When the MTA wraps up the East Side Access project sometime ever, the Long Island Rail Road will be able to offer more train service into Manhattan, and more train service into Manhattan via the tracks that have fueled decades of growth on Long Island is never a bad thin — unless, of course, you are afraid. “Afraid of what?” you may ask. Afraid, the answer is, of unsightly train cars displacing scenic and landscape-enhancing parking spaces.

The story goes like this: When ESA is finished, the MTA will expand service offerings along the LIRR’s Port Washington branch. More service, however, means more train cars, and more train cars requires more storage space. The current plan is to extend the tracks at Port Washington to allow for storage for 18 additional train cars, but some folks in North Hempstead don’t like this plan, Newsday’s Jennifer Barrios reports today.

The LIRR is considering two options for extending two tracks at the station, [LIRR chief planning officer Elisa] Picca said. Its preferred option requires it to purchase an 18-by-439-foot parcel in a parking lot owned by North Hempstead off South Bayles Avenue. That plan would remove 40 parking spaces from the lot, she said, adding that re-striping the existing lot could replace the 40 spaces. The alternate plan involves putting the track extensions in part of a parking lot the LIRR already owns along Haven Avenue. That would result in the loss of 140 parking spaces, but could be completed without the cooperation of the town…

Last month, LIRR officials met with town officials, including Supervisor Jon Kaiman and Councilwoman Dina De Giorgio. De Giorgio, a Republican who announced her bid for supervisor last month, said the proposals amount to creating an unsightly storage yard in Port Washington. “The idea of storing these massive trains, adding two storage tracks to Port Washington, will completely ruin the character of the town,” she said. “This is creating a train depot in Port Washington.”

…Mitch Schwartz, co-president of the Port Washington Chamber of Commerce, said his primary concern is parking in an area where parking is already notoriously tight. “If we’re going to give up even 40, there’s got to be a compelling reason, something on the other side that is going to get us better service,” Schwartz said. “I’m not convinced at this point.”

So the head of the Chamber of Commerce can’t see the obvious benefit of added train service, and a candidate for town supervisor thinks that storing two trains will ruin the character more than storing a bunch of inert cars already does. These are NIMBY arguments community leaders and elected representatives make to the media with a straight face. Aren’t you tempted to say, “If North Hempstead doesn’t want train service, let’s not give it to them”? Because I am.

Can the MTA, New Jersey Transit and Amtrak work together to overhaul Penn Station?

For many New York politicians and transit executives, Penn Station is a problem. The city has spent decades living down the decision to raze the 1910 Beaux Arts beauty, and everyone is trying to fix the current iteration. It is, after all, a station that needs something. It’s a basement of a sports venue that’s cramped, ugly and crowded. But just what money should we spend on Penn Station anyway?

Word of the latest attempt to remake Penn Station hit the news a few days ago. Ostensibly led by the LIRR but done in conjunction with New Jersey Transit and Amtrak, Penn Station Vision will be the name of a report soon to be released by Aecom. The $1.1 million study — half of which was funded by the MTA — will present a blueprint for restoring some respectability to Penn Station. No one can turn the West Side’s transit gateway into Grand Central, but it could be a far more pleasant station than it is today.

Newsday’s Alfonso Castillo had a report on the contours of the plan. With a focus on better lighting, cosmetic improvements to the dingy and cramped passageways and an effort to relocate some Amtrak back offices, it’s a start but not too much more than that. Castillo offered up an overview:

[LIRR President Helena] Williams said those changes will be phased in over several years, and even decades. She expects to include some improvements in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s next five-year capital plan, which begins in 2015.

The changes could include luring more upscale commercial tenants, improving lighting (including by letting in natural light if possible), adding new signage and getting rid of the main train departure board in the LIRR concourse to lessen crowding there.

Grander changes — including opening up space by relocating administrative offices, knocking down walls, and finding a new use for Amtrak’s waiting area when it moves to the adjacent Moynihan Station — could take much longer to complete. But LIRR officials and their partners in the project said they are committed to seeing it through. “We know the commuter experience can be and should be improved. The idea is to create a new, modern experience for Penn Station,” Williams said.

These are incremental improvements to a utilitarian station, and it’s tough to get too excited about such expenditures. The MTA’s next capital program will be tight on dough, and there are far more worthwhile projects to fund than some efforts to better light Penn Station. Transit experts and advocates expressed similar sentiments to Crain’s New York earlier this week. “How many more people are going to move to Long Island because Penn Station was redeveloped?” Columbia Professor David King said.

Meanwhile, one key element of the plan — better unifying operations and the overall feel of Penn Station — seems to have the support of Amtrak and New Jersey Transit as well. Currently, with three separate fiefdoms operating out of Penn Station, navigating Penn Station can be a challenge. Signs aren’t standardized, and moving from one departure area to the next involves twists and turns through strangely isolated passageways.

“Everybody has had a hand in stirring that pot a little bit, and part of the result, I think, is this almost haphazard look of development that doesn’t create the volume or the architecture of scale that you’d like to see in a grand terminal,” Drew Galloway, an infrastructure V.P. at Amtrak, said to Newsday. “It doesn’t work well today. Anybody who takes a walk down there today at 5 in the evening will agree.”

Still, MTA Board Members are skeptical that Amtrak is willing to cooperate. “To us, Penn Station is the one place where almost everybody who rides the Long Island Rail Road ends up. To Amtrak, Penn Station is one of many stations,” Mitchell Pally said. “It’s never going to be their No. 1 priority.”

Ultimately, I wonder if it even should be the MTA’s. It’s a better use of money to get better train service into Penn Station than it is to spend resources on improvements that do little to nothing to boost transit capacity. Penn Station is what is is, and putting lipstick on that pig won’t change anything.

“The basement atmosphere,” Bruce Becker, head of the Empire State Passengers Association, said, “I don’t think there is much that can be done with that, other than perhaps sprucing it up.” How much money from a limited pot of funds do we want to spend on sprucing something up anyway?

An unexpected lightning strike that took out Long Island Rail Road service near Jamaica had some help from LIRR workers executing a flawed process, a report released today by the MTA Inspector General said. On September 29, 2011, a lightning strike knocked out the LIRR signal system, delaying service across the region. A few hours later, an LIRR worker disabled another signal system while attempting to repair the damaged one, and all service shut down. The report, available here as a PDF, is not a particularly glowing one for the LIRR.

With a new signal system in place, the LIRR should have been prepared for such an outage. It was instead a 12-hour shutdown, and the IG had the following to say:

• LIRR personnel performed deficient Quality Assurance/Quality Control both during and after installation of the new system. Specifically, LIRR failed to detect both the installation of the wrong serial server connector as well as the non-installation of certain components shown on the original ASTS design.
• The diagnostic tools pre-programmed by ASTS into the new signaling system failed to pinpoint which critical components were not functioning. This complicated LIRR’s identification of the failure’s cause, thereby extending the duration of the incident.
• ASTS did not provide LIRR with operating manuals for the system as a whole, nor did ASTS provide LIRR with adequate troubleshooting procedures. Additional training of LIRR personnel by ASTS on troubleshooting could have mitigated the duration of theoutage and prevented the human error that brought down the signals at the second signal hut.
• LIRR employees did not have adequate replacement parts to diagnose and correct system problems. For its part, ASTS did not provide LIRR with a list of critical spare parts after its design was completed.
• The LIRR Signals Department was unaware of a separate contract modification with ASTS to provide emergency response services in situations just like the lightning strike. Further, ASTS failed to provide LIRR with the contract-required phone number and e-mail address to obtain immediate emergency assistance. LIRR did not attempt to contact ASTS using existing known contact information during the first five hours of the disruption.

The ultimate conclusion is an obvious one: “Believing that it had contracted for and installed a system providing appropriate redundancy and protection, LIRR was not adequately prepared for this emergency.”

By and large, the various recommendations in the report are fairly obvious. The Rail Road needs to work closely with its technology vendors to ensure adequate documentation and training. It must also train its workers in the maintenance of the technology to avoid future accidents. That we needed an incident and an IG report to reach that point is dismaying.

From a rider perspective, though, the Inspector General did not find the LIRR adequately informed its passengers of the outage, and that’s something easily fixable. The Rail Road, says the report, “should further develop and refine its protocols to facilitate the dissemination of appropriate information to passengers on stranded or standing trains regarding why they are stopped, and the plans being pursued and progress being made to get them going again.” Shouldn’t that be a lesson from Customer Service 101?