The Penn Passage
Reimagining North America's busiest transit hub as a through-running gateway that preserves Manhattan's urban fabric while boosting capacity by 65%.
Every day, hundreds of thousands of commuters navigate the labyrinth that is Penn Station, a testament to both human resilience and flawed infrastructure design. For decades, we've accepted its shortcomings as inevitable—but what if they weren't?
The current government-backed proposal calls for massive demolition of Manhattan buildings to expand Penn Station's footprint—a $20+ billion endeavor that would forever alter the city's character. This narrative presents an alternative path: one that finds capacity not through destroying neighborhoods, but through reimagining how the station operates.
The Current Crisis
Penn Station's fundamental flaw isn't its size—it's how trains move through it. While global cities like London, Paris, and Tokyo embrace through-running stations where trains continue their journey after passenger stops, Penn Station forces most trains to terminate and reverse direction, occupying platforms for up to 15 minutes.
This terminal design creates a bottleneck that no amount of expansion can fully solve unless we address the core operational model.
Fragmented Systems
Poor Connectivity
Current commuter rail networks operate as three disconnected systems, forcing passengers to make circuitous transfers through Manhattan.
A Tale of Three Isolated Networks
The tri-state region's transit crisis begins with its fragmented design: three railroad systems that operate as separate fiefdoms, meeting at Penn Station but refusing to truly connect.
Imagine living in Hoboken and working in Garden City—two points separated by just 30 miles. Despite this short distance, your commute requires multiple transfers, navigating crowded platforms, and often exceeds 90 minutes. This isn't a failure of geography but of vision.
The tri-state area's rail networks—NJ Transit from the west, Long Island Rail Road from the east, and Metro-North serving the northern suburbs—converge at Manhattan but operate as isolated systems. This fragmentation forces inefficient transfers, limits regional mobility, and creates pressure points that ripple through the entire network.
Technical Division
These railroads speak different technical languages—from incompatible power systems (12.5kV AC vs. 750V DC third rail) to varying platform heights and signaling standards. These differences weren't inevitable; they reflect decades of disjointed planning.
Operational Silos
Each railroad maintains separate operational protocols, crew assignments, and management structures. Trains from different operators often can't use the same tracks or platforms efficiently, creating artificial capacity constraints.
Governance Fragmentation
Penn Station operates under divided governance—Amtrak owns the infrastructure but runs the fewest trains, creating misaligned incentives. Changes requiring multi-agency approval face institutional paralysis.
The terminal model forces trains to occupy platforms for 8-15 minutes while changing direction, drastically reducing the station's throughput capacity.
The Platform Problem
Walk through Penn Station during rush hour and you'll witness the human cost of this design failure: passengers packed onto dangerously narrow platforms averaging just 10.6 feet wide—less than half the modern safety standard. These narrow platforms force slower boarding and alighting, further extending train dwell times in a vicious cycle of inefficiency.
The Safety Imperative
These platform constraints aren't just inconveniences—they're safety hazards. During peak periods, passengers stand inches from platform edges as trains enter and exit at speed. Modern station designs specifically prevent these conditions through wider platforms and better circulation space.
While the government's expansion plan would add capacity through demolition, it fails to address these fundamental operational flaws. Penn Station doesn't just need more space—it needs to work differently.
The Tri-State Solution: Fluidity Through Design
What if Penn Station's trains never had to stop and reverse? What if they could flow through the station like water through a well-designed channel rather than backing up like a clogged drain?
The Tri-State Solution presents a fundamentally different approach: transform Penn Station from a terminal into a through-running station where trains continue their journey after passenger stops. This operational shift—rather than expanded real estate—is the key to unlocking capacity.
Phase I creates essential "swing space" with a new Platform A while extending Platforms 1 & 2 to accommodate longer trains.
Phase II transforms the central core into through-running platforms, dramatically increasing efficiency and safety.
The Through-Running Advantage
At its essence, through-running is about continuous flow. Rather than entering the station, discharging passengers, changing direction, and departing—a process that occupies platforms for 8-15 minutes—trains would continue through to destinations on the other side of Manhattan, reducing platform occupancy to just 3-6 minutes.
Through-running allows trains to continue their journey after passenger stops, dramatically reducing platform dwell times and increasing throughput capacity.
A Phased Revolution
The beauty of the Tri-State Solution lies in its implementable design—a carefully staged transformation that maintains continuous service while progressively improving capacity and safety:
Creating the Building Blocks
Construction of a new 25-foot wide Platform A on the station's southern side creates immediate capacity relief while providing essential "swing space" for subsequent reconstruction. Extensions to Platforms 1 & 2 accommodate longer trains, boosting passenger capacity by ~33%.
Reshaping the Heart of Penn
The central core is progressively reconstructed to create five wider platforms (25+ feet each) with 10 through-running tracks. Each platform pair is rebuilt in sequence, allowing continuous operations throughout construction while providing safer passenger circulation and modern amenities.
Unifying the Regional Network
Technical systems integration creates unified train control, coordinated schedules, and seamless passenger information across all three rail networks, completing the transformation of Penn Station into a regional through-running hub.
Two Paths Forward: Confronting the Choices
Where the government proposal relies on demolition and expansion, the Tri-State Solution focuses on operational transformation and integration. This fundamental difference shapes every aspect of these competing visions.
The divergent approaches to solving Penn Station's capacity crisis reflect deeper philosophical differences about urban infrastructure. One prioritizes physical expansion at the cost of neighborhood destruction; the other treats the station as an operational system that can be optimized through smarter design.
Government Expansion Plan
- $20+ billion cost for physical expansion
- Demolition of historic buildings and displacement of residents
- Maintains inefficient terminal operations that limit throughput
- Long implementation timeline with significant disruption
- No regional integration between rail networks
Tri-State Solution
- $7-10 billion estimated cost (65% savings)
- Preserves neighborhood fabric through focused operational changes
- Addresses root causes of operational inefficiency
- Phased implementation with minimal service disruption
- Creates true regional connectivity across all networks
Beyond the Numbers: Human Impact
This comparison isn't merely about construction costs or capacity figures—it's about the human experience of the city. The Tri-State Solution preserves the urban fabric of Manhattan while creating a more connected region where someone living in Morristown could commute directly to a job in Great Neck without transferring.
Wider platforms mean safer, more comfortable passenger environments. Reduced dwell times mean fewer delays cascading through the system. Through-running means expanded access to jobs, housing, and opportunities throughout the tri-state region.
The Penn Station transformation could eventually connect to a new Sunnyside Station hub in Queens, creating unprecedented regional connectivity.
The good news: this vision is gaining traction. Technical concepts from the Tri-State Solution have been incorporated into the formal environmental review as a "Hybrid Alternative," and public officials are increasingly recognizing the merits of through-running as a central strategy rather than a peripheral consideration.
The Journey Forward
The Tri-State Solution isn't just a technical plan—it's an invitation to reimagine how our region connects. It challenges us to solve problems through operational ingenuity rather than demolition, to find capacity through smarter design rather than bigger footprints.
As this vision gains momentum among planners, officials, and advocates, the possibility of a truly integrated regional rail network moves closer to reality. The Penn Passage could transform not just a station but how millions of people experience the tri-state region each day.
The Tri-State Solution was authored by Liam Blank in June 2022 and featured in Bloomberg CityLab.