Amtrak's sitting area is distant from where they ask you to line up for the trains, which starts more than an hour before departure (like airport gate lice). It means you are forced to stand or forced to take really unhappy seat choices on the trains.

Airport gates have seating areas!

The problem is, it's now policy to not have benches in transportation facilities. They do not want to have to move homeless people off of them, because there are now tens of thousands of documented homeless people in the city every night & the shelters are terribly unsafe and overcrowded. So they've removed or altered benches in the subways, they close parks, they've taken benches off the sidewalks, and now they build new train stations (notably Moynihan and WTC) that have nowhere to sit at all, except for the tiny disconnected far-from-platforms Amtrak waiting area you mentioned.

People are mentioning it because sometimes they WOULD like to sit, and commuters are sometimes waiting 1-2 hours for their next train when it's off-peak service. (e.g. the weekend trains on Metro North past Croton and White Plains are hourly, and some destinations have even less frequent service) And these people tend to have luggage and don't want to arrive early and stand around with it. This isn't a bizarre hypothetical.

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/waiting-room-grand-central-terminal-new-york-city-new-york-news-photo/929234384

GCT is so big that it had adjoining rooms for benches that were nearly as big as the main hall.

The old Penn Station was the same. It had numerous large rooms; one of them was a waiting hall that was not photographed as much as the entrance and concourse rooms.

In other stations and terminals, such as 30th Street Philadelphia and Hoboken, there are many benches in the main halls.

Historically those main halls were nothing but benches for people waiting for trains to pull in / tracks to be announced. Including GCT

Pulling all the benches out (and designing for NO sitting space at all) is a fairly recent thing

And you’re… apparently not an expert

I love how you go from “sorry that happened” about my TBI to “you’re talking to a straw man” talking directly to facts about being a person with a cop-induced TBI. Any level of sarcasm is disrespectful and disqualifying.

That’s not a problem with police, that’s a problem with Reddit commenters.

A cop slammed my head on the concrete once and gave me a TBI. Because someone told them I was drunk. I remember the whole thing clearly because I was at a work event & talking with my boss online & had merely stood in front of the door to a bar area in an entertainment venue, pissing off a manager who screamed at me & then lied to the cops. All charges dropped after I was processed. Still get headaches on that side of my head. Wrote an article about it for the publication I was working at during that time.

Sorry about your angel police officers. I don’t wish for them to get hurt. But “could have been hurt” is not “gotten very badly hurt”. Pushing someone over is not attempted murder. If it was, surely modern policing would be impossible as I keep seeing arrest videos where the suspect’s head is repeatedly slammed into the pavement. I don’t wish for suspects to get unnecessarily hurt either. I’ll take the downvotes for that.

He didn’t severely injure anything but a cop’s ego. Just like those milkshake poison cops a few years ago.

Because you were just primed by a statement that said it was “out of control”

Wow Lee Zeldin has a lot of Reddit alt accounts today

They can’t afford moving and changing jobs. You can. It’s not rocket science 🚀 🚀 🚀

Yes, let 800,000 people move out so we can equalize demand with supply. Feel free to lead the way!

Oh, that’s not what you meant… who are you thinking should be the ones to move out?

Funny you said that. It’s totally possible, at significant expense, to convert an office building to a residential tower that meets all current codes. Might get a few more buildings converted if you loosened regs and offered subsidies/financing. But at the end of the day, 3% of office buildings have been converted because office prices are starkly higher than home prices per square foot, and most landlords prefer to make more money (or hold out for more money while refinancing their mortgages). There’s more of a trend of buildings adapting to different commercial uses rather than making offices into homes.

There was a Times article about it. Today. https://t.co/RPxiSmYE2p (paywall waived)

City and state governments would get way more bang for the buck simply building new housing on available lots. There are literally empty lots all around NYC. But they’re privately owned, not for sale, not being developed (yet), and the state is terrified to use their eminent domain powers. I guess they prefer having a shelter system with tens of thousands of beds instead.

Lol yes Manhattan needs more roads to handle more cars so it can grow. Good thinking 🤣

When you are a newspaper that writes everything toward the point of view of cops from Long Island, desk duty is a public square castration. I thought the Constitution forbade cruel and unusual punishment! They shoulda just docked him 2 vacation days like any other cop who beats to death a misdemeanor suspect

erm that data says it’s positive-trending.

Offices and storefronts are empty because landlords require a small fortune to lease one

I think the point is that, while some of this stuff makes sense, any system has to work as a whole and not just add or remove discrete parts. The system we’re talking about is an ideological finish line that hasn’t been achieved. The system we actually live with fails workers constantly because legislators have removed worker protections while adding owner/stockholder safeguards across the board. Any new measure to strengthen workers’ position moves us a step away from the “free market” ideal but we’re nowhere close to it to begin with.

Great. So then you don’t mind that we pass strong antitrust legislation that prevents industry consolidation above nominal market shares, and imposes stiff criminal penalties for collusion and union-busting? Sounds like you prefer a competitive market rather than one tied up in unilateral control from governments or corporations.

So it should instead be too risky to work for anyone?

It got a ton of blowback. People hated the plan! But it had no legal protection such as landmarking. If that solution were even available, Pennsy would have fought it. Teardown plans were already being circulated as early as 10 years prior to the actual teardown occurring.

Even today, notable buildings constantly get razed while LPC sits on their hands. And then non-serious proposals for small ugly buildings are put forward constantly by people just looking to lock out neighboring developments, wasting everyone’s time.

I would prefer to see deliberate public planning and architecture. With a serious budget. And with an open mind toward removing obsolete buildings to replace them with modernized versions of what came before it, minus all the ticky tack crap about reusing bricks and beams and what not.

As noted in the link, they let the place fall apart before they actually tore it down.

Most of the pictures people pass around are from the first 10 years… or even, the first days… of operation. While the place did become a predictably grimy and crumbly mess from lack of detailed upkeep (building such a massive structure with that kind of stone & exposing it to a barrage of human-generated pollution), it should also be noted that its late 50s iteration had become just as commerce-cluttered as what’s there today.

Additionally, it was unpleasantly vast and poorly designed. Which I say because… the concourses have the same general floorplan today, and people hate it. They didn’t actually change the train station part a whole lot. They just took the headhouse off the top of it. A lot of what people don’t like about Penn today came with the first version of the station.

It was a tragedy that they dismantled it. It was also a tragedy it’d gotten into bad shape already, a tragedy they built something that was in bad shape after just 50 years, and possibly a tragedy if they’d kept it and not improved it substantially.

Lol 2 Penn and MSG are not improvements at all, of course. And nothing the Pennsylvania Railroad did at the site changed the eventual outcome that Pennsy and 5 other major Northeast passenger/freight railroad companies crashed hard, couldn’t get out of bankruptcy, and had to be nationalized to become Amtrak and Conrail. (And Conrail’s successors are profitable, but a pain point in establishing better Amtrak service) And no one in government at the time could be trusted to build anything better, Robert Moses would have had a highway going through the site if he were allowed to build it. So it all just sucks.

And to think the Times Square changes had lots of opponents! Incredible that opponents making the same hollow, vicious arguments still get projects scaled back or spiked

The Times Square thing was not done as a fully permanent installation on the first run. What was done in the end was EXPENSIVE (tens of millions) and still isn’t perfect (bike lane sucks) and is still getting substantially dug up and rebuilt often (subway entrance expansion at 42nd). It’s good that they did it… but it sops up a discouraging amount of money to do things like that. Madison Square/Flatiron, reconfigured years ago, is still mostly paint + plastic + original curbs.

But you’re right; permanent changes should be budgeted now. If they’re not, it’ll take much longer to get to the point that you can do them (the construction itself goes pretty quickly; all the preparation takes forever)

It’s not the reason.

If it becomes the kind of project where they have to relocate physical parts of the street itself (rather than things painted on, bolted on or plopped down) it becomes a giant, unwieldy thing requiring NYC’s capital construction agency to step in, plus the underground utilities to be accounted for (and relocated when needed; if you have to move sewers, you also have to touch phone lines, gas lines, electric lines, steam lines, maybe even subway infra)

Such a project takes years to budget and execute.

I believe “things should be different” but it’s a system that includes century-old pipes and telecom stuff dating back older than any of us, and it’s always been extremely poorly organized, and there’s strong political resistance to fixing it (the utility companies are private-sector corporations that cooperate very poorly with public-sector interests & are governed by Albany) so its never going to be easy or cheap to dig up, regrade and reconfigure a Manhattan roadway.

In light of this, DOT’s approach is reasonable.

Or car fires?