This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful

[mahatmakanejeeves]

October 28, 2019: "One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat." -- Penn Station, NYC, 1910 - 1963

Linking to an article does not mean that I agree with every word.

HISTORY DEPT.

This Is Why Your Holiday Travel Is Awful
The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame.

By MARC J. DUNKELMAN

11/29/2019 08:01 AM EST

Marc J. Dunkelman, a fellow at the Taubman Center for American Politics and Policy at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, is the author of “The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community.” The research in article was supported by a fellowship from NYU’s Marron Institute for Urban Management.

At the northeastern corner of the underground maze that doubles as the Western Hemisphere’s most heavily trafficked transit hub, two frantic streams of pedestrians converge. Commuters—more than 8,000 of them heading in and out, every hour, during the morning rush—enter New York’s Pennsylvania Station from the blocks surrounding Macy’s department store and go down a crowded set of escalators off 34th Street. After arriving at the basement level, they merge with the hordes that exit New York’s subway, roughly 27 million passengers entering and leaving this one station each year. Together, the two torrents then enter the “barrel corridor,” a cavelike hallway lined with drug stores, coffee shops and rundown delis hocking “big boys,” the canisters of cheap beer popular with construction workers heading home to Long Island.

In May 2017, near the end of an ordinary Wednesday morning rush hour, a sewer pipe set above the barrel corridor burst open. Within minutes, streams of excrement poured through the station’s tiled ceiling. Sludge spread from a shabby McDonald’s at one end of the corridor to the Long Island Railroad ticket windows farther down. Armed with mops and buckets, janitors placed rolling dumpsters beneath the heaviest streams, but they couldn’t contain the flood. Unwitting commuters, their eyes cast at the downpour, traipsed through the mess, tracking it in all directions. A stench permeated the whole complex.

Vile as the sewage waterfall may have been, it was far from the most dangerous crisis to confront Penn Station commuters that spring. Six weeks earlier, and again in April, trains derailed in the tunnels a level below, injuring several passengers, and forcing the three railroads serving the station to cancel or delay dozens of departures. Inspectors eventually traced the problem to rotten ties, the wooden slats placed between metal railroad tracks. Inspectors had warned of the decay the year before, but executives had chosen to defer the repairs for what they deemed pressing priorities elsewhere.

Penn Station is the second most heavily trafficked transit hub in the world, trailing only Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station. The station serves more daily passengers than the region’s three huge airports (Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark) combined. More people pass through Penn each weekday than live in the city of Baltimore. Anyone who has passed through Penn Station over the past half-century—or who passed through it this Thanksgiving weekend—knows that the nation’s busiest transit center is a national embarrassment, a hole in the ground where the food is ratty and the waiting rooms are sparse.

For more than a generation, New York’s most important gateway has been a grimy relic. Powerful figures in New York, Albany and Washington have plotted for more than three decades to redevelop the whole complex into a world-class facility. But time and again, their efforts have faltered. Today, after 30 years of talk, the station is poised for an upgrade, but the plans are less elaborate than the ones that were announced last decade. And even when the current work is complete, the station will require still more renovation just to be considered a modern facility.


The rush of Penn Station in 1951 (top) and 2017 (bottom). | John Rooney / Mary Altaffer / AP Photo
....

The Trump era may not be the moment to extol the virtues of unchecked executive power. But Penn Station’s story suggests that, for those hoping to achieve traditionally progressive aims, America’s cultural aversion to power has gone too far. Far from running the risk that another Robert Moses might haphazardly destroy a vibrant neighborhood, New York has emerged as a place where even the most worthy projects are left for dead. And it’s not just New York. The poisonous tap water in Flint, Mich., illustrates how feckless government authority can be nearly as dangerous as an impregnable autocrat—and, as demonstrated by Trump’s surprise victory in Michigan in 2016, may lead frustrated voters to embrace one.
....

For anyone convinced that government is an indispensable tool in the progressive mission to improve peoples’ lives, Penn Station is a monument to conservatism. If public officials can’t even clear the way for a serviceable facility at the nation’s busiest transit hub, why give them any more authority? “Medicare for All,” debt-free college and a clean-energy revolution all require government intervention. Who wants to hand more power to the people incapable of fixing the Western Hemisphere’s most heavily-trafficked transit hub? Better, some will conclude, to hand the reins to someone willing to whip an impossible bureaucracy into shape—someone, perhaps, like Donald Trump.

New York does not need another Robert Moses. But amid the avalanche of checks created since the 1960s, progressives need to revisit the impulse that spurred figures like Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis to try to make government work. Public authority, in the end, isn’t good or bad—it’s a means to an end. No one should be allowed to bulldoze powerless communities with impunity. But government should be able to build a nice train station in less than three decades. To rebuild faith in the power of government to do good, responsible leaders need the power to pursue the public interest.

FILED UNDER: NEW YORK, HISTORY DEPT.

[PSPS]

1. LOL. Yes, let's all rally around trump so, somehow, that will fix penn station!!11!

[fleur-de-lisa]

2. "Progressives have made it too hard for the govt to do big things"?

What horse shit.

[mulp]

3. Why not blame Milton Friedman who sold the left and right on cutting costs?

The long, sordid history of New York’s Penn Station shows how progressives have made it too hard for the government to do big things—and why, believe it or not, Robert Caro is to blame.

Name the progressive who promises to hike living costs a lot?

Milton Friedman argued in his Newsweek columns circa 1970, and other places that government was promoting higher living costs which was bad because workers used unions to demand higher pay and benefits, which caused other workers to also get higher wages.

The higher wages caused increased consumer spending, mostly on new stuff, like new cars, more cars, which required bigger places to live, and tax and spend conservatives hiked living costs with higher taxes to pay workers to build roads, and spend and tax liberals paid workers to build schools and water and sewer and playgrounds to make nicer communities.

And the government regulators of utilities listened to workers (unions), widows who bought utility bonds to live on, customers who wanted reliable power, managers who wanted bigger kingdoms, and hiked rates to pay more workers to produce more utility service that was more reliable, but limited returns to investors by cutting the price of assets by depreciation, which forced managers to justify new equipment to replace the old to provide more and better service, and oh, by the way, pay investors more.

Friedman argued that paying all those workers to provide more and better service to everyone cost too much and charmed customers.

Of course, Friedman never pointed out that workers were the customers, so everyone thought that Friedman was saving them money without doing anything to stop their constantly increasing wages.

In 1970, rural telephone customers were served by party lines, and by about 1976 when Carter was elected, most now had party lines, so Cartrr, Ted Kennedy, and conservatives agreed to deregulate the utilities. Progressives loved how this would kill the reasons to build nuclear power plants, and everyone else loved not paying higher utility rates.

What no one expected was all the job losses, the wage and benefit cuts.

Nor did anyone understand Friedman's argument than anyone who wanted more than what was offered in 1970 should pay whatever it cost to provide the extra service at whatever high profit the capitalists wanted to charge.

Thus, high speed intrrnet over fiber is limited to only the wealthy because that is luxury today just as it would have been in 1970.

Likewise, getting back to transit. Paying workers to build really good transit costs too much. Only those who need it should pay, not the people who can afford cars and buy houses where the tax and spenders built roads, water and sewer, schools, etc.

Note, airports have been paid for and built for the rich, the members of Congress in control of tax and spend and borrow, but other than Joe Biden, almost no one rides the train. And Joe seldom goes as far as NYC.

Paying workers is costly. If you don't want neighborhoods bulldozed, you need to pay lots more to workers, eg, paying the sandhogs to tunnel underground, workers who are easy to organize into unions.

Conservatives have convinced progressives that paying workers cost too much so all the progressives talk about is cutting costs.

Bernie promises to cut costs. Warren promises to cut costs.

Milton Friedman would be very happy that progressives agree with him that cutting costs is the number one priority.

But cutting costs ALWAYS MEANS CUTTING LABOR COSTS, KILLING JOBS, CUTTING WAGES, ELIMINSTING BENEFITS.

Unless you as a worker want yo buy government bonds that will never pay interest or ever be repaid, government borrowing money to pay workers trillions of dollars to build public capital requires much higher taxes and fees paid by workers.

To say, as Bernie and Warren do that the rich, who are rich because the workers who can save buy stocks have inflated the scarce supply of stock prices, can pay for everything is a declaration of taxing workers with higher incomes. Ie, Bill Gates and Bezos and other rich people will be forced to sell stocks to pay taxes, and they can't sell yo the rich because they must pay taxes, so that means workers must buy the stocks for their 401Ks, IRAs, etc. If they don't, stock prices crash and trillions in wealth will vanish and the rich $100 billionaires Gates and Bezos will be only $50 billionaires with each losing $50 billion or so into the ether.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. "Thus, high speed intrrnet over fiber is limited to only the wealthy because that is luxury today...

There must not be any public libraries where you live, or public schools, or a middle class.

Where is it you live that only the wealthy have high-speed internet over a fiber optic connection?