Moynihan Station and the Future of NYC Transportation

Happy New Year!

New York City has a major new transportation hub -- out with the old Penn Station, in with the new Moynihan Station!

As Governor Cuomo dubbed it, the new station is "a work of art" -- a vast skylight ceiling, a huge Art deco clock, modern art, waiting areas that resemble hotel lobbies, it's a big new addition to the NYC firmament. It's named after the late great Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who dreamed of this project long ago. 

This station is also, in many ways, the correction of a massive error in the city's history -- the tearing down of the original gorgeous Penn Station in the early 1960s. It's a remakable achievement, particularly in this day and a age of dysfunction, to complete something like this -- especially in the middle of a pandemic.

Of course, a shiny new thing is not a substitute for a much more fundamental need -- the need for more public transit overall. We still need the Gateway Project -- more tunnels, more trains, much more capacity to handle the strain of ridership. This station, while making the experience of boarding and exiting the train more enjoyable, does not fix this massive problem. After all, it took almost 50 years to build three new subway stops on the Upper East Side -- how soon can we expect to give in and out and around NYC a whole lot faster?

So when it comes to meeting the needs for transportation in NYC, new station or no, we have a longgggggggggggg way to go. We have this great new station -- now lets have a transportation system for the whole city that's worthy of it.