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Hudson Yards: An Inescapable Commuter Nightmare?
By
Lauren Evans
Published Apr 1, 2014
Modified Apr 1, 2014
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By
Lauren Evans
Published Apr 1, 2014
Modified Apr 1, 2014
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Hudson Yards is going to be so exciting! There's going to be a great big L'Oreal and a Fairway and maybe an 80,000-square-foot movie theater! And no one will be able to leave, because the city's transportation infrastructure is obviously just not equipped to handle such a high wattage of fun. And by "fun," I mean "24 million extra people."
“Development is moving in a westward direction in Manhattan like it never has before,” Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress, told the Post. “It’s over 30 million square feet of new development. One subway line is not sufficient. We’re already seeing severe overcrowding on the commute rail lines.”
It's not that transit officials didn't see this coming—in addition to the 7 train expansion, which will extend the line to 11th Avenue and 34th Street, the city also planned to build a new Amtrak station inside the old Farley Post Office, which would ease some of the congestion currently clogging Penn Station. (This was delusional thinking, since only Amtrak would be offloaded—not the Long Island Rail Road or New Jersey Transit.)
Amtrak's proposed Gateway Project was initially lauded as a solution to alleviate the bottleneck between Newark and New York—in addition to converting portions of the post office, it would also add new rail bridges in the New Jersey Meadowlands, new tunnels under the Hudson Palisades and Hudson River, and an additional terminal to Penn Station. But the project, proposed in 2011, has collected only around $185 million of the estimated $14 billion needed to bring it to fruition.
The MTA is also looking into the feasibility of routing Metro-North to Penn Station, which would add a total of six stations—two on Manhattan's West Side and four in the East Bronx.
A spokesperson for the MTA told the Post that each of the proposed projects are either being "actively pursued" or, at least, "supported." The billions of dollars required to see any of the projects through, however, was not mentioned. But why would anyone leave anyway? There might be a Shake Shack!
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