Janno Lieber, president of MTA Capital Construction, oversees East Side Access, one of the largest transportation projects in America, which will bring Long Island Rail Road trains to Grand Central Terminal for the first time. He’s also directing future plans that include renovating Penn Station and enabling it to serve Metro-North New Haven line commuters. This exclusive interview with Trains News Wire has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q: The East Side Access project has been a long time coming. Why is it important for the Long Island Rail Road?
A: The first thing that we talk about is the bottlenecks in the system. The tunnels across the East River are a huge one because we share those tunnels with Amtrak and also New Jersey Transit, which deadheads trains across to Sunnyside Yard. There’s a lot of competition for space in the four East River tubes, so this adds additional capacity by using the 63rd Street tunnel. There’s going to be more resilience because as the [Hurricane] Sandy experience showed us, we can’t only have one way for railroads to get across the East River.
Q: One of the marvels of this project is building a whole new train station 150 feet under midtown Manhattan, directly below Grand Central Terminal. You were just visiting the construction site. What can you tell us about the how it stands now?
A: I was really looking at the condition of the construction and I’ll tell you this, it really looks like a railroad terminal. A train facility of this kind, this scale — it’s pretty amazing.
The civil work is largely finished. We have all the tracks in. The tunnels, signal systems are pretty far along. It has a series of entrances into it not just from Grand Central, but also direct entrances from some of the buildings along Madison Avenue. It’s 350,000 square feet and it’s got 25,000 square feet of retail. It very much echoes the design vocabulary of Grand Central but also has some very cool design features.
Q: How will Long Island commuters and the New York region benefit from this project?
A: The whole vision of this project is for Long Island Rail Road commuters to save somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour a day if they work in the center of East Midtown. Long Island businesses can now recruit from the New York City labor market and obviously the connectivity between folks coming to and from Westchester and Long Island. So, we’re talking about growing the economy and creating a much more attractive mass transit system.
Q: You recently presented a plan to renovate the old Penn Station [see “New York governor, MTA unveil proposals …,” Trains News Wire, April 22, 2021].
A: We have to build an expansion of Penn that will receive the additional trains that will be coming through the new Gateway tunnels, which will increase track and platform capacity by 40%. So, the design of existing Penn’s reconstruction should take place in tandem with the design for the Gateway expansion. We need a station facility [that] matches Moynihan [Hall] and the new East Side Access facility in terms of aesthetics and passenger experience.
Q: What are the next steps for that to move forward?
A: We have to come together with Amtrak and New Jersey Transit on the preferred [design] alternative. We have to enter into the formal NEPA environmental review process, and then we have to put the funding together, which is obviously something we have to do jointly with Amtrak and NJT. Anything we do is going to have to be a three-party collaboration.
Q: How optimistic are you that this will all come together?
A: We are in the middle of this great infrastructure moment and we want this project to be made part of that Biden infrastructure initiative in whatever form it ultimately emerges from Congress. We are creating a transportation system that builds on the fact that we are already the most greenhouse-gas efficient transportation region in the country by far, and we are connecting people who have historically not had as much equal access to jobs and education and opportunity.
As a long time LIRR commuter and resident of Long Island, I agree that this will help ease some of the problems inherent in the old infrastructure. But expansion of Penn Station and, even more critically, rehabilitation of the tunnels under the East River and the Hudson River, plus adding more trans-Hudson tunnels, should have been a higher priority. Both are planned and the new Moynihan Station is great, but they should have been first. AMTRAK needs to get on board with MTA on these. Also, the real savings to commuters is closer to 30 minutes (one stop on the 7th Ave subway and a subway shuttle to Grand Central) than the 40 to 60 cited. The real benefit is to ease the logjam at Penn Station, assuming the commuters return, and answer the desires of the more well connected commuters working on the east side of Manhattan and also those in nearby upstate communities who will eventually get access to Penn Station. And with all that said, we still need something long ignored more than any of this, a rail tunnel under the harbor and expanded rail freight access to and on Long Island. Not only would this relieve traffic on the island, but as we saw with superstorm Sandy, it could be critical in emergencies. And it would benefit far more of the population on Long Island.
1. It would be a heck of a lot bigger benefit to the entire region if they build through tracks between Penn and GCT, proposed back in the 1990s– if not earlier. This would increase connectivity for the entire East Coast to Buffalo, let alone the metro NYC region, while greatly decreasing the size of a Penn station expansion if not removing it.
2. Of course that raises the question of whether, MTA allowed for that potential when building the deep station at GCT. Given limited foresight and to think about ones own organization primarily, I am not too hopeful.
3. Nevertheless Eastside Access should be of big benefit if the Pandemic does not dramatically decrease commuting permanently.
BUT, when is the station under GCT set to open?