YES. If the Feds are going to throw tens of billions of dollars at New York-area commuter railroads, they should condition that funding on NJT and the MTA integrating their operations to through-run trains and better use existing capacity at Penn Station. https://www.city-journal.org/penn-station-expansion-plan-in-limbo-as-costs-pile-up

The money that’s supposed to be used for Penn Station South could pay for a whole lot of rolling stock and electrification upgrades that would enable the railroads to share more operations and spend less time clogging the existing 21(!) tracks at Penn Station.

Penn Station has a tremendous amount of capacity for a through station — it isn’t a terminal, it just gets used like one — but there has been a complete unwillingness to think about how to use that capacity more efficiently.

Through running doesn’t just reduce dwell times at platforms, it also makes it possible to run only westbound trains on the northern tracks and only eastbound trains on most of the southern tracks, greatly reducing weaving conflicts where trains must cross each other’s paths.