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This is a ludicrous plan. It looks great, but it's absurdly wasteful.

The Concourse A expansion will cost $200-300 million, allowing passengers to queue out of the way of shoppers and other passers-by.

But passengers shouldn't have to queue to get onto the platforms! Changing Amtrak's policy would be essentially free and solve the problem.

And is Union Station even the bottleneck? Seems as though using it as a through-station for just some VRE and MARC trains would boost capacity just by leaving out idling trains.

For comparison, Tokyo-Osaka has six platforms for high-speed rail but handles 151 MILLION passengers per year; Acela manages 3.2 million. Union Station doesn't, absolutely doesn't, need more capacity to achieve the stated goals of northeast HSR and getting more people on rails. Union Station's capacity problems are mostly organizational, and the system's physical problems aren't at Union Station.

by OctaviusIII on Jul 25, 2012 2:52 pm • link • report

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