This is Grand Central Terminal, in New York City. It’s a commuter rail station with an attached subway station and one of the most spectacular interior spaces in the world. This photo shows how big it is. It doesn’t show the vaulted ceiling, painted with the the constellations, with major stars lit with individual light bulbs. It does show something else: everyone’s moving. When commuters arrive here in the morning, they walk right to the subway or out the door to work. When they come back in the afternoon, they walk right to their train. For the purposes of the vast majority of its users, this is a hallway. 50 years ago, when long-distance trains still originated here, this was a waiting room. But today you can’t catch a train further than New Haven or Poughkeepsie, and there’s really no purpose for a room this big and grand at a transit station. If you have one, it’s worth preserving. But why build one?

A different scenario: a brand-new transfer station, built from scratch in an industrial neighborhood on the edge of Downtown, served by commuter rail, Greyhound, Amtrak, local buses, and a short extension of the light rail line. Sound familiar? Well, we’re talking about Salt Lake City. I present the Intermodal Hub:

The building’s nice, but not spectacular. It doesn’t have to be. Greyhound is using it already; the Utah Transit Authority will begin work soon on the commuter rail and light rail platforms. There’s a bus maintenance facility for Greyhound, and there’s room for a future parking garage.

The price tag? $23 million, plus $32 million for the light rail extension. The commuter rail platforms and tracks aren’t included in that cost, but they probably cost well under $10 million. Curious? Check out the pdf fact sheet or this article.

Whatever the right solution for Houston’s Northern Intermodal Center is — and I do hope METRO conducts a public process to determine it — I would suspect that it will resemble Salt Lake’s version more than New York City’s. And that’s fine — the measure of success here is not how impressive the building is, or even how many people use it; it’s whether the facility makes trips more convenient.

Bonus:

Microsoft’s Windows Live Local has bird’s eye views of
Grand Central as well as more modest light rail-commuter transfer points at Baltimore’s Camden station and San Francisco’s 4th and Townsend station

The place to talk about this is in the forums.