There are a lot of platforms at Penn Station, and it seems to me that trains spend quite a long time at these platforms, in part due to issues related to passenger loading and unloaded.
What if the number of platforms was reduced? (By placing bogeys that’s are just platforms on every second or third track, for example?) This would reduce the number of usable platforms by 1/3-1/2, but it would massively increase availability space for loading and unloading passengers. If this enabled faster train turnaround, it could plausibly increase station throughput.
(Aside from being annoying and perhaps dangerous, the current scheme is absurdly inefficient. People can board a train far fast than they can go down the one or two (!) main escalators, and the train cars far from the escalators barely load at all until the nearer trains are mostly full.)
edit: I’m apparently not entirely off base. Here’s a proposal that increases throughput while reducing the number of tracks:
Simply bridging the platforms is not enough. You’d also need to get those people off the platforms before the next train arrived, and you would need something more permanent than platform bogies to support wider stairs and escalator banks.
A bridge gets passengers off the other side of the train to the escalators on the next platform over (I think), which could double or more-than-double the egress throughout. (More-than-double because, at least with some gates or careful monitoring, you don’t actually need the passengers off the platform to move the train - you just need the passengers off the train. Similarly, to board the train, the passengers could already be on the platform when the train arrives, allowing all cars to board simultaneously. (Of course, this isn’t terribly helpful for train cadence — you can’t board the next train until those passengers get to the platform.) As currently configured, unlike most sensible train stations, a train full of passengers can’t fit on the platform.)
It’s still pretty narrow, because the individiual stairs themselves are only about one to two people wide, and they’re far enough apart that people would probably ignore any left/right directional flow that you would see on a double-wide set of stairs.
To give some perspective on how long a reconfiguration like this takes, JR East has been working on platform optimization like this at Shibuya Station since 2015, and the last elements will complete in 2027; and that’s at a station that started more optimally than Penn Station.
There are a lot of platforms at Penn Station, and it seems to me that trains spend quite a long time at these platforms, in part due to issues related to passenger loading and unloaded.
What if the number of platforms was reduced? (By placing bogeys that’s are just platforms on every second or third track, for example?) This would reduce the number of usable platforms by 1/3-1/2, but it would massively increase availability space for loading and unloading passengers. If this enabled faster train turnaround, it could plausibly increase station throughput.
(Aside from being annoying and perhaps dangerous, the current scheme is absurdly inefficient. People can board a train far fast than they can go down the one or two (!) main escalators, and the train cars far from the escalators barely load at all until the nearer trains are mostly full.)
edit: I’m apparently not entirely off base. Here’s a proposal that increases throughput while reducing the number of tracks:
https://www.rethinknyc.org/through-running/