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Rail is ultimately the way to go in the long-term.
There is a huge push right now to make passenger rail the perferred method of inter-city transportation. Not just on the East Coast, but through-out the entire US.
Mark_CT and I had a little chat on another forum about whether CT (or at least the western part) is New England. In summary Mark thinks New England is an outdated concept and that he'd rather not be in New England if it means being associated with Ma**holes. I sliced off western CT and gave it to NY, since its gravitational pull is in that direction and I wanted to make Mark's day better.
Mark clearly feels a lot of rage at all things Boston and should maybe shut off the computer and go enjoy THE GREATEST CITY IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE, KING OF THE HILL, A NUMBER ONE, TOP OF THE LIST, HOME OF THE 26-TIME NEW YORK YANKEES WHO WILL ONE DAY AGAIN FIGURE OUT HOW TO BEAT UP THE RED SOX NATION PANSIES AND TAKE THEIR LUNCH MONEY. Come on dude. We all get it, you don't like Boston, you don't like Massachusetts, you don't like the Red Sox. So don't come to Boston.
I raise this because that level of engagement, in a nutshell, is why NY and Philly are not the big rivals. They don't dislike each other as much as NY and Boston. I think some of that is a long history of rivalry in baseball and the other sports. The Red Sox and Yankees have a long intermingled history. The Philadephia A's were not really part of that and the Phillies were too lousy most years to attract the attention of New York's NL fans, who were rivals with each other due to having 2 teams. The Celtics and Knicks go back a long way, and the Bruins and Rangers were Original 6 rivals.
Of course it's more. The cities are similar enough and different enough to create tension, and both very high on their own city. From the Boston end, New York has loomed very large for at least a century, while NY people come to Mass. in droves for school or to take over the Cape and Islands every summer. So Mass. is in their consciousness a lot more than Philly is. Philly ran tourism ads (on TV in Boston) a while back where a guy says "It's like a little New York" and a Phoenix columnist said he'd punch someone who said that about Boston. That fuels rivalry since Boston will not call itself second-rate and is very in your face when it comes to New York.
As for Route 380, 209, 94, etc., the odd numbers are supposed to be North-South and the even numbers East-West. 380 was (originally) stuck with East-West because it's a spur of I-80, which very clearly runs East-West (NYC to SF). Apparently they are loosening the rules on the 3-digit ones. . 209 south of Stroudsburg is straight north-south and even by the Water Gap is more of a 45-degree angle. 94 is N-S in Chicago and a couple of other places but straight east-west in Indiana and ND/Montana. I-71 from Cleveland to Louisville is 45 degrees the whole way and could have gone either way, but I think a lot of people see Cleveland/Cincinnati as more a N-S distinction than E-W. Just a guess.
To be fair to Philadelphia though its Center City area is becoming one of the most affluent in the nation with housing costs that rival those of some Manhattan neighborhoods and more high-rises cropping up each year. I think Center City Philadelphia could easily rival Boston's Beacon Hill. A lot of white-collars are now moving to Greater Philadelphia and then hopping a train to commute back to work in Greater New York City. If anything these two cities will merge to form a very large combined statistical area (CSA) by about 2020 or 2030 as so many folks commute between both cities. By doing so the new New York City/Philadelphia CSA will easily be the largest in the nation for many years to come.
That will never happen.
New York and Philly are there own, unique markets.
Central and South Jersey may get blurred, but those are the perhipehal to the regions,
I think because Baltimore and D.C. are much closer to Philadelphia than New York, Philadelphia tends to lean more in the direction of the "lower Northeast." I'd say that New York is really kind of the one stuck in the middle. It is unquestionably the capital of the Northeast, and I think is tied halfway to Philadelphia and halfway to Boston. On the other hand, it is so much larger than both of these cities that it is easily kind of distinct from both. It has characteristics of both cities.
It's a pet peeve of mine, and a personal insult to the northeast, to include Baltimore and Washington.
The northeast begins when you cross the Mason-Dixon line, Washington and Baltimore are cities lacking idenity stuck in the mid Atlantic crossroads.
They ARE NOT in the culture of the northeast, end of story.
Another weird one. I-94 runs from Chicago to Milwaukee, which is almost due north and due south, but is called an east-west highway. I-69 in Michigan I think around Lansing curves sharply and runs more east-west to where it terminates with I-94 in Port Huron.
If you ask me, New York and Philadelphia were probably bigger rivals historically-speaking (and across all sorts of cultural and economic factors) than New York and Boston were, though clearly Philly and Beantown were probably fairly close on the "rival scale" from New York's point of view. When the U.S. was young and the East Coast cities (the 3 aforementioned cities plus Baltimore) were all trying to assert their dominance, it was Philadelphia, not Boston, that posed the biggest threat to New York, in large part because Boston was too far north and east to be a big factor in getting access to the vast territory that was the United States. New York's great natural harbor and its easy connection to the Great Lakes and Midwest via the Erie Canal gave it the necessary leg up over Philadelphia (and Baltimore), which was blocked to the west by the difficult to surmount Appalachian Mountain ridges (and particularly the Allegheny Front). Still, the two cities continued to compete with one another in many ways; one only needs to consider the battle between the Pennsylvania Railroad (based in Philadelphia) and New York Central Railroad (based in New York) to see an example of the rivalry; both railroads operated major east-west lines to Chicago. (As an aside, New York's two primary train stations were built by the two aforementioned railroads as their NYC terminals - Grand Central was the NY Central's station, and obviously Penn Station was the Pennsy's station. It was also the Pennsylvania Railroad that built the portion of the Northeast Corridor between New York and Washington now used by Amtrak and also electrified the NYC-DC and Philly-Harrisburg lines.) Boston was also still clearly a rival to New York, but not at the same level that Philadelphia was.
In a sports sense or at least a baseball sense, clearly the Yankees and Red Sox are bigger rivals than the Mets and Phillies are (though the latter rivalry has upped in intensity significantly the last 2-3 years); that has a lot to do with the Yankees' and Red Sox' consistent winning over the last few decades. Having said that, the Yankees' biggest rival wasn't always (or even usually) the Red Sox; back in the Ruth-Gehrig era when the Yankees became "the Yankees", the Philadelphia A's were a much bigger rival. Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig only played together for 10 seasons (actually more like 9 1/2 seasons, and the 1/2 season was during the worst season of Ruth's career) but only won 4 AL pennants. The primary reason for that is because the A's put together a great team of their own (included Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, Al Simmons, Lefty Grove, and a few other very good players) that ran off 3 straight pennants from 1929-1931 (usually winning the league by sizable margins), after the Yanks won the AL from 1926-1928 (and then won again in 1932 after the A's began to fade).
In other sports, or at least football and hockey, I think it is clear New York and Philadelphia are bigger rivals than New York and Boston. The Jets and Patriots have a pretty good rivalry, but doesn't have the history of the Giants/Eagles rivalry, which has become one of the NFL's best rivalries in recent years. With hockey, though the Rangers and Bruins were big rivals back in the day, I'm pretty sure most Rangers fans would tell you they dislike the Flyers more than the Bruins. The Devils and Flyers (and to a lesser degree the Islanders and Flyers) are also strong rivals.
In today's world, at least in sports terms, I think it is fair to say that if you live in southwestern Connecticut, you are much more sensitized to a New York-Boston rivalry, while if you live in north Jersey, you are much more sensitized to a New York-Philadelphia rivalry. With non-sports issues, New York's biggest rivals are mostly international cities, not Boston or Philadelphia.
Part of it has to do with the rivalry of the "elites" of Boston and NYC. The brahmins and the upper east side set were equally rare and powerful breeds who held a lot of sway over the country, and their rivalry easily becomes the cities' rivalry.
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