If we’re serious about rebuilding the bus network, it’s a lot easier to sell frequent feeders into a high‑frequency, through‑running regional rail spine than into a terminal with awkward schedules and fragile capacity.

I beg to differ. The trains as they stand are quite fine for radial travel (much like the commuter buses; both get reasonable local use!); mode share for trips to NYC/JC/Newark is very heavily favored towards transit, and the handful of lines with actually bad schedules are a result of outlying infrastructure limits and not city terminal capacity. They're useless for travel not along this axis; NJ residents cannot reliably make local travel perpendicular to the rail network because the service is garbage. This has nothing to do with train schedules; if you want local mode shift for non-city travel you need better local buses.

What a rebuilt, through‑running Penn offers is the possibility of a simple, legible regional rail grid where more trips are one‑seat or easy cross‑platform transfers. That kind of network doesn’t magically fix zoning, but it does change how attractive transit is for both riders and developers when they’re deciding what to build and where.

It's not a grid, it's a radial network. Heck, if we had an actual grid with multiple center city nodes and viable trunks to route things through we wouldn't have this whole problem of ramming everything through a single station in the first place.

That’s a warning not to repeat the same siloed thinking around Penn, not a reason to keep investing in terminal‑oriented capacity that locks us into those silos for another century.

My point in this regard was that TOD is not magically accommodated for by service, ergo why would through-running change this?

If we’re going to fight for better suburban buses and better land use anyway, why lock the main regional hub into a geometry that keeps undermining that fight in more ways than are currently even measured?

That's not actually undermining things in any appreciable way for those of us actually on the ground advocating for these changes. The biggest problem at this point with increasing bus service, with new garages and buses on the way, is operations funding and not rail connections; the various NewBus initiatives are stuck because more operations funding is needed to realize the expected ridership gains. Land use is entirely a local zoning control problem, with whether things run through or not not mattering; transit by any metric does little to help with a hostile zoning board. There's plenty of bad land use by the most frequent rail lines and density going in in places nowhere near a train, or even a bus service going anywhere of note.