bobtehpanda

In the grand scheme of things it takes 2h 25 to get to Albany, which is comparable or faster than driving depending on traffic conditions, and a minute or two on top is not going to change that. Flying is even worse given how long it takes during the rush to even get to LGA or JFK or EWR.

Germany and Switzerland are moving to nationally coordinated clockface schedules in which you can expect trains every hour on the hour or every half hour or fifteen or whatever at a given station, with timed connections at major hubs. As part of this, purely express trains will not exist, because it is more important that trains meet the schedule consistently than to run as fast as possible, so instead they run as fast as necessary and still make convenient stops. In fact this is part of a larger EU-wide scheme to bring consistent clock scheduling to all of European rail.

FWIW, most commuter rail systems outside the US do not have turnstiles either. There are instead freestanding pads that you have to validate on subject to random SBS-style spot checks. The technology is not a blocker though, if one desires this kind of practice. In Berlin they do it with paper tickets.

I mean this is neither here nor there. What I mean to say is, if the stop is going to get built anyways as part of Penn Station Access, and there aren't passing tracks around the station (which there probably wouldn't be given the Empire Corridor's constraints), then Amtrak should just stop there anyways since it won't add much time. As an example, if you take the ICE out of Berlin to Frankfurt it stops at Berlin Ostkreuz, Berlin Hbf and Berlin Spandau. If you take the Tokaido Shinkansen out of Tokyo it stops at Tokyo Station and Shinagawa. The same principle is in place for all of them; for intercity trips of 3-4 hours backtracking an hour via local transit to get from the door to the station or vice versa is counterproductive.

To be clear, what I'm not saying is that there needs to be faster access to Yonkers. What I am trying to say, is that if you are going to Albany and you live in, I don't know, East Harlem, neither schlepping down to Penn Station nor the reverse to Yonkers to catch the Empire Corridor is going to be very attractive, because that's what, an additional 30, 60 minutes to get to the station, for a trip that only takes 2.5 hours to start with.

125th (or whatever Uptown station you want) could use the frequency. Here you can use the commuter rail passes on the Amtrak trains to Portland and Vancouver since they make the same stops. The Amtrak trains are still faster than the buses and faster than flying once accounting for door to airport time.

So except for Hunts Point all of them would have pretty long walking connections to crossing bus routes. Great. How long are the platforms?

To be honest, Amtrak should probably stop there all the time if it gets built. The first stop after Penn Station is Yonkers. Yonkers is at least an hour away from Penn Station by local transit. A station halfway uptown would slash travel times to Amtrak services for a good million or two people.

The Gateway tunnels need to exist before NJT or Amtrak can send a single train from the west. There are two tracks under the Hudson and four under the East River. Soon there will be six; LIRR gets two and so Metro-North gets (some of) the slots freed up. (The exact operating plans of ESA, PSA, and Amtrak have not been publicized.) Gateway could use that room, but the difference is that ESA is, hopefully, actually almost done this time, whereas Gateway doesn't have a shovel in the ground to speak of. Plus, the Gateway Program also includes building Penn South, so it's not like NJT and Amtrak are getting nothing.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush and all that. Right now we've got the hand we're dealt.

I wouldn't really call 49-46 "narrow." WV was a very strong Democratic state until 2000 because of all the union jobs. Everything after has basically come down to WV being very anti-green. Manchin is surprisingly not actually anti-climate change, but we'll have to see how far he wants to walk the walk.

Also even with coverage based routing some of those routes in the center portion look a lot more zig-zaggy than they need to be.

I don't see indications that they're really anything more than just broad outlines. That being said I don't know why they're trying to tie higher frequency to all day transit and coverage to peak focused transit when I feel like those are two separate axes.

Biden's administration is not pro-China, they're just not noisy about it. Trump had a habit of pulling out the China card to bury bad news coming out at the same time. The official stance has not actually changed and protectionism against China is pretty much bipartisan.

So I think this is what OP is actually trying to bring attention to: https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-resumption-metro-north-penn-station-access-project

Literally a year ago the entire capital plan was on the chopping block, including the Second Avenue Subway's second phase. This isn't some preferential treatment thing.

Well yeah. The trains from the East Bronx run to Penn Station, which doesn't currently have room until the new terminal under Grand Central is available. It doesn't really make sense to start construction for a project if you can't run the trains by the time you're done.

East Side Access is kind of the prerequisite, and that had an original projected opening date of 2009.

Manchin is not going to get primaried and if he loses he'll be replaced by an actual Republican. WV went for Trump 68-29. A more liberal Democrat is not going to win West Virginia lol.

The problem with biking in Queens is that while there are plenty of quiet inner residential streets where you could bike fine, there isn't a great network of them. For example, there is pretty much no safe way to cross the Cross Island Parkway on a bicycle. There's also the matter of where to park a bike. I don't even think I've seen a bike rack in Downtown Flushing, for example.

"Democracy is bad because people vote for things I don't like!"

Even if $10 trillion dropped from the sky tomorrow for electrification, it would still take a fairly long time to actually build it out. So a train where you can swap/remove the diesel component is a necessary stepping stone, because the current Amtrak fleet isn't getting any younger.

There's the political patronage aspect, yes, but also the City and State are forever locked in zero sum combat, for ego reasons. This isn't that strange though, most states have some version of this dynamic. But the relationship is so toxic that even something as unarguably successful as NYCDOE renewal becomes a political football every time it comes up for renewal. (Performance was definitely worse under the old BOE.) MTA would be vastly more controversial given the ownership of Metro-North and LIRR; the suburbs have a relationship to the city that is at best frosty and at worst even more antagonistic than the city-state relationship. And Port Authority is not going to happen, because it's bi-state. Yeah here's the deal; Vision Zero candidates consistently win elections. Yes, the margin of victory in local elections is pretty small. The flip side of that is that it really doesn't take a whole lot to flip an election in the first place, and anti-Vision Zero sentiment is not strong enough to determine election wins. If anything the Council under Johnson and Mark-Viverito before him was more aggressive about Vision Zero than De Blasio was. If people feel that strongly about an issue seats will flip. We had a bartender with no previous political experience win over the 4th ranking member of the House. But people who vote support Vision Zero.

How hard would it be to convert 49th St on Broadway to an express stop?

The wording of the press release is strange; the mention that the units will be powered seems to be contrasting with the current Siemens trainsets. Amtrak already runs Siemens Venture sets (what VIA is getting) in California, the Northwest and the Midwest. I feel like if they were getting Siemens Venture sets they would've just said that outright?