Strategic Counsel for Infrastructure Governance.

Fix Penn Station and build Sunnyside

Mayor Mamdani asked President Trump for $21 billion to deck over Queens’ Sunnyside Yards. Sen. Chuck Schumer rejected Trump’s offer to unfreeze $16 billion in Gateway tunnel funds in exchange for putting his name on Penn Station. These fights miss a better solution: through-running.

Amtrak wants to spend $16.7 billion on Penn South, bulldozing Block 780 — a Manhattan neighborhood of homes, businesses, and a church. Nearly 200 peak-hour trains pull into Penn, sit idle, and reverse out. These trains cross paths, causing delays. Through-running sends trains through. That speeds service, removes crossing conflicts, and boosts capacity without expanding the station’s footprint.

Amtrak and NJTransit claim the station’s layout makes through-running impossible, but MTA Chair Janno Lieber admitted the MTA supports it and said the demolition push comes from Amtrak and NJT. If Gov. Hochul promised not to destroy a neighborhood for Penn South, why is Block 780’s demolition merely “on hold” instead of canceled?

Eight of Penn’s 11 platforms are 19 feet wide, trapping riders in long dwell times. But the answer is not razing a city block; it is widening the platforms. ReThinkNYC offers the blueprint: deck over alternating tracks to create 30-foot-wide platforms, leaving 12 through-tracks. Modern systems like London’s Elizabeth Line clear wide platforms in 90 seconds. Yet Amtrak assumed a five-minute clearance, capping the 12-track layout at 32 trains per hour.

Worse, the railroads faked the math. Their October 2024 feasibility study said simulations showed the wide-platform concept failed. But when my organization filed a Freedom of Information Act request, Amtrak admitted “no simulations or modeling data” exist.

Even using that five-minute assumption, the railroads admit the 12-track through-running plan can handle 32 trains per hour. A buried 2015 memo shows their preferred $16.7 billion demolition plan would operate Block 780 as a stub-end terminal handling just 19 trains per hour. They want to destroy a neighborhood for a project that moves fewer trains than the alternative they dismissed without evidence.

We should emulate German cities that forced agencies to cooperate under a unified regional network manager. Every transit dollar should carry one condition: Amtrak, NJT, and the MTA must share tracks and implement through-running.

This is where Mamdani’s Sunnyside plan comes in. Empty deadhead NJT trains now clog Sunnyside Yards. Through-running replaces those idle trains with active service or sends them to peripheral yards. Fewer idle trains at Sunnyside means fewer tracks are needed, cutting the cost of the mayor’s housing deck.

This plan also depends on a new Sunnyside rail hub, served by Amtrak, NJT, LIRR, and Metro-North, opening the region’s labor market outside Manhattan.

Here is the grand bargain: name this new Sunnyside hub after Trump. Offering the president a station in his home borough of Queens is the cleanest trade to unfreeze $16 billion for Gateway and secure Mamdani’s Sunnyside funds.

Hochul must lead. Andy Byford is overseeing Penn Station’s transformation and has no interest in Penn South’s extra tracks. Let him work. Yet Lieber recently declined Byford’s offer to make the MTA a partner, calling the MTA a “tenant” to Amtrak’s “landlord.” We cannot run the continent’s busiest transit hub like a lease dispute.

New Yorkers deserve better than a $16.7 billion demolition plan built on fake math and bureaucratic cowardice. We have the leverage to cut the ultimate deal: save Block 780, build the Sunnyside hub, give the president his prize, and mandate through-running. The region knows what’s wrong. Now let’s fix it.

Blank chairs the transportation and infrastructure committee of the City Club of New York.

Read Original Article on NY Daily News