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Liam Blank

About Liam Blank

Transportation policy, public-records, and civic visualization work for the people deciding what the New York region builds.

Liam Blank works on transportation policy, public records, and civic visualization in New York. The work covers regional rail, Penn Station, corridor reuse, and the institutions that decide what gets built.

The operating claim comes first

A visualization is useful only when it makes a decision easier to read. The image has to answer to the timetable, the right-of-way, the public record, and the people who live with the result.

Liam started with rail feasibility work: travel times, curve radii, grades, dwell assumptions, station capacity, and the operating patterns that make a plan work or fail. That technical base led to the institutions around each plan: boards, statutes, procurement, consultant scopes, public hearings, and the records that explain why agencies choose one path over another.

He now works with advocates, reporters, legal teams, funders, and civic institutions that need to test an infrastructure claim, recover the record behind it, and show an alternative before a weak assumption becomes a fixed public commitment.

What the work tests

The same method applies to Penn Station, regional rail, governance reform, waterfront logistics, highway removal, and corridor reuse: identify the promise, find the record, compare both with the physical system, and show what is at stake.

  • Operating claims. Train counts, dwell assumptions, turnback constraints, platform loads, service patterns, and station geometry decide whether a plan can function.
  • Public records. Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests can surface contracts, scopes, studies, consultant assumptions, correspondence, and agency review trails.
  • Scenario logic. A visual alternative starts from an explicit policy claim, a defined geography, a plausible path to implementation, and a clear line between known facts and assumptions.
  • Source-grounded visuals. Renderings, maps, and diagrams are built from reference imagery, plans, spreadsheets, public datasets, and reviewer corrections.
  • Civic strategy. Evidence has to become testimony, reports, legislation, press material, donor briefings, and negotiating positions without losing the technical argument.
  • Public risk control. Strong images can overpromise, so each one carries its assumptions, limits, and corrections where a reviewer can see them. The methods page sets out how.

Background

  • Chair, Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, The City Club of New York · 2023 to present. Directs committee research, federal policy engagement, public-records practice, external communications, and visual advocacy on Penn Station, regional rail, waterfront logistics, and infrastructure accountability.
  • Associate Director, Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA · 2022 to 2023. Led strategic planning, legislative tracking, rider council communications, and fare policy research for New York City Transit, Long Island Rail Road, and Metro-North riders.
  • Policy & Communications Manager, Tri-State Transportation Campaign · 2018 to 2022. Wrote transportation policy reports, advanced congestion pricing and bus policy campaigns, and produced the NJ Transit governance reform blueprint.
  • Transportation Analyst, ReThink Studio · 2014 to 2018. Developed rail corridor feasibility methods for underused and abandoned rights-of-way, including early regional rail and through-running concepts.

Liam wrote From Here to There: Regional Rail for Metro New York (2022) and has testified before the New York City Council.

Visualization service

The visualization work is policy-grounded visual strategy for contested public decisions. It suits a group that has reports, maps, spreadsheets, public records, or a rough policy concept but lacks a visual package that can survive expert review. Typical subjects include rail capacity, station reconstruction, waterfront freight, highway removal, public-realm reuse, transit-oriented development, and institutional alternatives that prose explains poorly.

Engagements take three forms. A scenario visualization kit covers one geography and one decision point: a source audit, a visual assumptions memo, a reference-image strategy, scenario images, captions, and revision notes. An advocacy visual brief is a compact set of maps, diagrams, before-and-after comparisons, and captions for testimony, board review, donor outreach, press, or coalition alignment. An interactive civic story page combines source-grounded visuals, maps, key metrics, and a scrolling narrative for a public-interest campaign. See Visual Futures.

These materials are conceptual advocacy and decision-support products. They are not architectural services, engineering drawings, construction documents, substitutes for environmental review, or official agency plans.

Selected work

Press coverage, op-eds, and testimony are collected on Press & Talks. Liam is also on LinkedIn and X.