The LIRR and East Side Access
East Side Access opened in February, about four months ago, connecting the LIRR to Grand Central; previously, trains only went to Penn Station. The opening was not at all smooth – commuters mostly wanted to keep going to Penn Station, contrary to early-2000s projections, and stories of confused riders were common in local media. I held judgment at the time because big changes take time to show their benefits, but in the months since, ridership has not done well. On current statistics, it appears that the opening of the new tunnel to Grand Central has had no benefit at all, making this project not just the world leader in tunneling cost per kilometer (about $4 billion) but also one with no apparent transportation value.
What is East Side Access?
Traditionally, of New York’s two main train stations, Penn Station only served Amtrak, New Jersey Transit, and the LIRR, whereas Grand Central only served Metro-North. East Side Access is a tunnel from the LIRR Main Line to Grand Central, permitting trains to serve either of the two stations; an under-construction project called Penn Station Access likewise will permit one Metro-North line to serve Penn Station.
The tunnel across the East River was built in the 1970s and 80s together with the tunnel that now carries the F train; East Side Access was the project to build the connection from this tunnel to Grand Central as well as to the LIRR Main Line in Queens. The Grand Central connection does not lead to the preexisting Metro-North terminal with its tens of tracks, but to a deep cavern:
What was East Side Access supposed to serve?
Penn Station’s location is at the southwestern margin of the job concetration of Midtown Manhattan. Grand Central’s location is better; the studies done for the project 20 years ago found that for the majority of LIRR commuters, Grand Central was closer to their job than Penn Station. In 2019, there were 589,770 jobs within 1 km of Penn Station’s northeast corner at 7th and 33rd, of whom 48,460 lived on Long Island; within 1 km of Grand Central’s southern entrance at Park and 42nd, the corresponding numbers are 680,586 and 57,457.
Based on such analysis, the plan was to send as many trains as possible to Grand Central, at the expense of trains that used not to enter Manhattan at all but instead diverted to Downtown Brooklyn (within 1 km of Atlantic and Flatbush there were 41,360 jobs in 2019, of which 3,895 were held by Long Islanders). The central transfer point at Jamaica was reconfigured to no longer permit cross-platform transfers between Brooklyn- and Penn Station-bound trains in order to facilitate more direct trains to Grand Central.
The state promised large increases in both capacity and ridership; in 2022, joint Metro-North and LIRR head Catherine Rinaldi said they were increasing service by 40%. Unfortunately, ridership has flopped.
Ridership is a flop
The most recent publication about New York commuter rail ridership is from a week ago. LIRR ridership in May was about 5.6 million, with a peak of 229,000 passengers per weekday; ridership before corona was 316,000 per weekday. Metro-North, with no opening comparable to that of East Side Access, had 5.43 million riders in May with a peak of 215,000 passengers – but pre-corona ridership was 276,000. Metro-North has held up better the LIRR and recovered faster: May 2023 was 28% above May 2022, whereas for the LIRR, it was only 23%.
The same publication speaks of East Side Access positively – as it must, as an official report. It says the share of LIRR ridership is transitioning toward 65% Penn Station, 35% Grand Central. But this by itself already raises questions. The easier access to Grand Central and the extra capacity should have raised ridership; in the report, no surge is apparent since February of this year. Judging by the example of Metro-North, it appears that no net ridership has appeared as a result of the new project.
What’s going on here?
I’ve spent many years criticizing reverse-branching, in which a trunk line outside city center splits into branches in the core, in this case some trains serving Penn Station and others serving Grand Central. For East Side Access, my recommendation was to have one specific track pair, such as the express Main Line tracks, only carry trains to Grand Central, and the rest, such as the local tracks and Port Washington Branch tracks, only carry trains to Penn Station. The disappointing ridership of East Side Access has led some area transit advocates to criticize the MTA on the grounds that the problem is one of reverse-branching.
The media stories in late winter and early spring of confused commuters are certainly consistent with my criticism of reverse-branching. Everything that’s happened is consistent with that criticism, and yet I’m not certain that this is what’s going on. After all, East Side Access also adds new service and new capacity. Potentially, it’s about the loss of Jamaica transfers, but then which trains would people even want to transfer from?
The main mechanisms by which reverse-branching hurts ridership are that it makes schedule planning too complex and thereby reduces reliability, and that the frequency on each reverse-branch is reduced. LIRR scheduling is already extremely complex, with one-off express patterns and trains weaving around one another at rush hour; in 2015, I looked at some rush hour schedules and compared them with the rolling stock’s technical capabilities and found that even relative to the derated capabilities of the trains, the timetables are padded by 32% on the Main Line. (Metro-North seems comparably padded.) East Side Access would hardly make this much worse. The second mechanism is frequency – but at rush hour, frequency at each suburban station is decent, if not great.
But then, I can’t think of anything else that fits. The issue could not be some permanent decrease in commuting, or some permanent decrease in commuting to Grand Central specifically, since Metro-North ridership has recovered better and all trains there go to Grand Central. It could potentially be some force of habit inducing LIRR commuters to stay on the trains they’re familiar with, but then we should see gradual increase in ridership since opening and we’re not seeing that at any higher rate than at Metro-North.
Pedestrian Observations 
This isn’t really true: “After all, East Side Access also adds new service and new capacity.” My station (Bethpage) has fewer peak hour trains than it did in January. LIRR Today has shown this is basically true systemwide east of Jamaica. If they had actually run more trains when ESA opened it would be one thing, but from the perspective of where their existing ridership base was it’s not any better than previous.
I second this. According to the LIRR today post at https://twitter.com/TheLIRRToday/status/1532741785923076098 the total number of peak trains east of Jamacia actually DECREASED! The number of trains only increases when you count the Jamacia to Atlantic Terminal shuttles.
I believe the Ronkonkoma trains and the electric Port Jefferson trains all used to run to Penn Station. Now half run to Grand Central, meaning that the frequency to Penn Station on these lines has effectively been cut in half.
True.
There are a number of issues here. First, while the LIRR has added lots of trains, something like 80% of them are west of Jamaica, mostly the Brooklyn shuttle trains, which are all new. East of Jamaica, there have been no real improvements except for the West Hempstead Branch, which now has hourly service for the first time in the post war era. The blog The LIRR Today has extensive documentation of all of these issues.
The next issue is the lack of timed connections at Jamaica and the decimation of direct service to Brooklyn, which is/was used by several thousand rush hour commuters, who are now massively inconvenienced by an up and over connection at Jamaica that is not guaranteed, so there are people are rushing over there to watch their connections leaving.
The railroad put up draft schedules several months in advance and welcomed comments, almost all of which were ignored.
The rollout was mishandled from the beginning, and I think that has much to do with the disappointing ridership.
Alon, What do you really expect when many of its former LIRR commuters are working remotely from home now ??? I also remember when the (S) 42 Street Shuttle with 3 car R17 cars were jammed packed with riders. It served as a connector for those LIRR commuters from Penn Station via Times Square to their East Side work places from Penn. Now that the (S) Shuttle has 6 car R62A’s. When I rode it back in April, I could NOT believe that I was the only passenger on board of this elongated 6 car shuttle train. It really shows you that TIMES HAVE CHANGED !!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJVLnNsuJRs&pp=ygUjdGhlIHRpbWVzIHRoZXkgYXJlIGEgY2hhbmdpbiBjb3ZlciA%3D THIW’s.
Yeah but Metro North commuters are also working home to the same amount to be fair.
And the increase of that started in March 2020 which is over 3 years ago.
Very TRUE – and then you wonder why this is happening now – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSSZfK91Q4Q&ab_channel=GeraldCelente
The LIRR has been reverse branching since the NIMBYs of Brooklyn banned steam trains and the LIRR decided to go to someplace else. Eventually Long Island City.
The TV stations find idiots to interview every time there is a major schedule change. If you show up for the 7:42 to Brooklyn, at 7;40, after it’s been changed to the 7:38 to Grand Central you can’t take the “train you are used to”. You still have to change to get to Penn Station. Like people who use your station have been doing since it opened in the 19th Century.
Did officials and consultants underestimate the travel time to get between the deep platforms and the street and subway and rest of Grand Central? Underestimating the time and the impact of the shrunken effective walkshed if you are calculating it as time instead of just horizontal distance? Also perhaps underestimating the utility of the multiple subway lines that are a fairly easy connection at Penn Station ACE, 123, NRQW, and PATH… that’s a lot more than the Shuttle and 4567.
The other comments aren’t specific to GCM but isn’t it time to examine the entire schedule and operating plan of the LIRR? It would be so much better if it were run more like an S-Bahn or RER, with regular, predictable, frequent clockwork schedules. Maybe less one-seat rides in exchange for higher frequencies and more connecting options and more frequent service at virtually all stops. More comprehensible service for occasional riders. And lower fares.
The LIRR is too hard to use and too expensive for occasional riders. With a shift toward more work from home and part-time commuting, making it more useful for occasional riders and more economical for people commuting 2 or 3 times a week would pay big dividends. Maybe operating more like an S-Bahn or RER can also reduce operating costs if the unions can cooperate. (Big IF)
The tunnel across the East River was built in the 1970s and 80s
The tunnel under the East River was completed in 1972. It sat there quietly until the MTA found the money to connect the ends on land to something. It is one of the reasons why almost all projects today have to “connect two stations”.
I think comparing the 1km radius from 33rd and 7th to the 1km radius from 42nd and Park misses the fact that it takes at least 5 extra minutes to get to 42nd and Park from platform level because of how deep ESA is. So really the corresponding job count should be generously a 600m radius.
That’s not true though. It only takes 5 minutes to get to the 4/5/6 from ESA. To street level it’s only about 2-3 minutes. Less if you use the elevators.
Using “radius from” is a very naive view of the world. There are multiple entrances/exits from either station and connections to the subway. If my goal, at Penn Station, is the 7th Ave Subway I want the east end of the train. If my goal is the 8th Ave Subway, I want the west end of the train. And there are a lot of destinations/origins in Manhattan that aren’t a short walk from either station.
Good Points
Yes, but very few of those jobs near 33rd/7th are located to its southwest; most are to the north and northeast. Same thing with 42nd/Park – the job density is west and northwest of it. Grand Central Madison’s depth makes it hard to get to the surface, but the northerly exits should be closer to a lot of high-end jobs.
Crazy idea, but do we have any data on where people live compare to where they work? Perhaps people working closer to Penn Station choose to live near a LIRR or NJT station, or vice-versa. Same with Grand Central and Metro-North.
……This isn’t Metropolis where everybody walks to work from Union Station.
There are more jobs south of 23rd Street than any other place in the country except Chicago’s Loop.
Rockefeller Center is, as the crow flies, is closer to Grand Central than it is to Penn Station. It’s a hike from Grand Central and a subway ride to 50th and Broadway from Penn Station. People aren’t stupid and they are going to pick the fastest trip. Once they figure out there is a faster trip.
I actually have hiked from Grand Central to Penn Station (via the Empire State Building) to Rockefeller Center and then down Park Ave back to GCT, its quite a walk, although between GCT and Penn I think it would be about 30 minutes, I certainly moved faster than the traffic, and in good weather is fine. Now a walk in high heat and humidity can really hurt you, I almost fainted going down the escalator from the PanAm Building into the Main Concourse after walking down Park Ave from the Asian Art Musuem, which street wise is in the 50s.
I would think that a high percentage of workers and other visitors would take the subway, perhaps those with work places within walking distance of GCT made the switch, while those taking subways stayed with the familiar Penn Station.
someone who has been taking the E train to 53rd and Lexington might find it faster to go to Grand Central on the east end of the train and use the North Concourse….. There are a lot of places to go and they let LIRR, Metro North, NJTransit and PATH passengers use the subway. And buses and taxis.
I live in the area, but don’t commute on the L.I.R.R. so I have observed this major change from a distanced standpoint.
It seems to me that the publicity and the clarity surrounding the schedules was not good. I’ve looked at the branch timetables and, pretending that I am a commuter attached to my usual 7:10 a.m. to Penn that is now the 7:05 to GC, it isn’t readily apparent from the timetables that there are *a whole lot* of other trains between Jamaica and either Penn or GC for me to transfer to in order to reach Penn as roughly the same commute as before.
Honestly if I were coming from New Jersey and going to Babylon I wouldn’t have any way of knowing that I could take any train to Jamaica to transfer to any train to Babylon that had originated at GC, rather than wait around 45 minutes at Penn to take the train indicated in the timetable. To me that is the crux of the problem.
But who knows, maybe in 10 years this will be a terrific success.
It looks like East Side Access has no east side access. All of the entrances and exits are on the far west side of the station.
I honestly think that the biggest problem is just the extreme stubbornness of Long Islanders. They’ve been fed a narrative that ESA is bad and since it’s different from what they’re used to and they love to whine about the city and agencies that serve it, they don’t use it. Ridership hasn’t increased because people who were enthusiastic about the project already rode the trains and those who think it was a big waste and it takes 3 hours to go down a single escalator will continue to drive into the city, stubbornly go to Penn even if it takes longer, or stay home. You can’t induce demand that doesn’t exist.
If it is about people who drive because before getting to gcs was too painful, then we nees to give this a few years. Eventually they will have a car breakdown (or other such thing) and they reluctantly take the train to discover it isn’t too bad.
Though it is concerning that in NYC we don’t see any results at all in a few months.
They haven’t been running a full schedule.
I’m sure they plastered every station with notices that the schedule was changing. Again. And made announcements on the train. And in the stations. On the website. The MTA can explain things to people many different ways. It can’t make them understand it.
Should we have expected this new tunnel to produce an immediate net increase in ridership? The LIRR is only really useful for suburban commuters who live on Long Island and work in Manhattan. Almost everyone making this commute already takes the train, because parking in Manhattan costs a fortune. The only way LIRR ridership can increase under the current paradigm is to have people who are currently working from home go back to the office, to have Long Islanders who currently work on Long Island take jobs in Manhattan, or for people who work in Manhattan to move to Long Island. My impression with work from home is that most workers prefer it and only go in to the office as much as the boss requires them to. Bosses who call their workers back to the office are likely making their decision based on a percieved lack of productivity, not on the transit options available to the office. Wealthy office workers stay at the same jobs for several years so job switching would take several years to have an impact on ridership. And Long Island refuses to build housing, so NY office workers can only move onto the island as quickly as current Long Islanders move out. Homeowners generally want to keep their homes at least until retirement age, for some until death, so this would also be a slow process.
I think you are underestimating the impact of fares and service complexity. If the fare from LI to Manhattan is $12, then for a couple to spend the day in NYC it’s $48 round trip. Might as well drive and find parking.
I believe Second Avenue Subway did produce a bump in ridership visible in 2017, even netting out reduced ridership on the 4/5/6.
Both Northern Hub in Manchester and the Chiltern extension to Oxford produced meaningful increases in passenger numbers visible in the first years numbers.
Now for sure they took maybe 5 years after that to reach their full potential but still.
Crossrail (or *cough* Elizabeth Line *cough*) produced such an uplift in rail transit ridership that surprised even the most fervent proponents.
It makes sense that SAS would produce a bump in ridership, as it would capture new markets (people who would otherwise walk, cycle, taxi or bus), and create a lot of induced demand in non-commute trips. Commutes take a lot longer to manifest themselves as you need to make major life choices (changing job and/or residence) for them to happen.
I don’t see ESA having the same kind of effect on ridership at all. Anyone heading to Midtown Manhattan from Long Island is already getting the train. Being able to get off at GC rather than Penn is probably nice for a bunch of riders, but is it really going to make the difference between whether they get the train or not? I doubt it.
Maybe over the course of several years you’ll see a modest uptick from new commuters but that’s about it (and this is all in the context of post-pandemic WFH, which has totally scrambled any viable ridership projections).
Through-running would be different as it would unlock new types of trips across the metro area (as Crossrail has in London), but ESA is merely a continuation of the old city-centric commuter rail, just now with a choice of two downtown terminals rather than one.
I agree. Unlike the LIRR, SAS is useful for non-commute trips, which are often discretionary. New York apartments also probably change hands more frequently than Long Island single family homes. Also, though I could be wrong, I thought there was a small amount of TOD in the form of a few new buildings on 2nd Avenue, while my impression is that Long Island allows basically no new buildings.
The main chunk of TOD opened in the 1960s in expectation of the line’s upcoming construction; TOD attached to the current project exists too but has been pretty minimal and not at all timed to open in exactly 2017.
Ok. Still I’d imagine a lot of the immediate ridership increase would be discretionary trips, which would be suppressed on the LIRR due to very low off peak frequency.
It was transit oriented development when the Third Ave. El arrived in 1878 and the Second Ave. El. in 1880.
I’m pretty sure the various Chiltern Line improvements saw immediate improvements in passenger numbers – and that you have a lot of (semi detached) homes that change hands infrequently. And to be honest outside central london most housing along the Elizabeth line will be semi-detached homes that change hands infrequently aside from the rented ones.
And those projects together might have cost $500m in todays money.
Fundamentally a $10bn project should produce an immediate increase in ridership – even if it takes 5-10 years to reach its full potential.
To be the chiltern projects cost maybe $500m. Crossrail cost a lot more. Perhaps $20bn?
Yes, without question.
Because there are thousands of other ways that billions of public dollars could be spent if not.
Because actual real-world expenditures that result in improvements to the public realm can and do show immediate (if not immediately 100%) improvements in oucomes.
Stop identifying with the oppressors, for God’s sake. The oppressors have that fully covered and paid for without your help.
What was the original rationale for East Side Access anyway? Was it that Penn couldn’t handle the projected service frequency required / passenger flow, or was to provide terminal choice for the sake of providing terminal choice?
Both.
Very possible.
Speaking of “passenger flow”, 8.3m wide (27 foot 4 inch) island platforms per track pair (8 terminal tracks, eight!, count ’em!) are indicative of non-serious passenger volumes per platform track per hour.
It’s almost as if massive overbuilding combined with sub-shit-level rail throughput and sub-shit-level passenger street—platform efficiency were the the entire point.
So there’s actually 14km of new tunnel. It your talking route miles it’s 3.5 miles so either way your math is incorrect. As for the service projections your about right. The Regional Plan back in the day identified a concentration of jobs around GCT and justified ESA based in providing one seat rides from LI to Manhattan. If people from LI still prefer to go to Penn and take the E then that’s probably a fault of the current LI operational plan rather than the original concept. ESA was designed for a peak of 24 trains an hour and was meant to replace existing capacity in Penn not really add to LIRR capacity. LIRR was originally supposed to give up slots in Penn to allow MNR to use Penn as well as GCT. Whether that makes sense or not who knows but that was the plan when I joined the project in 2006 and remained the plan until I left in 2016. Whether the railroad planners and timetable people are actually making it work the way it was intended is a different question. The biggest negative about ESA in its current configuration though is that the only exit at the N end of the concourse is tge ADA elevator at 48th St. There is an entrance box constructed beneath 48th st but MTA could not reach resolution with either the Mill steins or Chase to bring the entrance to street level through one of the buildings on tge corners of 48th and Madison even though are now being redeveloped. Fix that issue and the concourse works much better than it currently does.
The main issue isnt accessibility. The main issue is the off peak service is a joke. Id expect 10-12tph between Jamaica and Great Central and 10-12tph between Jamaica and Penn Station off peak.
6 tph would do it. That’s the headway of a lot of subway lines.
Sure subways often run at 6tph, but that is bad transit. It means far too much time spent waiting for your train. Either at the station, or at home watching the clock. You need to run more often than 6tph to have true show up and go frequency. True it isn’t as bad as the half our or worse headway most of the US puts up with (or more likely drives to avoid), but it isn’t good.
This is a subway. If you don’t have enough demand to run at least 12 TPH all day then you don’t have enough demand to build the expensive thing in the first place. You should be trying to do better. The point of transit is to get people where they want to go, when they want to go. Optimizing trains for how full they are is not a consideration.
Even if you own a car a ten minute wait is better than the 20, 30, 45 minute wait for a river crossing and since you left the car at home, you don’t have to find a parking space.
Of course 12 tph is way better than 6tph, and 20 tph is ever better. Moscow can do that. I cannot imagine any system in USA with that operating discipline.
More importantly, I wish you would transmit your thoughts to the many systems in USA who think that 15 minute headways are frequent. And who seem to think little of dropping even that to 20mins or even more weirdly to things like 18 minutes. What do the Hoboken light rail and Newark city subway operate at?
Also I cannot fathom any high frequency terminal station going from 2 tracks in a tunnel to 8 tracks in a terminal. That is completely ridiculous unless you are creating a storage yard. 2 tracks should work and are easiest for passengers, and at most 4 tracks on a single level. You can tell that they were not serious when they went with 8 tracks on two widely separate levels, driving up costs and driving down frequencies.
There is almost nobody in the US who will listen.
The “left”/”liberal”/democrats don’t care about transit. They care about union jobs, so over priced systems are a good thing. They drive (or take a helicopter), so long as they can check the box that they helped to too poor to afford a car they are happy even if it isn’t useful service.
The “right”/”conservative”/republicans are honest about not liking transit because they drive everywhere (or take a helicopter). They like overpriced transit because it proves transit isn’t cost effective and shouldn’t bee invested in.
Both like transit as a way reward people who helped their campaign win with a cushy job overseeing transit. They are happy even if the person is incompetent at running transit as they both care about winning elections.
There are some exceptions on both sides, but the reality is nobody who has any power cares.
Henry, you are SPOT-ON with your response on same, since the Uniparty politicians from both the D’s & R’s only caters to their largest donor (aka bribes) base. They make deals with them as well, and when they win the fake election – they are often owed a favor for same as well. THIW’s.
The total new tunnel route-length is about 2 km in Manhattan and a few hundred meters in Queens. The single-track length is a lot more than twice that because of the cavern, but that’s not relevant to passengers – passengers would be if anything happier if there were zero new platform tracks and the trains went to the Grand Central lower level.
Your still wrong. But whatever.
Ah yes the absolute nonsense about coming in at grade alongside the existing MNR platforms. It was looked at in detail and would have been more expensive than the one built. I have the concept drawings and cost estimates for that. Your probably not aware of how complicated the situation is within GCT with regard to MTA owned columns, third party foundations and DOT owned bridge columns. Bringing ESA into GCT at Madison Yard level would have required massive reconfiguration of third party building foundations requiring multiple easement agreements. The existing LIRR concourse was designed around the building columns and other than underpinning the Helmsley Building to be able to excavate one of the escalator shaft the third party building columns and their footings were not touched. Indeed form board was used to make sure that there was no connection between the new concourse and the existing foundations to avoid having easements. And given the column layout in what was a mid day storage yard it would have been challenging to get the layout right without wholesale reconfiguration. But whatever.
It would also have required underpinning some of the most expensive real estate in the US along Park Ave to get the tracks up to grade and spread into platform tracks.
The “study” they usually cite would have required tunneling through the foundations of the Chrysler or maybe the Grand Hyatt or both and through the connector between the Shuttle and the Lexington Ave lines. Though that one would have sent LIRR through Metro North trains to the upper level.
It seems to me that railfans think skycrapers sit on dirt like their house does. They don’t. Tearing down the Chrysler Building is not a viable option.
(The study that said it would require moving one of the Lex tunnels was for Alt G, and that was assuming 2% grades; this all goes away at 4%.)
Focus, alt-G is for ARC. Going through the Chrysler Building and the connection between the shuttle was ESA. And through Metro North because some crank railfan has a copy of Microsoft Word.
Sending 12 car trains to 8 and 9 car long platforms is not particularly effective. And there are people already using them.
I completely agree that the MTA’s LIRR should have used 10 tracks on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal Station instead of this Grand Central Madison monstrosity.
The other problem I think, is that MTA city fares are not valid on LIRR. If you live in Queens you are completely disincentivised to use LIRR.
You need both fare integration and sufficient frequency to make the LIRR more useful within the city. Minimum of 15 minute headways 6am to 9pm would do it, 10 minutes would be better.
Yeah, and that’s terrible, but Metro-North has the same problem and yet ridership there has somehow risen more since the opening of East Side Access than ridership on the LIRR has.
If you live in Queens chances are that you don’t live near an LIRR station and just staying on the subway is faster.
We live near the LIRR in Forest Hills and the new schedules are a disaster. There used to be about three trains an hour to Penn Station, now there are about one an hour to Penn Station and one an hour to Grand Central.
Physically, ESA isn’t a reverse branch. Without ESA, four pairs of electrified tracks connect to two at the Harold Interlocking. With ESA it’s four to three. Given that both LIRR’s Port Washington Branch and Amtrak’s Hell Gate Line, carrying intercity and future PSA services, have limited frequency of servies, it’s viable to merge them into a single pair of tracks into Manhattan. Under that scheme, you have matching number of tracks on both sides of the Harold Interlocking.
Thus, ESA is actually a good oppotunity for the railroad to streamline their service pattern east of Jamaica. In Japan, legacy tracks through large metros are classified as “mainline tracks” (列車線), carrying intercity, regional and freight servies or commuter-train-only “commuter tracks” (電車線). Commuter tracks usually run subway-frequent services, and can be equipped with automatic train control (ATC) while mainline tracks only get ATP due to interoperbility constraints.
By this analogy, ERT Tunnels 1&2 should be “mainline tracks”, carrying all Amtrak, PSA and Port Washington Branch services. ERT Tunnels 3&4 and ESA Tunnels should be “commuter tracks”, serving LIRR main line express and local trains respectively. The rationales are the following:
1. E trains already provide a one-seat express ride from Penn to Kew Gardens or Forest Hill, while there’s no direct subway service from GCT to either of them.
2. 7 trains connect Mets-Willets Point and Flushing to GCT, while a subway trip from Flushing to Penn requires a lengthy transfer at Times Square.
Such scheme also makes the overly-complex Harold Interlocking redundant. When bypass tracks are in service, only alternation between Port Wash / PSA trains requires a switch throw. Everything else run straight though the interlocking.
Unfortunately, the LIRR decided to keep their overly complex way of running random trains on all branches to random terminals, making ESA a reverse branch operationally. To reduce switch movements, the schedule has been arranged in an awful pattern that usually a bunch of trains serve one terminal, followed by another bunch serving another. This creates large gaps in either terminal’s schedules. Yet, there’re still many switch and signal troubles “West of Woodside” disrupting every service since the opening of ESA.
Yeah, it’s entirely possible to run service to Grand Central without reverse-branching, but the LIRR chose to reverse-branch and split frequencies. And unfortunately, part of the project has involved reconfiguring Jamaica to be a less useful transfer point, because of the harebrained idea for a Jamaica-Flatbush shuttle.
As someone who uses LIRR…it has been a disaster. As someone who goes to Penn on the Far Rockaway line…Peak trains have been cut in half and during off-peak times the train time on this route went from 45 minutes to 52-69 minutes. If you look line by line you see similar impacts. So essentially they spent billions of dollars to substantially worsen service. This has happened on multiple lines which also has negatively impacted ridership. Moreover if you take the line to Grand Central…given how long it takes to get to the street the benefit is only marginal.
Apart from cost (and a higher density of jobs to the west), is there any reason a second set of ~4 long escalators wasn’t built east from the deep platforms up to Lexington Avenue? I could imagine escalators straight up to the street level, or just below it, without the need for a north-south concourse connecting them, in which case you could excavate mostly under the street and approach tracks.
In terms of demand, the office core zoning extends all the way to 3rd avenue, and further in some cases. Given how long it takes to get down to the platforms, there has to be a non-insignificant disutility of traveling so far up and west if you’re ultimately going east toward Lexington, in which case you’d be better off transferring to the 7 at Woodside, or more likely you’d just drive.
On a personal note, I live in east midtown and it would be nice if I didn’t have to go east (and south) to Madison Ave to get to/from Jamaica and the Airports. I took the PortWash branch from Flushing yesterday and had to transfer at Woodside to get to GCM, and ended up waiting 20 minutes for a GCM bound train! If I’d realized I’d be waiting that long for a transfer anyway, I’d have just waited a half-hour for the direct train instead. The trade off comparison reminds me choosing between express and local in Manhattan for certain trips, where the express train should be faster in theory, but the frequency is so low that the local makes more sense despite having 3 times as many stops in some cases.
As for long-term viability and utility of ESA, I’ll wait for the through connection south from the 39th St tail tracks to Atlantic Terminal ;-).
For the cost to build this could they have instead built a new station on 34th on the East side? That would have allowed the every line to run the same as before but with 1 new stop before Penn Station.
You would still have six tracks east of Woodside and four under the East River.
The number of tracks would be the same as before ESA when the LIRR actually managed to run more trains from east of Jamaica into the city than they currently are post-ESA.
If they aren’t going to use the additional tracks to be able to run more trains in from Long Island then what’s the benefit of them?
You note the employment numbers within 1 km raidius of Penn and GCT. Measuring straightline distance from 33/Seventh to 42/Park, I get 1.11 km. If I remember my trigonometry, this means just about a third of those two circles intersect. A good chunk of this area, approximately stretching from 31/Park to 45/Seventh, is commercial/office. It’s almost like there’s an advantage to locating office employment convenient to both stations… This means that a large number of the 57,457 LI commuters within 1 km of GCT may see only minor benefits or even no benefit from service to GCT. Additonally, commuters from LI to lower Manhattan used to have fairly good connections at Atlantic Terminal via subway. Now they either have to change at Jamaica then again to the subway, or continue to GCT/Penn and then a longer subway connection downtown.
Compare the benefit from this $12 billion to what could have been gained by a cross-rail type connection and coordinated service between Atlantic Terminal, Hoboken, Penn and GCT.
They could have gone to Brooklyn and changed to the subway there, but didn’t.
Is the heart of the problem that Woodside is hard to make transfers convenient at and that is stopping the LIRR from organizing the network in a way that maximizes the benefits of the new tracks? Not every track has a platform there and among the trains that do stop there’s no cross-platform transfers for trains going in the same direction.
If transfers aren’t convenient then it’s going to be hard to convince LIRR not to do reverse branching. If Jamaica is used for cross platform transfers between Penn and Grand Central bound trains then transfers from trains terminating in Brooklyn are not going to be convenient and it’s going to be hard to convince LIRR to give up the Brooklyn shuttle idea. If they don’t give up the Brooklyn shuttle idea then the new tracks to grand Central don’t allow any increase in trains coming from Long island.
Would the proposed Sunny Side station be able to give cross platform transfer between Penn and Grand Central bound trains or do the ESA tracks split off too early for them to use the station?
How ambitious of a project would it be to redesign Woodside for better transfers?
The only branch that does not go through Jamaica is the Port Washington branch. Which means all the other branches could change at Jamaica. And do and have been forever.
“If Jamaica is used for cross platform transfers between Penn and Grand Central bound trains then transfers from trains terminating in Brooklyn are not going to be convenient and it’s going to be hard to convince LIRR to give up the Brooklyn shuttle idea.”
So why are you blowing up Woodside so that people who can change in Jamaica can change in Woodside too?
Since you keep commenting about the conclusion but not the points that lead to it I’m going to break this down and number each point to make it easier for you to say which one you get lost at:
1. LIRR cares more about the Manhattan bound trains than Brooklyn bound ones.
2. Prioritizing Manhattan Bound trains and transfers between them at Jamaica means no cross platform transfers from Brooklyn trains to Manhattan bound ones.
3. With no easy transfers to Manhattan bound trains LIRR doesn’t want to run any trains from Long Island that terminate in Brooklyn. Hence the Brooklyn shuttle.
4. That means that despite all the money spent on ESA there is no increase in trains coming from Long Island.
5. If there was a station West of Jamaica that could handle the transfers between Penn Station and Grand Central trains then Jamaica could go back to be organized around cross platform transfers from Brooklyn bound trains to Manhattan bound ones. That station could be a redesigned Woodside or a new station.
Grossly over simplified the trains that used to originate or terminate in Brooklyn now go to Manhattan. The people who used to be changing at Jamaica don’t have to anymore. For some of them anyway. I have better things to do than spend a week comparing old schedules to new schedules. Building shuttle platforms at Jamaica didn’t interrupt service for half a decade and cost a lot less than blowing up Woodside.
“Grossly over simplified the trains that used to originate or terminate in Brooklyn now go to Manhattan. The people who used to be changing at Jamaica don’t have to anymore.”
Okay so you get lost at point 4 then. Not sure why you couldn’t just say that. I was nice enough to number the points for you and everything.
(Ignoring the Lower Montauk Branch) Jamaica has 8 tracks entering it from the West, 2 going east to Brooklyn, and 4 going East to Queens. Not running trains from Long Island to Brooklyn means there is no new increase in trains coming from Long Island despite all the money spent on ESA.
“I have better things to do than spend a week comparing old schedules to new schedules.”
If you have better things to do then why do you keep replying to every one of my comments?
But anyway for the second time here’s that comparison already complied:
So keep replying to me about how you better things to do or reply calling me stupid like you have in other posts on here, but I still hold that a reason ESA is not living up to what people wanted from it is that there is no station for convenient transfers between Manhattan bound trains east of Jamaica and that is prompting LIRR to organize the network in an inefficient manner.
A worldwide pandemic was outside of the scope of the planning.
It’s not just you, so don’t take it personally, and, above all, don’t feed the troll.
He’s been compulsively posting content-free drivel reply-guy for decades at every possible vaccuous “opportunity”. Just ignore it. You’re wasting valuable hours of your life.
If you use the “stylus” web browser extension this improves one’s quality of life:
li.comment-author-adirondacker12800 > article:first-child { opacity: 5% !important; }
[One day usenet kill files and score files may be reinvented, but this is not that decade …]
Given that Metro North is planning to do a similar project (reverse branching so that their trains go over the Hell Gate to Penn along with Grand Central) are there any lessons to be learned from this? I’m assuming that there are enough differences that this is potentially viable but maybe not?
“Kill it with fire”
“Nuke the site from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure”
The biggest difference is that this does not involve a cavern, so the costs are much lower, while still representing a huge premium over normal-world cost, by at least a full order of magnitude.
The main lessons are about rail timetabling, since PSA makes scheduling intercity and regional trains more delicate, with a longer section of track sharing. Unfortunately, the $3 billion for PSA do not include grade-separating the busiest passenger rail interlocking in the US, Shell (just south of New Rochelle).
Yes, clearly the cost is less insane in an absolute sense.
I guess the other thing is that Metro-North is a bit better at running trains on time than LIRR so in theory they could make it work. I just worry that something like the current Jamaica mess is going to happen at New Rochelle or wherever the transfer point ends up being.
I don’t think they’re even planning on transfers – and New Rochelle is not great for this with its current track layout.
It depends on the service patterns. If it’s local between New Rochelle and Stamford or express to Stamford and then local to New Haven, you don’t need to change trains.
It doesn’t have to be New Rochelle either. North of where the mighty New York Westchester and Boston, ran parallel to the New Haven it looks like the former ROW is still there. Actually cutting down some trees the railroad owns and sacrificing a few dozen parking spaces to put in two islands instead of two side platforms might take a decade or two of lawsuits.
It might be the busiest one outside of Chicago and New York City. It can’t be busier than Grand Central because Grand Central has all of the New Haven Line, the Harlem and the Hudson lines too. And there are a lot more trains flitting around in Sunnyside/Harold. I doubt it’s busier than the northwest corner of the L at the Loop. I don’t know or care which of the Chicago commuter stations are busiest.
They are rolling “19 miles of new and rehabilitated track” and “four bridge rehabilitations” in with four new stations. And new substations. There are freight improvements too. Separating station costs, Amtrak costs and freight costs would be interesting. It’s probably buried on page 233 through 286 of a study.
They could run service tomorrow, in Westchester and Connecticut, if they leased a few trains from NJTransit but aren’t.
….Hunter? Currently, not some time in 2037 when they finish Penn Station Access, there are five north/east bound Raritan Valley line trains arriving in Newark between 6:50 and 7:49. There has been grumbling about grade separating that forever. Wikipedia says it’s under environmental analysis.
Define viable. The have been able to run trains to and from the New Haven Line to Penn Station since 1917. They do now, it’s the route Amtrak uses. They didn’t, before the pandemic and before the Long Island Rail Road reassigned trains to Grand Central, because there was no capacity. They could start service tomorrow, assuming they could scare up qualified crews and equipment. Don’t have to build anything, at all, to do it….. Like Amtrak does once or twice an hour.
The usual number cited for New Haven Line weekday ridership, before the pandemic was 125,000. Or the same as SEPTAs or the MBTAs was. Skim off ten percent of them, for the cost of running trains, it makes their commute to the West Side faster and frees up capacity to Grand Central and on the shuttle to Times Square.
They have been planning to build stations in the Bronx since forever. I don’t know how far along they are with that. It’s more people to skim off the shuttle to Times Square. And makes life easier for a few reverse commuters…. define viable
I can’t disagree with you there. When I rode the (S) Shuttle with only 3 car R-17 trains back in the 1980’s it was PACKED, and I mean packed. When I rode the rebuilt (S) Shuttle with 6 car R62A trains a few months ago I was the only passenger on the entire 6 car train. I rode it back and forth a few times just for the fun of it to see how it was, and still I was the only passenger on the 6 car (S) line. THIW’s.
As a disclaimer, I know absolutely nothing about new york. The following speculation is based purely on map crayoning terms.
Wouldn’t it be nice to connect this line to penn station (or south, depending on gateway tunnel plans) and the new hudson tunnels, allowing through running?
Not really – it would provide LIRR-New Jersey Transit through-service, which can be done without it via the existing tunnels. Penn-Grand Central through-running should be done with new tunnels connecting to the subsurface Grand Central tracks of Metro-North, to open more through-running trunk lines.
I didn’t realize that the East River tunnels are 4 track. I was thinking of redirecting all LIRR and NJT through trains via the new Hudson tunnels and East Side Access, then adapting the northern portion of penn station, the north river tunnels and the east river tunnels to HSR standards, perhaps in conjunction with a 250kph (3km curves) tunnel under Harold Interlocking, via LGA and the Hutchinson River Expressway, as part of the Northeast Corridor HSR.
Now I think that probably the GCT cavern tracks should be extended to Hoboken. This would allow complete separation of NJT trains and NEC trains while ensuring NJT capacity.
It would be too much capacity. People who want to go to Grand Central don’t need to be on a Penn Station train or vice versa. There are the pesky problems with Grand Central going down ten stories, give or take and how they went and built subways.