This will be my second Yonah-inspired post of the day. After Gov. Christie announced the termination of the ARC project, Yonah, a firm supporter of ARC, wrote an excellent post outlining other ways New Jersey could increase capacity on NJ Transit:

New Jersey Transit and Amtrak have a unique opportunity to take advantage of the limitations in tunnel capacity to reform the way they do business, to improve and speed up operations in ways that will bring some benefit to their customers but also seriously increase the number of people that can travel under the Hudson River to work every day. Without making changes, trains will become more and more packed and the total ridership of the services will be limited.

Yonah observes that while NJ Transit carries 275,000 riders a day, a single Paris commuter liner, RER Line A, carries 1 million riders a day. He then explains why:

The explanation is the agency’s steadfast adherence to the rule that commuter trains are different than rapid transit ones — primarily, that they have to offer each and every one of their riders a comfortable seat. This limits maximum train capacity to about 1,400 passengers when using ten multi-level cars such as the ones pictured above. While this may seem like a lot of people, with only limited tunnel capacity there are only so many trains that can make the trip into Manhattan during peak hours. If the agency were to simply remove a dozen seats or so per car and replace them with standing areas, trains would be capable of carrying up to 2,000 people apiece. There’s a huge bump in capacity, at virtually no cost. The RER A has a relatively even mix of standing and seating areas, and that’s one of the primary reasons it’s able to move so many more people.
Of course, this would come at a comfort cost to the people who now ride the trains, since what had once been a comfortable ride may be replaced by a standing-room only train. But that may be the price to pay if New Jersey Transit wants to ensure that it can transport all the people that need to get into New York City every day.

NJ Transit could also raise the fare at that point. Granted, increasing the capacity of the tunnels by making some commuters stand isn’t very glamorous. But in a straitened economic climate, it certainly sounds like a prudent move.