iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

to me the biggest advantage of the bus is that more rides can be two-seat instead of three, but unless you extend a bunch of routes across the river—which you wouldn’t—lots of rides will be three-seaters anyway.

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agree of course that the bus could be more useful; my pro-higher mode counter would be that a gondola would save you a lot of bus service hours that you’d spend crossing the river, especially when cross-river demand will be highly uneven and dependent on train schedules

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would accommodate constant mid-level demand for travel across the river more efficiently than buses, it’s a relatively short straight line, should be cheap to construct.

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ok, i know it’s been proposed before, and i know this type of proposal always gets clowned on: but, genuinely, is a gondola between the train station and downtown/the ESP a bad idea?

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of course, it would probably be easier to convince the amtrak people if north america was full of other railway electrification that operated at the 60 Hz standard, but for most of recent history it's just been amtrak. instead of "we should stop being an outlier" it's "oh, we just have two systems."

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if you had to move to another country, would it feel "easier" to replace every electric device you own all at once or to buy some converters and eat the resulting hit to personal convenience?

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path dependency creates weird incentives and power infrastructure is a pain. japan is still out here running two separate grids at two different frequencies, despite this being a known annoyance

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but in the long run they'd almost def realize savings from 1. not having to maintain a dedicated 25 Hz generation and transmission system and 2. not having to procure specialized equipment, since ~everything is made for the 60 Hz grid standard today

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yes and no. it's a state of good repair project, but an extra complicated one because it's a path dependency problem. you're right that it's narrowly *easier* for them to replace 25 Hz equipment like-for-like because it saves the cost and hassle of changing everything out for stuff that works w/ 60

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not an expert here but this has been the general trend among transport operators ~forever, i believe. the oldest rapid transit systems (nyc, london, undoubtedly others) also had their own power generation systems but gave them up to integrate with the grid

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Again picking up the Pittsburgh example, that train is often full (and I expect the 2nd trip will be too) despite being kind of objectively a bad option: (much) longer travel time than flying, driving, or bus, often no cheaper than flying, much less frequency. People do just want to take the train.

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Germany is probably one of our closer parallels but we have a big problem w/ state governments that are, well, straight-up evil. We can elect federal governments who want good things, sometimes, but pro-Bad Things majorities are locked in in several states, some of which are on key corridors!

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And there are so many promising corridors where one can envision this being an issue. VA/NC/GA politics are at different points on the same trajectory but SC is never gonna play ball. Indiana is probably always gonna be a problem.

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Agree w everyone re: the scaling-up approach, but there are two huge blocks to that scaling-up happening: 1. PRIIA forcing ops costs onto fiscally-constrained state govt’s 2. The Class 1 shakedown—to pick up the PGH example, the price for a single daily RT on that corridor is, apparently, >$200m

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

PRIIA reform/replacement has to be top of the agenda for passenger rail advocates post-current administration. It’s straightforwardly incompatible with building a pax rail system that gets meaningful ridership in our lifetimes.

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I think that would be useful for other reasons but all of this seems much more relevant to a (second) Atlantic Terminal/Center Mall redevelopment than the remaining yard blocks

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

I think that ship probably sailed with Atlantic Terminal redevelopment 1.0. The platforms, and the aggressively sharp curve that contains them, are somewhat outside the footprint of the remaining yard holes

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Reposted by Liam O’Connell

Nolan Hicks @ndhapple.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Fun find this afternoon: In 1957, the Port Authority did the engineering work to link the downtown PATH to the Lexington Avenue subway local tracks.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

I don’t have a quick or easy policy fix for a system that relies on public agencies getting the consent of private railroads to access their tracks, but preserving this system and meaningfully expanding passenger rail use are pretty clearly mutually exclusive.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Pennsylvania just paid $200m for one additional passenger round-trip from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh. Colorado is paying ~$100m per round-trip (on a route 1/4 the length of PA’s). At these prices, the “low-hanging fruit” of US intercity pax rail expansion are a lot higher up than they appear.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

well, at least their schedules allow *lots* of time to make this transfer

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Reposted by Liam O’Connell

bsquiklehausen @bsquiklehausen.com · 25/03/2026

This is my grandfather at work back in the 80s. He was a test pilot at Grumman starting from the LEM and continuing all the way up until the late 90s. You may know him from his work as the Apollo suit test dummy, or helping launch the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

there’s a ton that could be said about this, and probably more that will be written, but my most overwhelming feeling is just the huge disappointment at watching what was the best hope for north american commuter rail modernization go up in smoke like this www.thetrillium.ca/news/municip...

thetrillium.ca

Shorter, more frequent GO train plan ‘unlikely to materialize’: leaked document

Metrolinx locked into agreements for trains it no longer needs, draft fleet strategy says

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

I don't disagree! The railroads had (have) an operating model largely incompatible with highly-frequent urban service. Building rapid transit on railroad ROWs was the easiest way around this.

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Reposted by Liam O’Connell

Anyone have any good sources on the crafting of the Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008 (a.k.a. PRIIA, a.k.a. the law that governs much of intercity pax rail planning) and/or on federal politics around Amtrak more generally in the 2000s?

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Anyway, this is all to say that far from the kind of incremental improvement that might've led to major US passenger rail terminals highly optimized for high train volumes, we got incremental whittling away of railroads' provision of the types of service that would've forced such improvements.

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The sharing (or outright recapture) of railroad ROWs for urban/suburban transit continued throughout the mid- and late-20th c.—first for the great society metros like WMATA, later for the 80s-00s light rail explosion.

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You can see this in @chittimarco.bsky.social's diagram quite clearly; the yellow tracks in the top diagram are the WMATA Red Line, built 1976. (One also imagines how willing cash-poor RRs were to sell off their ROWs to rapid transit agencies that would provide the service the IRS wouldn't!)

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Anyway, fast forward to the postwar era and the simultaneous decline of railroads and rise of suburbanization. Once again there was an opportunity to rethink suburban transit, and once again this role was filled by new rapid transit lines—many of which directly took over railroad rights-of-way!

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Penn is probably the most infamous example of the above genre, in part because its construction was part of what catalyzed the explosion in NJ suburbia. (But like...you didn't think to plan for that effect when your busiest rail station was still a series of drawings?)

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So you had all these major rail stations, including many of the "union" stations, built around the 1910s and 20s, *after* streetcars and subways had seized the urban and suburban transit market and many of them weren't built that well for commuter transit. (Some aren't really in their CBDs!)

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There was a pre-rapid transit period of urban history during which railroads ran rapid transit-adjacent service (we all think wistfully of those late 19th c. LIRR timetables with 5-minute Atlantic Branch headways). But this market was ceded pretty immediately to streetcars and/or rapid transit.

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