Washington Post on Boarding Amtrak, Particularly at Washington Union Station

[jis]

The problem is the term "fixing" it and you know what is about to happen Jis. I'm mounting up on my high horse.

Why are they continuing to stuff things into Penn Station? There are still only 21 tracks and not of them access every place they should which limits your ability to handle the traffic. Sure, cutting holes in the floors and making new concourses, exits, stations (the Farley fiasco) all sounds good on paper. However, what is being done to change the operational profile of Penn Station? I don;t care if you have an exit PER PERSON.  None of that matters if you continue to stuff more trains into an infrastructure that it wasn't designed to handle.

As Dutchrailnut famously said 'it is a new tent over the same old circus!"

Washington DC is also out of control. That is because traffic has increased and Union Station was basically turned into a mall! (Didn't the Onion spoof this fact?) 25 years ago, you barely had VRE service, MARC didn't have much service and Washington DC wasn't in the midst of a renaissance.  That is no longer the case. They are now taking steps to expand it (instead of eliminating the mall) but relief is years away. 

Fixing these things should include a diversification of resources and that MUST include ferries.  It MUST. They should be a part of our transportation policy.

I agree about the lunacy of stuffing more trains into NYP without adding anything to the track infrastructure. Actually in some sense building of the new tunnels to only feed more into this unholy mess seems to be the wrong way to go, if one steps back and takes a look at the whole situation. Maybe it was time to create a third terminal underground, maybe further downtown. In addition to stuffing more trains into an inadequate infrastructure, there is also the issue of pedestrian dispersal of all those arriving by those evermore in number and capacity trains. AFAIK, NYCTA has no plans to increase capacity on anything to take passengers away from the NYP area.

If you look at any large city in the world, their arrival terminals are dispersed typically in a ring around the inner core, and interconnected by good subway/bus/tram systems. Cities that started off with one or two terminal have aggressively proceeded to create additional terminals rather than expanding capacity of existing terminals to the exclusion of adding capacity in new terminals. NYC chose to disperse its airports three to five ways, depending on how you count, but failed at fixing its transit entry point issues, by systematically de-emphasizing even alternative terminals that they already have - like Hoboken or Flatbush/Atlantic.

So once mounted on our high horses, I think we agree on the basic principles, even though we may disagree on some details.

 

[railiner]

Wait a second. Is this why so many escalators at Penn Station “don’t work”? They’re not broken or turned off by the staff, it’s just been a ton of moron passengers who can’t wait? What the hell is wrong with people?

Unfortunately, that is so.   I have even seen some lazy employees doing it, most commonly the lower level 'short' escalator's.   Only usher's, redcaps, and asst. stationmaster's have the keys to restart it.   A louder alarm on the cover over the button, together with a bright flashing strobe, and then a video, and a 'campaign' of police enforcement for a couple of weeks, should do the trick to change these people's habits.....

 

[jis]

There is no simple fix for "Me first, the rest be damned" culture, unfortunately. h34r: Toilet training takes quite a while under the best of circumstances.

 

[Thirdrail7]

That's an interesting statement. Do you mean commuter ferries, or something more like the sea going ships you see in Europe and Asia? Or did you omit the smiley face? 

I mean commuter ferries. What's old is what is new.  Many cities and towns were built on the waterfront.  When you have a place like NYC, which has 4 out of 5 boroughs occupying an island (and the fifth is on a peninsula), there is NO excuse to not consider a robust ferry system. Unfortunately, ferries, like railroads have trouble earning profit. As such,  a lot of private providers fold.

This is why I say the ferries should be subsidized just like the roads, the trains, the airlines, etc.  We have all of this talk about Gateway and we keep erecting real estate on valuable ferry slips. NYC extended the #7 to the western portion of Manhattan. There is no reason why high speed ferries should service this station and deploy through out the region.

Various Central New Jersey ferry operators sprung forward when the gas prices were crippling. They service a lot of communities. They couldn't survive. Fortunately, NYC has started reviving the ferry industry. Someone like NJT should take over. We wouldn't need as many trains.  I'd venture to say Washington DC could have a nice ferry system as well. They can shuttle people from park and rides to Metro Stations., possibly VRE stations.

I'm serious.  Look how many years and millions of dollars it took just to make a PROPOSAL for a new Long Bridge, which will take 1/2 of billion to build. With water, the infrastructure exists. Dredge that channel, get the boat in the water, move the condo off the pier and ALL ABOARD!

 

[trainman74]

And they would have to be periodically inspected, and perhaps recertified as to their ability to meet those standards... :unsure:

Most jurisdictions do require escalators to be periodically inspected in the same manner as elevators, although few require an inspection certificate be posted on the escalator.

 

[TiBike]

I mean commuter ferries. What's old is what is new.  Many cities and towns were built on the waterfront.  When you have a place like NYC, which has 4 out of 5 boroughs occupying an island (and the fifth is on a peninsula), there is NO excuse to not consider a robust ferry system. Unfortunately, ferries, like railroads have trouble earning profit. As such,  a lot of private providers fold.

Got it. Yeah, ferries are very much a part of the commuter mix in the SF Bay Area and around Puget Sound. Integrating them with rail has been problematic, in the Bay Area anyway. The Ferry Building in San Francisco is a hike even from the new Transbay terminal, where Caltrain will eventually end up, although it's reasonably close to BART and SF Muni. And the good people of Larkspur succeeded in stopping SMART a few hundred meters short of the ferry terminal there.

 

[cpotisch]

I mean commuter ferries. What's old is what is new.  Many cities and towns were built on the waterfront.  When you have a place like NYC, which has 4 out of 5 boroughs occupying an island (and the fifth is on a peninsula), there is NO excuse to not consider a robust ferry system. Unfortunately, ferries, like railroads have trouble earning profit. As such,  a lot of private providers fold.

This is why I say the ferries should be subsidized just like the roads, the trains, the airlines, etc.  We have all of this talk about Gateway and we keep erecting real estate on valuable ferry slips. NYC extended the #7 to the western portion of Manhattan. There is no reason why high speed ferries should service this station and deploy through out the region.

Various Central New Jersey ferry operators sprung forward when the gas prices were crippling. They service a lot of communities. They couldn't survive. Fortunately, NYC has started reviving the ferry industry. Someone like NJT should take over. We wouldn't need as many trains.  I'd venture to say Washington DC could have a nice ferry system as well. They can shuttle people from park and rides to Metro Stations., possibly VRE stations.

I'm serious.  Look how many years and millions of dollars it took just to make a PROPOSAL for a new Long Bridge, which will take 1/2 of billion to build. With water, the infrastructure exists. Dredge that channel, get the boat in the water, move the condo off the pier and ALL ABOARD!

NYC actually has a pretty good ferry system, IMHO. NYC Ferry serves various points throughout Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn (with some going as far as the Rockaways), while NY Waterway serves a bunch of points in New Jersey and on the West side of Manhattan. Also note that NYC Ferry only costs $2.75, so it’s as cheap as the subway. And then you have the Staten Island Ferry, which is completely free. So all in all, I think it’s a pretty thorough and usable network.

 

[Thirdrail7]

If you pay attention to my post Cpotisch, you’ll see I noted that NYC is reviving their ferry service. However, this is a recent turn of events with some of these routes beginning with the Summer of Hell. The reality of the situation is these routes stagnate in the winter and operators have folded when they couldn’t make a profit.

This is what I meant when I stated they should all receive a subsidy like other transportation....not just the operator selected by the city. All of them.

 

[railiner]

The City now seems to be considering legalizing unlicensed electric bikes and scooter's as another transportation alternative, with considerable opposition from various quarter's...

 

[jebr]

There's been a similar article posted on Vox (first three paragraphs below):

Trains, unlike airplanes, have many doors that passengers can use to get on and off. Consequently, train boarding works differently than airplane boarding: Train passengers wait on the platform for the train to arrive and then, when the doors open, pour in — making it possible for a huge crowd to embark in a relatively short amount of time.

At least that’s how boarding a train works on the New York City subway, the Washington metro, and other mass transit operations around the country. It’s also how European intercity and mass transit trains work. And it’s how you board trains at many Amtrak intercity stations in the US.

Yet curiously, even though the big advantage of this boarding method is how quickly it allows large numbers of people to get on and off, it is not how Amtrak boards trains at its busiest stations — New York Penn Station and Washington Union Station.