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View Poll Results: Is SEPTA doing a great job in regards to bus, subway, and commuter rail overall??????
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  #1601  
Old Posted Apr 6, 2021, 7:32 PM
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  #1602  
Old Posted Apr 6, 2021, 7:36 PM
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  #1603  
Old Posted Apr 6, 2021, 11:13 PM
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APPROVED! (did that work?)
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  #1604  
Old Posted Apr 15, 2021, 1:12 PM
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  #1605  
Old Posted Apr 19, 2021, 3:44 PM
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Construction Progresses On New Conshohocken Train Station

Site rendering:


Progress:


Current station:


Read/view more here:
https://phillyyimby.com/2021/04/cons...n-station.html
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  #1606  
Old Posted Apr 19, 2021, 5:17 PM
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Nice! It's kind of amazing that Conshohocken went so long without a decent station (I used to have to use it and it seemed kind of pathetic with the amount of people waiting for the train with me), but glad it's finally happening.
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  #1607  
Old Posted Apr 19, 2021, 5:27 PM
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Good news. Here's to hoping the new station architecture and execution doesn't look like a cheesy strip mall or theme park.
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  #1608  
Old Posted Apr 20, 2021, 1:43 AM
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I rather think you systematically missed all of my points.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wanderer34 View Post
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsy...hore_Lines#RDC

I'm not just talking about whether electrification is necessary for the River Line or the Glassboro line. You have to remember that we're talking about 1950's technology here and it's not necessary to have electrification along the Glassboro or the River line. It's amazing that as recently as the late 1970s that rail service was still feasible from Camden and Philadelphia to Atlantic City, Ocean City, Wildwood, and Cape May with RDC train sets until Penn Central went belly up and it's assets were sold to Conrail.

As a result, Conrail ceased to run it's South Jersey trains until Amtrak stepped up and purchased the Atlantic City line during the 1980's until NJT took over that line in the 1990's. It's almost like asking how many engineers does it take to screw a lightbulb when a much simpler answer should be only one, which is why I didn't like the mode of operation for the River Line because I was afraid that it would delay any hope that heavy rail service would come back to South Jersey with the exception of The Atlantic City line.

Even when trains were starting to get unpopular during the 1950's into the 1980's, NJT could've at least provided some limited service from Camden into the Jersey Shore, not the same service as North Jersey, but more limited, with frequencies between a hour and up to two hours on the weekends. NJT underestimated the riding public in South Jersey, which is why many of the old rail lines had no service and placed all it's eggs in the NYC basket than placing another basket for Philly/South Jersey.

Also, the old Camden Terminal, which had the ferry slip and is where the current BB&T Center is currently located at, was the main rail hub for all of South Jersey. It reminds me a lot about Hoboken, another factory town just across NYC. If the powers that be wanted to replace the old Camden terminal, the best place for it would've been at the current site of the Walter Rand Transportation Center.

The only difference between Hoboken and Camden is that since Hoboken is across Manhattan, the financial and media capital of America and the world, is that Hoboken started to gentrify in the 1980's and transformed into a working class community into an upper class enclave while Camden until recently was bogged down due to deindustrialization, race riots, poverty, marginalization, globalization, and finally rampant violence. It has recently turned a page and recorded it's major crime drop, but Camden is still a shadow of what it once was in the early half of the 20th century.

https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/...=yhs-Lkry-SF01

Click on the second link and you'll see a picture of what Camden Terminal used to look like.



Read the first paragraph. The old South Jersey lines don't need electrification at all. This isn't SEPTA. It just need a simple diesel generator locomotive that can haul passengers from Camden and Philadelphia into South Jersey town all the way into the Jersey Shore. Does it need to be state of the art or cutting edge just to ensure ridership? Not necessary. It just needs to serve the riding public and I just don't understand why we need to throw money away just to create another gimmick when all that was needed was a simple diesel generator train set, some coaches, and yearly maintenance of the rail lines.
There are at least three counterarguments here. The first is that the Millville Branch was actually electrified at one point, so traffic on the line certainly warranted electrification at its peak. The second is that the lack of electrification was almost certainly a major driver of what doomed the South Jersey network in the 1970s and 1980s. The third is that you are fundamentally misunderstanding what the point of electrification is here.
Quote:
We're not talking placing high-speed rail like the Acela and the new Avella Liberty, but heavy rail commuter service which is common in places like Long Island, Westchester, North Jersey, and the Chicagoland areas. The blame does go the NJT since they didn't know how to manage the rail service and rail frequency in South Jersey compared to North Jersey. If there's less commuters, you run less trains and less passenger coaches, at least an hour every weekday or every two hours every weekend.
I don't think you even know what you're talking about here. There's some stuff that's right but it's mashed up with so much misused technical vocabulary (for one thing, Metra and the LIRR is not "heavy rail") that it's hard to pull out. However, you are right that frequency (or the lack thereof) is what doomed the South Jersey network, and the lack of frequency can be traced back to inadequate equipment and operations. If this is the case, however, then your entire proposed solution set is, well, utterly counterproductive. The River Line succeeded because it re-established a line with reasonable (I mean, Japanese inaka, but still "reasonable" by rock-bottom American standards) frequency along a corridor that badly needed it. More such corridors are of course in evidence in South Jersey, and similar technology can and should be used to re-establish frequencies where needed.

The reason I want to advance electrification on both the River Line and on this line is because the real goal of the South Jersey network needs to be to reach Philadelphia, and doing so will require a substantial investment in new infrastructure (most of it underground) which will require electrification. However, that's still a far-off conversation which requires considerable consensus building in a part of New Jersey where the current challenge is restoring services on lines which once had it. So, again, back to the fine-for-the-purpose Stadlers until there's a large enough constituency of rail riders to demand serious infrastructure upgrades.
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Mass transit is a big factor why the Greater Philadelphia area hasn't grown as fast as Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, and it's peer cities of DC and Boston.
Um, wait, what was the point of this again? Because this is a total non sequitur. Nobody in their right mind would lump these two classes of city together in terms of quality of mass transit service.
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It's not the service to Glassboro that I'm against, but I'd rather see heavy rail and the state of NJ spending less money on decent rail service and rail maintenance than making everything "smoke and mirrors" when we're renovating a line, and the fact that it's light rail is a slap in the face to the great PRR and the RDG. I still feel that the reason why the River Line was so expensive wasn't because it was just light rail, but a lot of the contractors wanted a lot of money (pork) just to place a toy train when all that was needed was to restore rail and place new heavy rail rolling stock onto the River and connect the River Line to Trenton Station via the Northeast Corridor, which would've made more sense than giving the River Line it's own platform across for Trenton Station.
This is a point with a lot of traction in the community, that there is a problematic trend towards cost maximalization in mass transit investments. So despite your consistently wrong use of the term "heavy rail" (which refers to subways, not to mainline rail) and your appeal to nostalgia this is not that wildly off the mark. However, given that the pilot line already uses Stadler GTKs and the connection to mainline rail is all but nonexistent, network extensions can and should continue to use GTKs along with upgrading the tracks (which is a real cost center here, the trackbeds are in unfathomably bad condition). The real mystery is why this project has kicked around the engineering offices for the last 15 years instead of actually getting built to that the Millville extension and other new South Jersey lines could get worked on.[/quote]
Quote:
heavy rail
Quote:
heavy rail
Quote:
heavy rail
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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  #1609  
Old Posted May 15, 2021, 7:48 PM
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New Plan Suggests Sending Part of Roosevelt Blvd. Underground by 2040

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news...-2040/2815064/
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  #1610  
Old Posted May 16, 2021, 4:15 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by EastSideHBG View Post
New Plan Suggests Sending Part of Roosevelt Blvd. Underground by 2040

https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news...-2040/2815064/
come on. if they haven't been able to get the subway line built, what the hell makes them think they can completely reconfigure the whole boulevard, including sinking the center lanes below grade. and why would they propose sinking those lanes without including the subway line? the BRT will not be enough; there are more people in NE Philly than the entire city of Pittsburgh.
this is nonsense. as I've observed before with proposals like this, Elon Musk will have landed people on Mars before this proposal is completed.

Last edited by thoughtcriminal; May 17, 2021 at 1:11 AM.
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  #1611  
Old Posted May 16, 2021, 6:31 PM
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Haven't had a chance to leave a post with my in depth thoughts... But briefly, my thoughts exactly.
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  #1612  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2021, 7:56 PM
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King of Prussia rail extension is an exemplar of bad planning | Opinion

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/com...-20210607.html

Quote:
.....

- The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority is planning to spend $2 billion on an exemplar of bad transportation planning. SEPTA’s King of Prussia rail project will build a four-mile branch of the Norristown High Speed Line, a light rail line from West Philadelphia to the northwestern suburb of Norristown. The branch will serve a large mall and office park in King of Prussia, just southwest of Norristown. — The project shares many common flaws of American transit projects, such as the extreme cost, $500 million per mile would buy a subway in most European cities and the protracted environmental review that has produced hundreds of pages of reports. Spurious environmental concerns, furthermore, seem to have motivated several bad and likely costly planning decisions, beginning with the route choice.

- A natural route choice is U.S. Route 202, a broad, straight road flanked by strip malls that runs from the King of Prussia Mall to an existing NHSL station. This route was considered as an alternative in the project’s nearly 700-page draft environmental impact statement (DEIS). But planners chose a route that runs along an undeveloped power line corridor and the Pennsylvania Turnpike freeway, serving nothing useful along the way. The DEIS admits that Route 202 “would provide the most access benefits” to “community facilities” such as schools, churches, and medical offices. — The DEIS mentions one valid point in favor of the turnpike route: it would be one or two minutes faster for most riders. But other factors are harder to accept. Businesses, for instance, complained that Route 202 construction would temporarily disrupt traffic.

- The DEIS further mentions many dubious concerns about visual and noise impacts. King of Prussia rail will include an unnecessarily complicated overpass over the Pennsylvania Turnpike, for example, to avoid noise impacts on a few dozen houses abutting the turnpike even though turnpike traffic already creates plenty of noise. It even brings up — though it ultimately dismisses concerns that a light rail line along the turnpike would harm drivers’ views along the turnpike and the freeway’s purportedly historic architecture such as “travel lanes, some interchanges and toll plazas, some bridges, culverts and retaining walls; some service plazas; maintenance facilities; and state police stations.” — There’s reason enough to doubt the need for a rail line at all. King of Prussia was designed for suburban drivers: it sits in the middle of a tangle of freeways, its buildings are separated by massive parking lots, and it is hard to navigate on foot.

- It’s natural to consider cheaper options for better King of Prussia transit, such as bus service. KOP rail’s DEIS dismisses bus alternatives because most current buses to King of Prussia come from Philadelphia via the congested Schuylkill Expressway and have poor reliability. But this problem has an obvious solution: cut back the existing bus routes to shuttles from King of Prussia to nearby stops on the NHSL or SEPTA’s Regional Rail lines, so passengers can take more dependable trains to Philadelphia. Buses could be timed to make transfers convenient, and reforms such as fewer conductors on regional trains could allow more frequent service without more spending. — This alternative would free up money for many better uses: for instance, replacing outdated train cars on the busy Market-Frankford subway line, or building high-level rail platforms for faster boarding, better accessibility, and better punctuality on Regional Rail lines.

.....



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  #1613  
Old Posted Jun 8, 2021, 8:21 PM
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  #1614  
Old Posted Jun 9, 2021, 2:29 AM
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I strongly disagree! Look at the last two paragraphs of the Inquiry article,

"King of Prussia light rail is hardly alone in exemplifying two pathologies of American transit planning: expansion for its own sake (rather than building as a result of actual demand, which I lobby for in a new Manhattan Institute report), and making expensive concessions to placate a handful of change-averse residents. American cities are strewn with unused light rail lines in freeway margins or low-density industrial zones — where there may be no one to ride the train, planners think, but at least there’s no one to protest it.

Neither pathology can be cured without two key reforms to the transit planning process: First, streamline public comments and environmental reviews to reduce the influence of small but vociferous interest groups. Second, end federal subsidies of transit capital projects, such as the New Starts program that may provide half of King of Prussia rail’s budget, that enable transit agencies to spend billions of dollars they don’t have on new rail lines they don’t need."

Watch some youtube videos from 10-15 years ago when DART built light rail lines in low density iand empty blocks of industrial zoning, then compared them with recent videos with all the mixed used TODs popping up. DART's Green Line just north of downtown has filled in nicely near Parkland Hospital and the Medical District, not only with doctor offices but with mixed used and higher density apartment or condo complexes. Would that neighborhood had changed as quickly or as urban without the Green Line being built, you make the call? But it did change. Videos do not lie.

Many different issues are look at and studied determining what should be the preferred route of these new transit lines and highways. Ridership is just one item, other items also come into play like costs to implement, environmental, and economics, and social justice. The people making the decisions where to build are usually from that metro's regional administrators and stake holders weighing all the issues and balancing them as best they can. The EIS process and the EPA was put in place by the Nixon administration not to kill transit and highway projects, but to minimize their environmental impacts. In the 1960s too many disadvantaged neighborhoods were torn down in the name of urban renewal for new highways and transit lines. It is still an issue today. What is good for the goose should also good for the gander. Both rich and poor homeowners dislike seeing their homes torn down in the name of process. They both deserve a voice where new highways and transit lines are built. Streamlining public comments is the exact opposite of what should be done. Ending the FTA's "New Starts" program will kill any new transit lines ever being built in the USA into the future. It would also kill building new intercity passenger train services as well. These programs have not remained unchanged the 50 years since the EPA was started, they have been changed and modified as years have passed by, I believe for the better. Can they be improved more, of course, but you can not improved something you destroy.

Editorialist journalist will often include popular sentiments early in their editorial, but you have to read them all the way to the end, because their unpopular lopsided opinions of what should be done are included long after your guard as the reader has fallen.

Last edited by electricron; Jun 9, 2021 at 2:53 AM.
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  #1615  
Old Posted Jun 10, 2021, 2:32 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron View Post

Watch some youtube videos from 10-15 years ago when DART built light rail lines in low density iand empty blocks of industrial zoning, then compared them with recent videos with all the mixed used TODs popping up. DART's Green Line just north of downtown has filled in nicely near Parkland Hospital and the Medical District, not only with doctor offices but with mixed used and higher density apartment or condo complexes. Would that neighborhood had changed as quickly or as urban without the Green Line being built, you make the call? But it did change. Videos do not lie.
Comparing a light rail north of downtown dallas to this is a pretty stretch. This way out in the suburbs.
Quote:
Many different issues are look at and studied determining what should be the preferred route of these new transit lines and highways. Ridership is just one item, other items also come into play like costs to implement, environmental, and economics, and social justice. The people making the decisions where to build are usually from that metro's regional administrators and stake holders weighing all the issues and balancing them as best they can. The EIS process and the EPA was put in place by the Nixon administration not to kill transit and highway projects, but to minimize their environmental impacts. In the 1960s too many disadvantaged neighborhoods were torn down in the name of urban renewal for new highways and transit lines. It is still an issue today. What is good for the goose should also good for the gander. Both rich and poor homeowners dislike seeing their homes torn down in the name of process. They both deserve a voice where new highways and transit lines are built. Streamlining public comments is the exact opposite of what should be done. Ending the FTA's "New Starts" program will kill any new transit lines ever being built in the USA into the future. It would also kill building new intercity passenger train services as well. These programs have not remained unchanged the 50 years since the EPA was started, they have been changed and modified as years have passed by, I believe for the better. Can they be improved more, of course, but you can not improved something you destroy.
Sure, I guess if you look at things in a vacuum, positives can come out of the process. However, as pointed out about this project, it really just made this project more awful than it already was. It pushed the rail line away from the already built "town center" to literally running along side the turnpike, crossing through the back of a grocery store, to a mall parking lot, to back again next to the side of the highway.

Quote:
Editorialist journalist will often include popular sentiments early in their editorial, but you have to read them all the way to the end, because their unpopular lopsided opinions of what should be done are included long after your guard as the reader has fallen.
I mean he isn't really an "editorial journalist", he is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who studies public transit.

ALL of this money should have been spent on creating ONE more subway stop to the Navy Yard in Philadelphia.
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  #1616  
Old Posted Jun 10, 2021, 4:03 PM
Skintreesnail Skintreesnail is offline
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The Amtrak proposal for rail to Reading has a stop at KOP. I feel like it would be more beneficial to have frequent regional rail service along that line (which would also serve Phoenixville) and just have shuttles to distribute commuters around the KOP area, which is really a sea of parking lots, office parks and the mall with a serious lack of pedestrian infrastructure (sidewalks). I don't know why we can't focus on making regional rail more affordable and increased frequency (which the city proposed earlier this year in their OTIS report). 2bn towards that and other service improvements (like BSL to the navy yard) seems like a much better investment.
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  #1617  
Old Posted Jun 10, 2021, 4:43 PM
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  #1618  
Old Posted Jun 10, 2021, 5:03 PM
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At least Leslie Richards is also CEO now... really changing things up at 1234 Market

The proposed extension of the Broad Street Subway to the Navy Yard is seems like a dead idea. Almost nothing has been said of it since the feasibility study was released in 2019 and the project website has vanished. The better project that King of Prussia Rail is diverting attention and resources from is Trolley Modernization. (Perhaps also replacements for the M4 and Silverliner IV cars)
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  #1619  
Old Posted Jun 10, 2021, 8:26 PM
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^^^ good point; trolley modernization is long overdue and making our trolley network into something resembling light rail would be a huge improvement. Another good example of a project that would benefit a lot more people than the KOP spur. The KOP project doesn't even sound like that great an idea when taken by itself due to what KOP is, and the fact that it's taking priority over these other initiatives is frustrating.
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  #1620  
Old Posted Jun 27, 2021, 9:53 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Delthayre View Post
The proposed extension of the Broad Street Subway to the Navy Yard is seems like a dead idea. Almost nothing has been said of it since the feasibility study was released in 2019 and the project website has vanished. The better project that King of Prussia Rail is diverting attention and resources from is Trolley Modernization. (Perhaps also replacements for the M4 and Silverliner IV cars)
The BSL to the Navy Yard and many other projects were shown in the Philly Transit plan a couple months back, it's not dead everything is just awaiting funding.
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