Layering method reshaping aging transit hubs

Inside the “Layering” Method Reshaping Aging Transit Hubs

24 September 2026

Author: Adrian Welch

For years, public transit has drawn increasing attention as the foundation of growth for cities. Amid social upheaval, a changing climate, and shifting populations, transit has become the vital thread connecting economic and social development. Standing at the center of that convergence are the transit hubs, which have never mattered more. But many historic transit hubs in the United States are fighting a losing battle. Stations built decades ago are now absorbing passenger volumes beyond their intended capacity, while running on systems that were never designed for modern demands.

The deeper issue is that these aging stations are not facing a single problem. Growing ridership and capacity constraints, aging and congested facilities, changing mobility trends, and climate risk are separate factors that compound one another, touching everything from the smallest architectural detail to district-wide station operations. Layer on a preservation mandate protecting the historic fabric, a renovation process under relentless pressure to cut cost and schedule, and a persistent reluctance among many funding authorities to pay for anything beyond the minimum, and it becomes clear why so much transit renovation follows the same pattern: a series of patches applied wherever needed to cover up one issue, often at the cost of escalating another, rather than the product of a properly planned-out strategy. The result is a category of building that resists real, lasting improvement.

Tianjian Li is an award-winning architectural designer at Grimshaw who focuses on rethinking transportation design to push innovation, resilience, and sustainability. He has spent the past several years building a different way of working through that problem. He has worked across New York’s historic transit landscape with experience on some of the region’s highest-profile hubs — Penn Station, Newark Penn Station, and Jamaica Station — each facing constraints that limit its ability to provide a safe, seamless, and efficient travel experience. He developed what is called the “layering” approach, which helps identify redesign opportunities in the renovation of aging, historic transit hubs from a project’s inception.

Rather than treating the station as one undifferentiated challenge, he separates it into the layers that actually govern how it functions — circulation, program, structure, building systems, and site context — and matches each to the scope, timeline, and degree of intervention it genuinely needs. Breaking a station down into layers of different scale is intended to reveal the interconnections between elements that each carry a different degree of flexibility and room for retrofit. Combined with how long a given measure takes to implement, and how it affects station operations, those conditions can be tested and recombined into different schemes, giving decision-makers maximum flexibility and the clearest path to the most economical approach. Most importantly, the method identifies the core layers driving each component’s performance and reveals sustainable choices that a conventional, undivided approach tends to miss, because a structural constraint that looks fixed at the scale of an entire station often turns out to be flexible once it’s considered in isolation.

Each layer of a station carries its own pace of change — the approach helps identify design opportunities within each one:

Image © Tianjian Li

Two examples illustrate how the approach is implemented in practice. At Newark Penn Station, Li led the master planning for a station whose circulation had been treated for years as a fixed condition of a historic, heavily used facility. The masterplan establishes a long-term vision to transform the station into a world-class, 21st-century transit hub that meets the evolving needs of commuters, travelers, and the surrounding community, all while preserving the station’s historic significance since its opening in 1935. But recent work has mostly scratched the surface: renovations have been scattered across the station, occurring piecemeal across different phases and years.

The station’s structure, left repainted rather than restored, continues to deteriorate under open-sky operation and diesel train exhaust. Its waiting room and bus platforms — themselves earlier add-ons — now work against passenger safety and experience, with inefficient boarding and alighting patterns and narrow stairwells that choke passenger flow. These were maintenance fixes, necessary to resolve the most pressing piece of a problem at the time, often without the runway to weigh the longer-term use and upkeep questions they would eventually raise.

Market Street Bus stop waiting room at Newark Penn Station:

Image © Tianjian Li

Aging platform structure and its waiting space work against the passenger experience:

Image © Tianjian Li

The layering approach peels back these existing issues to reveal redesign opportunities by treating the station as a set of integrated layers, each affecting operations at a different scale: from the district-wide level of urban connectivity and the streetscapes of Raymond Boulevard and Market Street, to the station’s six distinct levels, each serving its own function, down to the smaller kit-of-parts — stairs, signage, fare gates. To reduce congestion at the platform, the team applied the method beyond simply widening the platform edge — introducing a new set of elevators, relocating fare gates, widening the hallway at select locations on the level below, and reconfiguring the signage visual language along the passenger flow. Each layer is tested in parallel against passenger experience, structural assessment, preservation opportunities, and traffic analysis and forecasting, helping reveal real estate development potential, investment capacity, and phasing opportunities.

A parallel case unfolded at Jamaica Station, the transit hub linking New York City to JFK Airport, where Li played a leading role in the station’s visioning effort for a facility that serves over 200,000 commuters daily and handles more than 1,000 Long Island Rail Road and subway trains each day. The station faces challenges at the subway level, the street level, and the mezzanine level — each with its own constraints and its own advocates. Layering let Li’s team treat each as a distinct problem, a threshold of opportunity to be worked out on its own terms while still weighing its impact on overall station performance, then reassemble the results into a phased implementation strategy that diagnosed each symptom and matched it to the proper treatment. The station’s canopy redesign, which is set to be revealed to the public soon, came out of the same effort and followed the identical logic at a smaller scale: rather than replace the historic structure outright, the design preserved its existing form while incorporating a modular panel system that wraps the imposing structure. The design aims to resolve structural efficiency, daylighting, and climate resilience using low-carbon material, while leaving the roof open for future photovoltaic integration once conditions allow.

The imposing existing structure of Jamaica Station at the corner of Sutphin Boulevard:

Image © Tianjian Li

Because operational windows are so tightly constrained in the transit environment, even a small piece of work can mean pulling a section out of service entirely, which is why sequencing isn’t an afterthought in Li’s method, but something built into the layering itself. Each layer’s timeline and scope are weighed against the others to find the phasing that delivers the most value at the right cost, while preserving the presence of the station’s historic features. That evaluation runs alongside a genuine effort to bring stakeholders and the public into the process, laying out what the design is trying to achieve and taking in their feedback. That input keeps the resulting strategy tied to the region’s broader mobility goals of connectivity, safety, and sustainability.

Transportation is the most essential part of our daily life, and historic transit infrastructure deserves to be treated as the thread that has grown alongside a city’s progress, and the vessel that carries its memory. Li’s layering method is an efficient tool for accelerating decision-making across the full life of a historic transit station, from design and financing through construction and maintenance. It is also a repeatable framework for a problem the entire industry will be dealing with for decades to come. For an industry that will be rebuilding this country’s aging infrastructure for decades regardless of who’s doing it, that discipline may prove to be the more lasting contribution.

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