New leases for past-lives? Optimizing infrastructure to serve more, better

A recent opinion piece critical of New York’s Governor and of the MTA, the transportation agency responsible for the commutes of vast numbers of New Yorkers, pointed to the vulnerability revealed by the capital cost per commuter of the soon-to-be completed East Side Access project connecting Long Island with Grand Centeral Terminal via LIRR. In the spirit of turning a negative into a positive, we wanted to wonder aloud: could this potentially underutilized infrastructure (if it lives down to the author’s billing) be pressed into service to save the struggling U.S. Post Office? Could any of those gleaming new tracks be used, at least in the reverse commute, as a “trunk line” to deliver goods to branch points at LIRR stations? And perhaps a public-private partnership between the USPS and, say, Amazon - turning the USPS from a net junk-mail delivery service into a critical backbone of a nascent home-work movement? Removing cars, trucks and greenhouse gases in the bargain? https://secondavenuesagas.com/