The RPA Publishes Bad Report Against Through-Running

The Regional Plan Association released a new report, called New York Penn Station: Constraints and Considerations for Meeting Future Demand. It argues against through-running on the grounds that it would reduce capacity, and asserts that any solution to station capacity after the Gateway tunnel, the Hudson Tunnel Project, opens in the late 2030s must include “station expansion or some other form of system expansion.” There’s something disappointing about this report, not because it’s wrong (although it is) but because it seems to just rehash past arguments without seriously addressing past criticisms of the $17 billion Penn expansion. The lead author Rachel Weinberger and I talked about Penn Station capacity issues in 2024, after I wrote these two blog posts attacking Amtrak for its assumptions that imply additional tracks are required at Penn Station. Since then, the Effective Transit Alliance has done additional work, modeling the interfaces between the trains, the Penn Station…