The terror that permeates this sentence — “New York metro area riders are bracing for eight weeks of gnarly commutes this summer because of a $40 million Amtrak project to upgrade track switches in Penn Station, which will shut three tracks at a time” — is easy enough to explain. After all, the average person is easily able to comprehend the concept that shutting down tracks in a busy rail station is going to cause, as they say, confusion and delay. Everybody’s been in a traffic jam, right?