The Problems of not Killing Penn Expansion and of Tariffs
Penn Station Expansion is a useless project. This is not news; the idea was suspicious from the start, and since then we’ve done layers of simulation, most recently of train-platform-mezzanine passenger flow. However, what is news is that the Trump administration is aiming to take over Penn Reconstruction (a separate, also bad project) from the MTA, in what looks like the usual agency turf battles, except now given a partisan spin. I doubt there’s going to be any money for Reconstruction (budgeted at $7 billion), let alone expansion (budgeted at $17 billion), and overall this looks like the usual promises that nobody intends to act upon. The problem is that this project is still lurking in the background, waiting for someone insane enough to say what not a lot of people think but few are willing to openly disagree with and find some new source of money to redirect there. And oddly, this makes me think of tariffs.
The commonality is that free trade is not just good, but is more or less an unmixed blessing. In public transport rolling stock procurement, the costs of tariffs are so high that a single job created in the 2010s cost $1 million over 4-6 years, paying $20/hour. In infrastructure, in theory most costs are local and so it shouldn’t matter, but in practice some materials need to be imported, and when they run into trade barriers, they mess entire construction schedules. Boston’s ability to upgrade commuter rail stations with high platform was completely lost due to successive tightening of the Buy America waiver process under Trump and then Biden, to the point that even materials that were just not made in America (steel, FRP) could not be imported. The problem is that nobody was willing to say this out loud, and instead politicians chose to interfere with bids to get some photo-ops, getting trains that are overpriced and fail to meet schedule and quality standards.
Thus, the American turn away from free trade, starting with Trump’s 2016 campaign. During the Obama-Trump transition, the FTA stopped processing Buy America waivers, as a kind of preemptive obedience to something that was never written into the law, which includes several grounds for waivers. During the Trump-Biden transition, the standards were tightened, and waivers required the approval of a political office at the White House, which practiced a hostile environment, hence the above example of the MBTA’s platform problems. Now there are general tariffs, at a rate that changes frequently with little justification. The entire saga, especially in the transit industry, is a textbook example not just of comparative advantage, but of the point John Williamson made in the original Washington Consensus that trade barriers were a net negative to the country that imposes them even if there’s no retaliation, purely from the negative effects on transparency and government cleanliness. This occurred even though tariffs were not favored in the political elite of the United States, or even in the general public; but nobody would speak out except special interests and populists who favored trade barriers.
And Penn Expansion looks the same. It’s an Amtrak turf game, which NJ Transit and the MTA are indifferent to. NJ Transit’s investment plan is not bad and focuses on actual track-level improvements on the surface. The MTA has a lot of problems, including the desire for Penn Reconstruction, but Penn Expansion is not among them. The sentiments I’m getting when I talk to people in that milieu is that nobody really thinks it’s going to happen, and as a result most people don’t think it’s important to shoot down what is still a priority for Amtrak managers who don’t know any better.
The problem is that when the explicit argument isn’t made, the political system gets the message that Penn Expansion is not necessarily bad, but now is not the time for it. It will not invest in alternatives. (On tariffs, the alternative is to repeal Buy America.) It will not cancel the ongoing design work, but merely prolong it by demanding more studies, more possibilities for adding new tracks (seven? 12? Any number in between?). It will insist that any bounty of money it gets go toward more incremental work on this project, and not on actually useful alternatives for what to do with $17 billion.
This can go on for a while until some colossally incompetent populist of the type that can get elected mayor or governor in New York, or perhaps president, decides to make it a priority. Then it can happen, and $17 billion plus future escalation would be completely wasted, and further investment in the system would suffer because everyone would plainly see that $17 billion buys next to nothing in New York so what’s the point in spending a mere $300 million here and there on a surface junction? If it were important then Amtrak would have prioritized that, no? Even people who get on some level that the agencies are bad with money will believe them on technical matters like scheduling and cost estimation over outsiders, in the same manner that LIRR riders think the LIRR is incompetent and also has nothing to learn from outsiders.
The way forward is to be more formal about throwing away bad ideas. Does Penn Expansion have any transportation value? No. So cancel it. Drop it from the list of Northeast Corridor projects, cancel all further design work, and spend about 5 orders of magnitude less money on timetabling trains at Penn Station within its existing footprint. Don’t let it lurk in the background until someone stupid enough decides to fund it; New York is rather good lately at finding stupid people and elevating them to positions of power. And learn to make affirmative arguments for this rather than the usual “it will just never happen” handwringing.
Pedestrian Observations 
The hard part is how does someone who knows they are not a domain expert figure out who really is and get those people in charge? This is a constant problem all over. In major wars you see all the time the early generals are not that good – their skill is looking good in front of the government not leading war, but because military results are something that becomes obvious over a few months so generally the best quickly rise. (though not always since once in a while a great leader is on the hard part of the line where a retreat is the only possible answer even though it looks bad. Also sometimes loyalty is valued over competence even in the middle of a war)
With transit there is no attention grabbing war to force politicians to pay attention. Even if they all would focus on transit and get great results there, that most likely is done at the expense of everything else they are also supposed to watch.
You need to have at least a little knowledge of the domain, (witness someone else) ask the possible expert a question, and evaluate their answer for yourself. For example:
– O astrologer, why did I stub my toe?
– Because Mercury is retrograde and Jupiter is in the house of Libra.
This answer conforms to the literary genre of astrology, thus the possible-expert passed this test. In the limit of “has satisfactorily answered all questions so far and we don’t feel like asking more”, they are certified Expert™ for the time being. Compare the answer:
– I don’t know.
This answer shows the expertise-claimant to be a shallow fake. (I must emphasize the adjective here. As stated above, there is no distinction even on the conceptual level between “fake deep enough to have fooled everyone” and “real”. Hence the commonly said advice “fake it ’til you make it”.)
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I hope it is obvious that the above is wrong. It is advice for LARP and stage improv. Unfortunately, a great many people do think in exactly this manner — and that is exactly why the willingless to say “I don’t know” is prized in a technical discussion. It demonstrates that the person is not operating on LARPistemology.
I think the best approximation I can give is that if someone can explain some fundamental tradeoff or concept of the field (which probably has a jargon word for it) without resorting to other jargon words, they are probably a good expert. (Unfortunately, some good experts are bad teachers. However, the other “error” direction is interesting. If someone who couldn’t previously write e.g. a Jarrett Walker article on the ridership-coverage tradeoff simply recites said article to you, is that really a false positive? After all, they clearly have access to his catalog and contact info, so they might become the least stupid candidate in the pool half a year in the future.)
Of course, this (and presumably every other possible answer) at some point relies on the taste of the non-expert evaluating it. I have a particular illustrative example in mind, an Arizona politician (Sen. Juan Mendez) saying “[housing crisis] Our motto cannot be that a $300,000 house is cheaper than a $500,000 house; this out-of-touch mindset […] [therefore oppose build-by-right proposal]”. One would assume that a politician says something like this because it is known that a large fraction of the populace reacts positively to it.
A lot of this is hiring 25 year old interns to do everything
On the jargon point, I’d like to push back a bit. The issue is that explaining complex concepts using simple language is what a lot of good experts can do, but it’s also what a lot of airport bestseller writers do. That’s why references are required for claims, and why it’s important to be able to explain complex concepts not just in simple language but also, to a person with some (if sub-expert) background, in intermediate language. A Jared Diamond can explain history in extremely basic language, but collapses if you ask about details of the Spanish conquests in the Americas or about how much crop dispersion there really was along the east-west axis of Eurasia.
On the one hand, point taken. On the other hand: I thought wheat was cultivated “everywhere” from Northern China to the Atlantic by 1000 BC at the latest. Slightly less OP crops, such as rye, spread less, and were big acreage losers of the Early Modern / Protoindustrial Era agricultural improvements. (Though millet spread absolutely everywhere despite being a niche crop in the temperate belt.) Meanwhile, it would be entirely proper even for an expert historian to say “don’t know off the top of my head, will look it up” about the details of the conquests.
(I suppose if someone wanted to “argue against” Diamond, they should write a book about the Portuguese and later Dutch (&c) conquests in Southeast Asia (“against the rice”). It would be about the tributary-military complex landball-rolling contest, and how ships sometimes let you find places with much smaller polities. 9 of 10 oikisteis would recommend.)
The two big Us specific issues are the “court politics” that Alon has discussed before. Try doing a Lib Dem by-election and that should get you back on track.
the other is the extreme reluctance to learn from overseas
To give an example the US is in a much weaker position on the EV transition than basically any other country.
And there’s the list everyone but the US has done from banning asbestos to maternity pay
As if they intend to do anything with anything. They’ve had their chance to call Northeasterners evil. It will stall anything happening anywhere for years. I suppose that has the advantage of punishing the people who convicted Dear Leader of felonies.
To beat the dead horse one more time, Access to the Region’s Core should be open by now. Canceled 15 years ago everything was going to move lickety split on other projects. It’s just been stalled even longer!! !!
Very reasonable. Pesky arithmetic. $20 an hour over a 2000 hour work year ( 50 weeks of 40 hours a week ) is $40,000. $40,000 over six years is $240,000. Very crude quick way to estimate how much an employee costs is to double their hourly wage. Half a million over six years. That’s just “direct” costs. Employer paid taxes, benefits and the cost to administer all of it. That doesn’t include the costs of actually having a place to work. Rent, utilities, other insurance etc. is three times the hourly rate. Six years of labor in the valiant private workforce where everything is super efficient would be three quarters of a million. Depreciation on a computer and cubicle to put it in isn’t much. It’s a lot more on piece of heavy construction equipment.
Double the wage includes overheads, and those overheads are in turn included in the number of jobs created, so the multiplier is a lot less.
It’s either that or they are taking $100 bills out into the parking lot and having bonfires.
Double is “direct” costs. Wages, benefits, employer paid taxes, banking charges, fraction of a payroll clerk. They can’t do this milling around on a street corner, three times covers rent, amortizing a computer and cubicle. That’s just rough guesstimating for someone who types for a living. It’s costs a lot of money to rent a backhoe. And backhoe operators make a lot more than $20 an hour.
At union rates, backhoe operators were making $20 an hour in 2018, when the article praising the Kinki Sharyo LRV order for LA appeared in the Prospect. Today, of coruse the rates would be higher, but these days, rolling stock in the US doesn’t cost $140,000/m, but much more; the entire LRV order in 2023 dollars was $200,000/m, and there are even more expensive LRVs out there – for example, the Type 10s in Boston are $230,000/m, with Buy America but no union lawfare.
Backhoe operators don’t assemble LRVs. Backhoes cost a lot of money. The oil company they get the diesel fuel from doesn’t give it to them. When it breaks down the mechanic who fixes it wants to get paid. The payroll clerk making sure the direct deposit gets made wants one too and the bank charges to do that. It’s very roughly three times the hourly rate for someone in a cubicle. It’s a lot more for someone who doesn’t type on a keyboard for a living.
The oil company’s revenues are not really included in the job creation figures, and “this job creation figures includes oil company revenue” would usually be an argument against the program.
Backhoes don’t work for very long if the fuel tank doesn’t get refilled. Just like your computer won’t work for very long if the electric bill doesn’t get paid. Whoever is paying the bill for the diesel and the electricity wants to get paid and the bank charges a fee to process the payment. It all adds up. You don’t get to decide which expense gets added in.
Quick estimate is double the pay for “direct” costs and triple for an employee when things like rent etc. are added in. It can be quite a bit more for people who do something more vigorous than typing on a keyboard all day long….. connecting to the internet isn’t a benevolent emanation of the universe. It costs money to do that…
Double? try triple to actually make a normal profit as well.
The first para of this article today (below, ostensibly about the Tesla Takedown) is so en pointe (for PO) I feel compelled to share it. I understand it is the same designer as Penn Stn.
Also, “Honk if you hate billionaires.” (or London:-)
Penn Station is a s***hole and should be razed to the ground starting with MSG above it. Its not and never will be about how many trains and through running and all the other BS that surrounds it. Just stop it being a homeless encampment with crowded platform, intolerable heat in the summer and intolerable cold in the winter and make it a more pleasant experience. You get tired of stepping over sleeping bodies when you arrive in Penn around the 6am time. Passengers care about that and not whether there’s a through train to somewhere they don’t want to go to. Plus nothing is being funded for the next 4 years by the Feds as it relates to transit/rail.
It does not cost $7 billion in Penn Reconstruction to remove homeless people from a train station. Homeless people are not a popular group in the broad public (there’s a reason left-wing groups use the euphemism “unhoused”) and are not a legally protected class in American civil rights law, and politicians who thought that the problem to be solved was their presence could say so out loud and get tough on crime accolades.
Excuse my ignorance:
In this Penn Expansion, what happens to Madison Square Garden?
Which Penn Expansion? The official plan is to condemn the block south of Penn Station, which doesn’t touch MSG. There are various plans to remove MSG and rebuild Penn Station with better sight lines, pedestrian circulation, and natural light, but they’re private proposals by architecture firms or by advocates. The current plans for both Penn Expansion and Penn Reconstruction are that MSG should stay in place.
It can get printed and put on the bookshelf in the archives with all of the other expansion plans that have been floated in the past 40 years. Access to the Region’s Core was cancelled 15 years ago. The only thing that has happened is that space has been reserved between 10th and 11th Ave for tunnels that might someday get built. In the mean time they’ve needed more capacity for 30 years.
Thanks.