Subway Sagas

With everyone all aflutter over the four mindbogglingly dramatic architectural plans for a new Penn Station, some folks hold that other transit hubs in the city deserve their own infrastructural overhaul. Take Times Square's labyrinthine station, which serves more passengers than Penn Station and is in just as bad (if not worse) shape. Like Penn, it's got low ceilings, congested corridors, and difficult transfers, entrances and exits. Yet, worryingly, the city seems more concerned with starchitecture than functional, everyday logistics. Writes Alon Levy over at Second Avenue Sagas: "The technical issues here are a lot less important than the fact that city leaders, architects, and even transit commentators assume that it is more important for New York to have a great train station used by 200,000 suburban commuters than for it to have a great subway station used by (at least) 200,000 city residents." [SAS via Pedestrian Observations]