Hell and back again
It was one of precious few transit bullets dodged in an absolutely awful year for getting around the city: The Summer of Hell predicted by Gov. Cuomo for Penn Station’s railroad passengers never materialized. Commuting into and out of the dreary pit these past few months turned out to be just ordinarybad, not off-the-charts, tragicomically terrible.
Today, the Amtrak repairs that took tracks out of service and cut back schedules end. Regular operations resume, bringing back 230,000 daily LIRR trips, 172,000 using NJ Transit and 35,000 on Amtrak. Good news, right? Kind of. If the repairs really did what they were supposed to do, those hundreds of thousands of commuters rushing back into the rabbit warren would henceforth have far smoother rides in and out.
But Penn has been badly mismanaged by cashstarved Amtrak for decades. With full service returning, the delays and headaches are sure to come back with a vengeance soon enough.
Rather than wait for the inevitable, the railroads should learn from the summer and use now-proven methods to change travel patterns permanently to ease the crush.
The No. 1 reason the summer was a breeze was because there were fewer people and trains at the station. Amtrak sent some trains to Grand Central. NJ Transit diverted whole lines to Hoboken, and the LIRR substantially boosted service to Brooklyn’s Atlantic Terminal and Hunterspoint Ave. in Queens.
Most critically, both NJ Transit and the LIRR cut the fare to the other destinations, which at first the LIRR refused until Cuomo made them do it.
It worked swimmingly. Ridership to Brooklyn and Queens went up 40% and 60% respectively, as thousands of Long Islanders voted with their wallets, taking advantage of cheaper fares.
Over in Jersey, NJ Transit trips to Hoboken climbed, as did PATH rides into Manhattan. And everyone else at Penn benefited from a lower load there.
Today, for no good reason, the fares to reach outlying stations go back to what they were before — a boneheaded refusal by the LIRR and NJ Transit to learn from a rare experiment that worked.
Both commuter lines have to lower fares to their non-Penn stops and balance any lost revenue by increasing the Penn fares.
Penn remains at the track crossing. Amtrak, the landlord despite running the fewest trains, should be forced out of its management role. The station should be handed off to the state so that the cruddy place and the new Moynihan Station to its west can be knitted seamlessly together when the latter opens in 2020.
But we need not wait for that to happen to win lasting improvements at New York’s most exasperating transit hub. The Summer of Hell is dead. Long live its smarter ideas.