Amtrak's proposed Union Station renovation is a terrible idea / Matthew Yglesias

Amtrak's proposed Union Station renovation is a terrible idea / Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 11 minutes

Amtrak's proposed Union Station renovation is a terrible idea

An object lesson in American agencies' refusal to coordinate

A bit over a year ago, New York City premiered the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, a very expensive train-related infrastructure project that did not increase the number of trains that can roll through Penn Station nor make the trains go faster nor increase the number of destinations the station can serve. In other words, it was a train project that had nothing to do with trains.

And now Amtrak wants to undertake a $10 billion reconstruction of Union Station in D.C. The project looks great in the renderings, but that raises similar questions. Amtrak is not saying this will allow them to provide new service to and from Union Station. They’re not saying it will increase the frequency of the trains that serve the station. Nor will the trains pass through, into, or out of the station faster. Because the renovation is not actually a renovation of the functional part of the station.

They’re also not talking about touching the historic Union Station building, a gorgeous architectural gem. Instead, the plan is basically to build a nicer shopping mall between the historic building and the platforms:

Visitors can make their way from the historic building to a new train hall, which is designed for daylight and for passengers to more easily spot where to catch their bus or train. The station also connects to Metro and DC Circulator services.

Parking is located at the lowest level, along with the majority of the pickup and drop-off area and two of the four concourses lined with retailors. From there, visitors have their pick of escalator or elevator to travel up to the train station. And above the train station is the bus facility. The project assumes increased use, so bus and train capacity has been added. The highest level offers an outdoor deck where people can be dropped off or picked up, or simply leisure along some green space.

There is also an ambitious plan to build a deck over the platforms themselves and the tracks north of the station to create a 15-acre mixed-use real estate development called Burnham Place.

These are just weird ideas to be seeking public funding for. Replacing the dingy existing train hall has some obvious upsides, but this is a commercial real estate project — either the nicer shopping facility will generate enough in additional sales and retail rents that it pencils out or it won’t. Either way, a real estate development project adjacent to the station should be a source of revenue for Amtrak, not something that it asks money for.

The point of spending public funds on train-related infrastructure upgrades should be to make the trains better.

The D.C. area needs infrastructure investments

As I’ve written a couple of times before, the D.C. area has most of the infrastructure it needs to stitch together MARC commuter rail to Maryland and VRE commuter rail to Virginia into a high-quality, high-frequency regional rail system similar to the RER in Paris or to the S-Bahns in the German-speaking world.

D.C. (unlike, say, Boston) already has a tunnel under the city that connects the tracks heading north to Baltimore to the tracks that head south. So just as some Amtrak trains currently pass through the city to serve points south, Maryland commuter trains could pass through the city to serve the huge job center at the Pentagon and then run out into the Virginia suburbs. And Virginia commuter trains could pass through the city into the Maryland suburbs and reach Baltimore. But a few changes are needed to make this a good experience that involves trains that run quickly and frequently at an affordable price:

Electrifying two of MARC’s three lines (one is already electrified) and both of the VRE lines

Replacing the MARC/VRE rolling stock with electric multiple units that accelerate faster out of the stations and can speed things up

Lots of small station upgrades in Virginia to create high platforms that let passengers board level with the train doors — this speeds ingress and egress and is a huge deal for accessibility

Replacing the Long Bridge over the Potomac River with one that has a higher capacity

Paying off a lot of wasteful conductors and replacing them with a system that requires spot checks of tickets in order to reduce labor costs and fares

These are non-trivial infrastructure investments, but they have a clear purpose related to transportation. Trips that are possible with the current infrastructure would become faster, more frequent, and more affordable with these upgrades. And many trips that are not currently possible would become possible. That’s the kind of thing the United States should be spending transportation infrastructure money on, making transportation infrastructure better.

Alon Levy, outraged by the extraordinary expense of the $10 billion station renovation project, has billions in new Metro construction projects they think D.C. should do over and above these commuter rail upgrades. I would love for everyone to get their shit together and do that stuff, too. But what I’m struck by is that before you even get into details of what’s a good project and what’s a bad one or what’s cost-effective and what isn’t, there’s a basic category error in these station projects: I want America’s transportation agencies to spend money on ideas to improve ridership while they want to do generic real estate development.

Train stations aren’t airports

Ever since I started writing about Amtrak’s peculiar ideas about how to board trains, I’ve noticed that the agency is inevitably run by an American airline-industry veteran rather than by a foreigner who has experience working at a successful passenger railroad. So really basic points like “trains have multiple doors while airplanes have just one and this makes a difference” seem to slip their grasp.

While planes have a lot of good features, those features often mean that the air travel experience involves a lot of waiting around in airports. Not only are planes fast, but they can also connect arbitrary geographies, which lets airlines do two things very well that even the more successful train systems don’t:

Low-frequency routes — United flies once a day between D.C. and Rome. So if you’re booked on that flight, missing it carries a very high cost. To avoid the high cost of missing that flight, most people arrive quite a bit early and end up waiting in the airport.

Hub and spoke transfers — People from smaller cities across the southeastern United States can take small planes to Dulles and switch to a larger plane serving Rome or other major international destinations. But transfer passengers need to wait for their flight.

On top of these two sources of waiting around, airports are generally very far from the city center. And even when they are kind of close, the security requirements mean there is a hard boundary between what’s inside the airport and what’s outside the airport. So making the airport a pleasant place to sit around and wait is a crucial determinant of the trip experience. The fact that Dulles isn’t very nice is a legitimate reason for a would-be traveler on a connecting flight to prefer to go through a different airport. That’s a bona fide competitive disadvantage for United vis a vis other carriers that use nicer hubs. So while making the airport nicer isn’t the biggest priority in the world for the airline (if it were, they’d have done it already), it’s absolutely on the list.

Train stations aren’t really like that — transfers are pretty unimportant. What trains are good at providing is frequent service along a busy corridor, mostly to commuters. And most of all, the station is right in the middle of the city with no security barriers.

Train stations aren’t important

Historically, of course, train stations were very important locations for buying train tickets.

They also contained big signs alerting people about train departure times and track assignments. Today, though, these functions are much less crucial because people have e-tickets on their phones and because railroads should (though they oftentimes don’t) deliver schedule updates and track information to people’s phones. This means that in the modern world, train stations are more different from airports than ever since the main “a lot of people need to wait around here” functions of a train station are now obsolete. There’s absolutely no reason passengers couldn’t kill time at a coffee shop across the street from a train station and then zip directly to the track based on a mobile update.

None of which is to say that cities should be demolishing their train stations, eliminating ticket vendor machines, or pulling down clocks and signs with schedule information. As long as you have the building, you may as well use it.

But if you don’t, that’s okay. Consider the L’Enfant Plaza VRE station that’s south of the national mall. Even though this is right in the city, it’s essentially identical to a very humble commuter rail station in the middle of nowhere. It has some tracks and a couple of platforms. With through-running investments, more riders would use the station. But there’s no need for a huge investment in improving the station itself. Passengers who want to buy some food before boarding a train at L’Enfant can go to one of the food trucks that park nearby or to one of the shops in the surrounding city blocks. It’s just a place in the city. Its important function is that trains stop there and people can get off or on.

The existing historic Union Station building is already a very nice shopping-type venue — they’ve got a Chopt, a Chipotle, a Cava, a Shake Shack, a Blue Bottle, a Roti, a Potbelly, and I think a Pizzeria Uno. If the modern building between the historic building and the tracks is overcrowded, that reflects two things.

One is that they don’t let people directly access the train platforms and wait there. The other is that they are stuffing the building with this additional tier of retail — a Sbarro’s, a Claire’s, a Victoria’s Secret, a Jamba Juice and a Juice Press, etc. — right where the most reasonable place for people to wait is.

I don’t feel that the crowding situation really is that bad or that it would necessarily warrant removing some of the existing retail. Giving people access to the platforms is a good idea for other reasons and would reduce crowding. But if the feeling is that something needs to be done that would cost money and alleviate crowding, then opening up the space and accepting reduced retail revenue seems like the obvious choice rather than a $10 billion construction project. Meanwhile, there is plenty of space to develop more retail options.

The Architect of the Capitol is the real villain here

Far and away the biggest design flaw with Union Station is that rather than being surrounded by a busy district of office buildings with ground-floor retail, it’s surrounded by surface parking lots (directly east of North Capitol and between 1st Street and 2nd Street) and a totally vacant park (between the station and D Street).

This is not land that is owned by Amtrak, so it can’t be the focus of an Amtrak-specific real estate development project. It’s instead controlled by the United States Congress, specifically the Architect of the Capitol’s office, which controls the Capitol building itself and the nearby congressional office buildings.

If you gave me magic powers, I would turn one of these blocks into a large new congressional office building and the others could be sold for private development. Pre-Zoom, I would have guessed that meant commercial office space, but these days housing is probably more likely. Either way, you’d have underground parking garages and plenty of street-level retail. The benefit to Union Station would be that the station is more knit into the neighborhood and there is less need for loitering passengers to specifically congregate in the station rather than nearby.

In the real world, of course, the issue is that Amtrak controls Union Station but does not control those adjacent parcels — that’s Congress. At the same time, we’re talking about the national legislature here and a state-owned railroad company. And the inability of the American public sector to coordinate with itself is a constant source of problems.

A failure to communicate

Think back to the idea of S-Bahn service for the D.C.-Baltimore area. Delivering it would require some infrastructure investments: a bunch of stations would need their platforms raised, plus a new bridge, electrified tracks, and new rolling stock.

But while this isn’t trivial, it’s very much doable, especially in a world where numbers like $10 billion are being thrown around.

The harder part is that for MARC/VRE through-running to work, MARC and VRE would need to coordinate with each other and with Amtrak. They would also need to lay off a bunch of conductors to reduce fares and operating costs. Now many more trains would be running under this paradigm, so there wouldn’t even necessarily be job losses in the aggregate. But jobs would have to be reallocated. And of course you’d need to cooperate with the Architect of the Capitol on developing the real estate assets.

Coordination on anything resembling this level just seems far beyond the capacity of American agencies.

A key element in the German S-Bahn model is fare integration. What you pay to get from Point A to Point B in Berlin is determined by how far you traveled, not whether you went on S-Bahn or U-Bahn or a combination of the two or whether or not a bus was involved. Currently, neither MARC nor VRE integrates fares with the Metro system run by WMATA. In New York, the commuter rail systems and the subway are both run by the MTA, but they don’t integrate fares. MetroNorth and LIRR can’t even agree on whether it’s “rail road” or “railroad.” And in D.C., WMATA doesn’t integrate bus fares with metro fares.

There’s no one single reason why America spends too much money on low-value transportation projects. Some of it has to do with NIMBYism and adversarial legalism. But a lot of it has to do with this inability to cooperate. Many of the highest-value projects require a lot of coordination to implement, and in practice a lot of agency project planning is driven by a desire not to coordinate. This Union Station plan isn’t the answer to the question “what’s a good way to improve train service in the D.C. area?” — it’s an answer to the question “what would be a cool asset for Amtrak to own and control?”

But that’s the wrong question.