Be Glad ARC Was Cancelled

Recently, the cancelled Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) project came up in two different contexts. A few weeks ago, New Jersey freshman Rep. Tom Malinowski debated his challenger, State Senator Tom Kean, Jr. Both candidates were asked about the Gateway Project. In response, Kean cited his role in obtaining off-peak one-seat service to Manhattan from the Raritan Valley Line, and Malinowski fell back on the tired trick of dinging former governor Chris Christie over the cancellation of ARC. Neither candidate offered any acknowledgement of the greater New York construction cost bloat. Subsequently, ARC arose on Twitter, with Matt Friedman of Politico posing a perfectly logical question of why many transit advocates celebrate or are at least nonplussed over its demise. I will attempt an answer.

Although ARC would have added some trans-Hudson capacity, and improved somewhat on today’s situation, it would have done so in a highly suboptimal way. By the time ARC was funded, the project had evolved to terminate in a new cavern a block away from and deeper than the existing New York Penn Station. Finding out why the much better version connecting to Grand Central was scrapped—to avoid pissing off a small but apparently untouchable group of railroad managers—doesn’t take much reading between the lines. While later conversion of the deep terminal into a through station would still be possible, any transfer between the new and current stations would have entailed a long walk, making New Jersey-Queens or New Jersey-Connecticut travel tougher rather than easier. Subway transfers would also probably take longer. Conversely, whoever decided to tie the Gateway Project into the existing stub-end tracks (1 — 4) of Penn Station made the correct call.

There are some situations where a deep cavern station is unavoidable. New York Penn Station is not one of them. It has a set of terminal tracks, numbers 1 — 4, that only connect to New Jersey. Today, they do not handle the train volume they are capable of handling because of the station design. Today, any train leaving the terminal tracks westbound not only temporarily blocks eastbound trains into the terminal, it blocks all eastbound trains from New Jersey period. For this reason, increasing the use of the terminal tracks past a certain point requires a decrease in the throughput on the through tracks. In fact, the new tunnel proposed under Gateway, linking right to them, is exactly the fix that they need. Dedicating the terminal tracks to the new tunnels would keep the trains serving them out of the way of traffic on the through tracks. Note that while there would be fewer conflicts caused by reversals, they would not disappear entirely. For that reason, breaking the platforms out to the east to Grand Central is still necessary to realize the full potential of the new trans-Hudson tracks. In any case, the Gateway Project would provide some crossovers that could be used for interlining during maintenance and breakdowns, as shown in the below graphics from the Hudson Tunnel Project website.

The four-track terminal at Haussmann-St. Lazare on the Paris RER E handles up to 16 trains per hour. The combination of conversion of the terminal to a through station and installation of a modern signalling system should raise that to 28 trains per hour. If dedicated to the new Gateway tunnel with no other modifications, it is reasonable to expect New York Penn tracks 1 — 4 to handle somewhere around 20 trains per hour; today they handle nowhere near that. Extension of platforms 1 and 2 (serving tracks 1 — 4) to the West End Concourse and concomitant addition of new stairs to each would speed passenger circulation, allowing more and longer trains. Completion of the Central Concourse would disconnect the midpoint stairwells from the upper level and link them to an extended, much larger lower level hallway, which would almost certainly help downstream flow. Dedicating one or two through tracks to terminating Gateway trains would also add some more slots. On New York’s recent rail transit projects, a theme quickly emerges that new stations are a bigger contributor to the budget and schedule bloat than tunnels. For that reason alone, any sane analysis would have elevated a solution that ties into an existing station over one requiring a new cavern.

In the long term, connecting tracks 1 — 4 eastward to Grand Central would dramatically increase their capacity. Such a connection would eliminate the delays arising from reversals. Trains reversing at compact outlying terminals have fewer tracks to cross and thus can process faster than those reversing at city center terminals such as Penn Station or Grand Central. Furthermore, since alighting passengers would split roughly evenly between Penn Station and Grand Central, it would roughly cut in half the time needed to discharge passengers at either stop. The vertical access to each of platforms 1 and 2 can each currently move some 700 passengers per minute. It is not hard to see a capacity of 1,000 per minute if the platforms are elongated to reach the West End Concourse and the eastern stairwells widened and straightened. That should allow each of tracks 1 — 4 to handle a train discharging 800 — 1,000 people (about half a full load) and loading onward riders over 3 minutes. Adding 2 minutes between each train gives a total slot time of 5 minutes, which would permit 24 trains per hour over two tracks each way. Even this short window should be plenty to execute a crew change. For example, I saw one happen on a Tokyo area regional train during a normal enroute station stop lasting a minute, if that. Had the front cab not had a clear partition, I would have had no idea of the event as it added no delay whatsoever. My understanding is that SEPTA changes its crews in central Philadelphia similarly quickly.

When it comes to high-functioning regional rail, I am increasingly convinced that the main barrier is a small group of kings of the hill. Unlike New York, other cities around the world have a long record of executing new infrastructure in concert with operational changes that necessarily bridge institutional divides. A day or two before Thanksgiving in 2017, on board a New Haven-Grand Central Metro-North train, I talked to a senior Metro-North engineer who was off duty at the time. At one point, the discussion got to the football trains. He explained to me that he knew of scores of other engineers who would have been happy to run trains through Penn Station to New Jersey and that the Amtrak dispatcher that killed the football trains. The Japanese run private trains through into Tokyo on public lines; Paris got the SNCF and RATP to cooperate on the Paris RER; Italy got the FS and FNM to work together on the Milan Passante. America can dethrone the hilltop emperors within the MTA, NJ Transit and Amtrak who refuse to talk to each other.

Nor is the problem money, at least not in greater New York. This region found billions of non-federal money to shovel into East Side Access and new subways under the West Side and Second Avenue. It finds the money to pay for subway and regional rail conductors that technology made obsolete decades ago. Even as problematic as the Trump Administration has been on transit, some major projects in blue states got funding out of them. Yes, Christie should have contributed to the Gateway Project, which correctly plans to tie into New York Penn Station and actually sets up nicely for a connection to Grand Central, but ARC deserved to die. It is time to retire the hand wringing over that botched effort.