded Cuomo that he dumped in the trash. I have the 90's EIS in my Gmail somewhere. The 287 "BRT" system would've been a separate regional line. But it also cost about $2B to $4B to fully build out. Right now it's "future proofed" (as in, the bridge was designed to carry the weight, and the approaches are not so steep. And it's not like the Port Jervis lines are particularly busy today anyways; there are a total of 9 weekday trains leaving Port Jervis in the AM spread out from 3-11 and one train an hour is not going to kill Grand Central. There aren't places to put a new bridge. The Hudson River Valley is pretty steep on either side of the river, and any reasonable place to put a bridge has long been filled in with suburbs. And not to mention the need for longer connecting railroads; pretty much the only useful connection would probably be Newburgh-Beacon but that bridge is not getting replaced any time soon. I would imagine that it may be useful for freight operations given that the next northern bypass of NYC's busy commuter railroads is in Selkirk.

Unlike Rockefeller Cuomo might actually finish his fourth term. (I don't think he's delusional enough to think he could win national office ever again. I also don't know that he has any place in the Biden administration.)

The dude is delusional enough to think he could get term 4, the first governor in history to do so.

I don't think this would be very successful, mostly because the Jamaica grid is not neat and Archer Avenue is not a through road that connects to anything outside of Downtown Jamaica well. Every bus currently using Jamaica both ways would have to make two turns to get on/off Archer and so would all the cars, and the amount of turning movements would kill efficiency unless you made some pretty drastic north/south traffic changes as well. Hillside would probably be fine with a median busway, which would be easy enough to protect.

I mean lately the MTA has been trotting out things for appeasement but f**king up the results so they don't actually have to do anything. See: Rockaway Beach Branch reactivation allegedly costing $8B.

Any sample timetables were from long ago so are probably irrelevant now, but I do remember that the documents for Port Washington Yard expansion showed four trains to Penn and four trains to GC per hour during the peak, alternating. I would imagine, at minimum, most branches looking like that, and the Atlantic Branches being replaced with services to Penn (given that when ESA opens it's highly likely Penn will become the less popular terminal)

This is how National Rail works out of London. All these things exist in other places and I'll hold my breath for whenever New York decides to take a serious look at it. (The CBC has been hemming and hawing about this for decades.) On a more serious note, I would have no idea where you could reasonably put a turnstile array anywhere in Penn Station without causing major chokepoints. The station is poorly laid out and congested as it is, and there's not really room for them in the Empire Station plans either. For context, this is how large the gate line at Waterloo Station is:

Remember when Bloomberg declared Hudson Yards finished? lol.

But they do, otherwise they wouldn't be rolling out CityTicket or Atlantic Ticket or these Zone 3 cuts in the first place.

I haven't heard of it. TBH I would put that up there with "direct LIRR train from WTC to JFK" in terms of probability. So like, I'm not saying this would necessarily happen, but I do remember a few time the token booths question came up it involved transitioning people into new roles for the same pay or buying people out. The railroads are crowded, in places. At least the LIRR has the examples of the Far Rockaway, Long Beach, and West Hempstead branches with poor ridership. The most well utilized parts of the Port Washington Branch are almost entirely in the city; I think the last time they published station counts Bayside was a top ten station. And soon the Atlantic Branch is going to get severed with a dinky little shuttle. It would be no bad thing to increase utilization for these routes with cheaper fares, since empty seats don't generate revenue, and the City Ticket, the Atlantic Ticket, and the slash in Zone 3 monthly prices are steps in the right direction, even if they're poorly coordinated and communicated.

Also keep in mind that the end result of the Cuomo MTA audit and reorganization was somehow to conclude that MTACC was an example of successful consolidation.

The most silly example is the PJ line. It takes double the time, over an hour longer, to travel from Stony Brook to Penn Station, than it does from Ronkonkoma, even though they are more or less directly north/south from each other. And this is because the transfer at Huntington sucks, the line isn't double tracked, and the diesels are slow and unreliable.

To be quite honest, I wonder how much it would cost for NYC to buy out the inner LIRR branches and their assets.

Funding was cut to pay for the black hole that is East Side Access. It's also very silly, because we cut funding for that, but we are simultaneously building an Elmont station that nobody asked for.

It's early days yet but Amtrak has released plans to improve services from NY to Toronto and Montreal, we have an administration that is doing legwork to make infrastructure spending actually happen, etc. NYDOT has a EIS completed for potential upgrades to the entire corridor from NYC to Niagara Falls. The alternatives still in play bump NYC-Albany Services from 13 a day, already one of the most frequent corridors outside the Northeast/Acela, to possibly even 27 services a day. And all for less than the cost of the Gateway tunnel. Toronto and Montreal were also legally cleared to have CBP preclearance at their train stations, but as far as I know they haven't worked out who is paying for what yet.