Our webinar about the train station 3D model went off successfully. I was on video for a little more than two hours, Michael a little less; the recording is on YouTube, and I can upload the auto-captioning if people are okay with some truly bad subtitles.

I might even do more webinars as a substitute for Twitch streams, just because Zoom samples video at similar quality to Twitch for my purposes but at far smaller file size; every time I upload a Zoom video I’m reminded that it takes half an hour to upload a two-hour video whereas on Twitch it is two hours when I’m in Germany. (Internet service in other countries I visit is much better.)

The questions, as expected, were mostly not about the 3D model, but about through-running and Penn Station in general. Joe Clift was asking a bunch of questions about the Hudson Tunnel Project (HTP) and its own issues, and he and others were asking about commuter rail frequency. A lot of what we talked about is a preview of a long proposal, currently 19,000, by the Effective Transit Alliance; the short version can be found here. For example, I briefly mentioned on video that Penn Expansion, the plan to demolish a Manhattan block south of Penn Station to add more tracks at a cost of $17 billion, provides no benefits whatsoever, even if it doesn’t incorporate through-running. The explanation is that the required capacity can be accommodated on four to five tracks with best American practices for train turnaround times and with average non-US practices, 10 minutes to turn; the LIRR and New Jersey Transit think they need 18-22 minutes.

There weren’t questions about Penn Reconstruction, the separate (and much better) $7 billion plan to rebuild the station in place. The plan is not bad – it includes extra staircases and escalators, extra space on the lower concourse, and extra exits. But Reinvent Albany just found an agreement between the various users of Penn Station for how to do Penn Reconstruction, and it enshrines some really bad practices: heavy use of consultants, and a choice of one of four project delivery methods all of which involve privatization of the state; state-built construction is not on the menu.

In light of that, it may make sense to delay Penn Reconstruction. The plan as it is locks in bad procurement practices, which mean the costs are necessarily going to be a multiple of what they could be. It’s better to expand in-house construction capacity for the HTP and then deploy it for other projects as the agency gains expertise; France is doing this with Grand Paris Express, using its delivery vehicle Société du Grand Paris as the agency for building RER systems in secondary French cities, rather than letting the accumulated state capacity dissipate when Grand Paris Express is done.

This is separate from the issue of what to even do about Penn Station – Reconstruction in effect snipes all the reimaginings, not just ours but also ones that got more established traction like Vishaan Chakrabarti’s. But even then it’s not necessarily a bad project; it just really isn’t worth $7 billion, and the agreement makes it clear that it is possible to do better if the agencies in question learn what good procurement practices are (which I doubt – the MTA is very bought in to design-build failure).