I work on transportation policy, public records, and civic visualization in New York.

Since 2014, I have focused on Penn Station and regional rail, while also building public data tools and visualizing alternatives for highways, public land, and working waterfronts.

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Liam Blank

Penn Station’s capacity is governed by the service plan.

Train capacity depends on how trains are scheduled, turned, crewed, and assigned to tracks as much as on the station’s physical footprint. Federal modeling now supports limited commuter through-running within the existing station; higher levels depend on reducing arrival variability, relieving West Side Yard congestion, and changing dwell and circulation conditions.

My work follows those assumptions through agency studies, consultant scopes, public records, and comparable rail systems. The unresolved issue is the passenger service itself: which trains run through, how often, on what equipment, and under whose control.

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The Greater New Yorker East, an illustrated regional view east of Manhattan
The Greater New Yorker, East
The Greater New Yorker West, an illustrated regional view west of Manhattan
The Greater New Yorker, West

Replacing the BQE

Off-Ramp NYC compares rebuilding I-278 with a corridor-wide alternative based on highway removal, transit, freight reform, land reclamation, and neighborhood reconnection. My renderings place those choices in recognizable Brooklyn locations so the proposal can be judged as a physical change rather than an abstraction.

See the BQE work

MTA spending and congestion pricing

For Reinvent Albany, I helped turn nine years of MTA vendor transactions into an interactive statewide resource and 239 district fact sheets showing where the money went and which firms received the largest shares.

For Tri-State Transportation Campaign, I combined Census commuting data with legislative boundaries to produce 217 district fact sheets. In the districts studied, an estimated 0.51 to 1.78 percent of commuters would likely pay the congestion-pricing toll.

239 MTA vendor-spending district fact sheets
217 Congestion-pricing district fact sheets
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Public-facing aerial visualization of the Middletown development proposal

Middletown Town Commons

I translated a developer’s site plan into a public-facing aerial, then developed a resident-informed alternative that preserved Pottsy Field and concentrated development on the former Navy Lodge parcel. The town’s amended agreement later adopted a broadly comparable division of the site.

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Liam Blank

I began working on Penn Station and regional rail at ReThinkNYC in 2014 while studying planning and public policy at Rutgers. I later served as Policy and Communications Manager at Tri-State Transportation Campaign and Associate Director at PCAC to the MTA. Since 2023, I have chaired the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee of the City Club of New York.

I grew up in Rhode Island and live in New York City.

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