The Federal Railroad Administration just released phase 1 of its own study on Penn Station capacity. Assuming that the Gateway tunnel is built but no other improvements to the station are made, the FRA thinks that the station’s infrastructure can handle a peak traffic of 32 trains per hour entering from New Jersey in the morning and 30 returning in the afternoon if part of the station is used for through-running. The assumptions on dwell times and other operational matters are conservative, and will be explored more deeply in a phase 2 report.

I bring this up because ETA has a report giving more nuance on the FRA report, welcoming it and yet demanding that phase 2 take operational reforms more seriously. We believe, with further reforms to reduce peak dwell times within the current footprint of Penn Station, that much higher throughput than 32 trains per hour is possible, potentially the 48 that the North River Tunnels and Gateway tunnels are capable of. On the other hand, Streetsblog is much more negative about the report. Dave Colon calls it a ruse, saying it exists to give a veneer of technical respectability to a Trump project that is not about transportation but about the appearance of building something as a signature.

On the technical matters, I naturally think ETA is right here; the report would not be published if I had serious misgivings about it. But Dave is right on the politics. The purpose of the FRA report has to be understood in this political context. It’s not about trying to snipe the possibility of Penn Expansion, because there’s no expectation that there should be any money for Penn Expansion; the expansion is expected to cost $16 billion on top of $7 billion for Penn Reconstruction, a project almost as useless as Penn Expansion, and this only gets funded in the context of an omnibus federal spending bill, which isn’t forthcoming. A spending bill with money for this may materialize if the Democrats win in 2028, but that depends on the economic conditions of 2029, and also there is little chance FRA activity in 2026 is conducted with an eye to a spending bill that may be negotiated in 2029.

Nor is the report exactly about how to do through-running. Phase 1, at least, does not give a blueprint for how to integrate operations at the station or for what near-term infrastructure and rolling stock investments are required to facilitate it. The word “Hunter” does not appear once in the report. Neither does the word “Shell.” Grade-separating these two junctions is the most important physical infrastructure required to support modernization of commuter rail operations in New York. It’s not exactly through-running infrastructure because it equally improves operations regardless of whether any through-running is implemented, but these are both high-priority projects budgeted in the hundreds of millions, and New Jersey Transit already asked for money for Hunter made available in the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and probably would have gotten it if Kamala Harris had won the election. That these projects are not mentioned tells me this isn’t a report about how to integrate infrastructure with operations better.

Rather, the FRA report has to be understood in the context of the signature project Trump is trying to foist on Penn Station. As there is no need for Penn Reconstruction (let alone Expansion) from the point of view of passenger throughput, the project is free to send a political message, untethered from any transportation reality. Because there is no transportation value nor any intent to effect any, the cost can be whatever can be afforded. The point isn’t to improve facilities, but to make a statement. Indeed, the more useful part of the report, the future phase 2, is not expected to be released until after station reconstruction begins, the exact opposite of what if the purpose of the report were to inform infrastructure spending.

Authoritarian and backsliding leaders love talking about their infrastructure projects, to the point that there’s sometimes a meme in punditry that they’re better at infrastructure than democracies. In non-populist, depersonalized democratic regimes, infrastructure isn’t used for political polarization purposes, so it’s not attributed to anyone; it’s much easier to identify a piece of infrastructure build by a Hitler or a Mussolini than by any postwar Christian Democratic government, even though the latter did far more than the former, because Hitler and Nazi sympathizers bragged about the Autobahn in ways the succession of democratic leaders since 1949 have not.

In truth, the most successful infrastructure programs are built by an empowered civil service. It can happen in an autocracy if it is sufficiently bureaucratized, as China is and as Russia was until recently. It can’t happen when one leader makes everything about himself; the designs will change too much and reward corruption rather than long-range planning. Among the lowest-construction costs countries, the only one not fully democratic is Turkey, and in Turkey the context of EIB financing for opposition-run cities permits the same kind of bureaucratized infrastructure planning even in a system of competitive authoritarianism. The ideal train station is one that one can’t ever attribute to a single leader; it would be preposterous to identify Berlin Hauptbahnhof as a project of Angela Merkel, Gerhard Schröder, Helmut Kohl, or any of the Berlin mayors during its construction.

In this sense, a national leader taking personal control of the project is best analogized to starchitecture. If a subway line or a train station or a similar rail megaproject has an internationally renowned architect in charge, it costs too much and is unlikely to be functional. Similarly, if it is the identifiable project of a politician, then failure is almost guaranteed, according to any criterion of transportation utility.