[k1052]

Originally Posted by mrnyc

why are you advocating for doing nothing?

of course the costs for gateway balloon as time goes by, but at least the empire/penn station south costs will now be fixed in time.

one piece at a time? ok so get done what you can. thats how it is at the moment. post trump who knows? hopefully someone will care about transit and will fund the tunnels after trump reneged on the deal in spite over his election results around here.

I actually propose that we do spend a load of money but spend it differently to get way more bang for the buck:

Originally Posted by k1052

Go stand at the RER station at Les Halles that does half a million people a day on four big platforms. The big differences are station design and how the service is run to maximize the physical assets.

I'd essentially turn Penn into the same thing but almost triple the size (and thus capacity) by demoing MSG to build a gigantic mezzanine with wide platform-mezz-street access points, filling in tracks to widen the platforms, add the two Hudson tubes, and making NJT-LIRR-Amtrak thru run all services. If anything stands at the platform for more than a couple minutes then something would be wrong. There would be no flat crossing movements.

This is a reasonable illustration of such a plan: