Just curious; does anyone know the building at 2400 Walnut Street; the graphic says a big building is there on the site of the old Mandeville Condo; but I haven't heard anything about this one.

That is Mandeville.

Plus, even if ending trolley transit east of 30th street helped more commuters than it hurt (which I'd assume it certainly would), you'll always get way more negative feedback from those being hurt than positive feedback from those you'll help. It's just how people are.

People in west philly would go nuts if you tried to pull this off. Developers investing along those trolley corridors would pitch a fit. Would it be that big of a deal to have to transfer to the MFL at 30th? No. But it would be a huge negative for those invested in those areas to go from being a 15 minute trolley ride from Center City, that comes sometimes as frequently as every 5 minutes, to having to suddenly deal with transferring and taking two trains.

1 minute to wait for a single car trolley vs 6-8 minutes for an 8 car train, it's about a wash.

I've been hearing about this for years, don't think it's ever going to happen. nor should it, when there are already stations at 19th and 22nd streets that could be used.

people keep bringing it up- its not happening and there is no justification for such an expensive project at this point. The # one thing SEPTA absolutely needs to get done next in CC is upgrading City hall station and making it ADA compliant. Period. Thats $50m right there.

Exactly, growing up in Philly, I just considered the trolley to be the "locals" along West Market and the El to be the "express." And when visiting an aunt at 49th & Spruce, it was great to just walk to Baltimore Avenue to grab a trolley back into town to catch the 47 home rather than:

1. Waiting on the 42.
2. Walking to the El.

And to be clear, there are a mere 11 blocks (if you count the river as one) b/w the 15th Street and 30th Street Stations on the El, with again, two "local" stops in between. All of that's before you even consider actual transit needs for corridors that have no form of rapid/high capacity transit at all.

yes but the point I've been laboring to make is that if you're going to have subway service in the central business district, it should be from the MFL because it has much higher ridership and has more capacity than the SST, your own personal experience notwithstanding.
As someone said in an earlier post, if we were designing the system today, we would have at least one MFL stop between 15th and 30th and probably not have SST, at least not east of 30th street. As I said in my first post on this topic, as long as we're fantasizing, I'd extend the patco line to Rittenhouse Sq, then turn it north on 19th and put a station under the "new" MFL station / exist SST station at 19th, then have it continue to the Parkway, with stations at Logan Circle and the art museum. So if there was only going to be 1 MFL station between 15th and 30th, put it at 19th to maximize this opportunity to connect with the patco line.
all of it is fantasy, none of it is going to happen in my lifetime, but if anyone's asking, these are my recommendations.

The justification is the opportunity cost in density to areas not within a few blocks of a subway stop. Right now, this prime area in CC is isolated from transit options which limits possibilities for growth. Not that any of this is necessarily a bad thing, but if people have visions of the Broadwalk becoming similar to Chicago’s Riverwalk, transit options would be important to extending higher commercial and residential density towards the river.

Didn't mean to be critical of anyone's specific ideas. I spent so much time doodling subway maps and dreaming about transformation that I stupidly convinced myself to go to grad school for urban planning, so to everyone smart enough to ponder these things without incurring 70 grand in loan debt, cheers to you!

I'm chiming in because I know how exciting it is to think big, and my time in school and then in related work since has led me to the conclusion that it's better to filter those ideas through the lens of what the actual monetary, political, and civic capacity is (a coping mechanism to avoid ongoing disappointment and permanent urban planning blue balls, if you'll pardon the term).

I mentioned platform lengthening because it's something SEPTA itself is already thinking about, not because I thought anyone was suggesting it here. It's a good example of one of the realities of US transit planning: agencies tend to try and solve the problems they know they already have, rather than proactively build for the problems they one day hope to have. SEPTA is dealing with the problem of today: the MFL is at or above capacity, and apparently running with greater frequency is an issue, though no one in a position to know has ever explained to me why 3-4 minutes is the tightest headway the line can achieve. Point being, SEPTA would rather spend money on fitting more people onto every existing train by elongating platforms to uniformly accommodate longer trains than it would to build one new station that would serve a more specific and limited population that frankly isn't YET that big (though presumably development will fill in CC west of 20th enough to eventually create that very real problem).

Read about platform lengthening here and you'll note a little issue: it's MASSIVELY more expensive than lay people would ever possibly conceive it might be. http://septa.org/strategic-plan/repo...31-program.pdf
We can debate whether $1.3 BILLION DOLLARS is well spent to make every el train two cars longer, but accepting for a moment that that's what it costs, and accepting for a moment that it's already worked into SEPTA's budget as a real and previously agreed upon priority, the point is that they'd need to finish spending $1.3B on this before even thinking about other MFL investments. By the time they finish this (if they even can), it will also be time to think about replacing the entire MFL fleet, which went into service when I was a kid, so they'd probably have to put that ahead of new stations as a priority too. That's also an opportunity - if they bought articulated trains without separated cars as seen in Paris and other places, they could potentially avoid lengthening every platform and just educate people on when to walk forward to exit at shorter stations - but I digress.

I'd love for SEPTA and US transit agencies to act more like those in Europe and Asia by planning proactively for future capacity and anticipated growth. Unfortunately, they aren't in a position to do that because the money isn't there to keep stuff going at a state of good repair, let alone build new. Perhaps enough climate-related crises will compel the feds to drastically shift how they allocate and prioritize transpo funding in the coming decade or two. I would love that (not the crisis part, just the reprioritization part). In the meantime, I'm intentionally limiting my expectations to avoid disappointment and hoping that a combination of MFL capacity enhancement, smart procurement of higher-capacity trolleys, and expedited construction of nicer and new underground connections between lines makes the existing less-than-ideal multi-seat ride situation that much better.

(I know this whole thing belongs in the Transportation thread, apologies for prolonging the non-real estate discussion).

Unfortunately, one of the problems with platform lengthening is that SEPTA kind of screwed up when they rebuilt the Market Street Elevated -- that would have been an excellent opportunity to futureproof its platforms and instead all the platforms along that stretch are barely longer than the current trains.

That said, it should not be that difficult to lengthen platforms along the elevateds. A few years ago, I took the El up to Arrott on a daily basis for work, and something I noticed while they were rebuilding the station is that they threw up a temporary platform that was quick, cheap, and easy. Something like that would be a good interim solution for lengthening elevated platforms for 8-car trains along both the Market Street and Frankford elevateds.

The real problem here are the short platforms in the tunnels: 5th, 11th, and (to a lesser extent) 34th, as well as the eastbound platform at 8th. Fortunately, 5th, 8th, and 11th are all side platforms, while by my amateur assay you can just fit a lengthened 34th Street platform in the existing station approach, but even so, none of these are going to be easy or cheap. Worse still, AFAIK SEPTA decided to rebuild 5th Street without considering platform lengthening.

And another problem to consider here is the departure platform at 69th Street, which just fits 6-car trains and is constrained by very curvy approaches on either end. While it is on the surface and therefore not as technically difficult as platform lengthening in the tunnels, lengthening 69th Street's departure platform will likely require reconfiguration of the loop.

Or, you know, instead of spending an arm and a leg lengthening platforms, the next El equipment order could have open-gangway trainsets (up to a 20% capacity increase!) with doors able to be toggled for variable-length platforms instead of the single-switch setup they currently have in those trains. That would probably be the cheaper option.

Totally agree with you on this as a realistic approach with good ROI.

Sometimes it’s good for people to talk about “art of the possible” before backing into realistic proposals or roadmaps. Appreciate all the various perspectives on here as it’s great to see all the ideas.

Jeffy, it sucks.
 

This would be an excellent solution and perhaps by the time the M4 cars are replaced, whoever is responsible at SEPTA would be receptive to them. They would also seem likelier to prevent trackfalls than multilingual eye-level height signs and automated announcements.

I think that an obvious solution is higher service frequencies, which would require signal improvements and new rolling stock at worst, which is probably more attainable and cost-efficient than anything entailing excavation and underground construction would be. I don't know what the maximum throughput of the MFSE is, but if they would like to increase capacity by a third, running trains every 3 minutes rather than every 4 minutes seems as though it should be feasible. The platform extension idea always seems cockamamie to me. I think that the MFSE would do well to have more capacity, but platform extensions almost seems like solving a problem that the PRT or its successors had dealt with a long time ago using more or less the same infrastructure as I assume that the line had higher ridership in the past when the city's population was higher, more concentrated in central areas and owned fewer automobiles.

I recall reading claims somewhere in the annual reports of the Department of City Transit or this report on construction of the Frankford Elevated that it would be possible to run 44 trains per hour on the Market Street Subway-Elevated with the never-built Darby Elevated tied into it, pending its never-realized later routing into a Chestnut Street Subway. I also recall citations for the PRT having run variously 20, 30-34 or 40 trains per hour over the MSSE. Some time ago I chanced upon a fleet management plan for the M4 cars that cited intended service of 20 trains per hour and noted that the M3 fleet had run headways sometimes as close as 2.2 minutes between trains. (I wish that I could find that again)

For some reason a fleet of 218 M4 cars is insufficient for better service than 15 trains per hour. I assume that simply multiplying trains per hour by cars per train and adding the FTA prescribed 15 % spare ratio is too simple to yield the actual number of cars needed for service, but something seems amiss. Using that simple calculation for illustration note that there are 218 M4 cars in service, crudely using 104 cars per hour (6*15*1.15=103.5, rounded up to 104), which is 47.71 % of the fleet. By contrast, the crude calculation for the Broad Street Subway is 113 cars per hour (((16*5)+(9*2))*1.15=112.7, rounded up to 113) or 90.4 % of the fleet. Maybe some difference in infrastructure explains the MFSE's comparative fleet inefficiency, but I wonder if something is wrong with the M4 cars themselves that limit service levels beyond what infrastructure limitations would. Page 7 of SEPTA's most recent capital budget notes that the $ 1.3 billion project would include,"associated vehicle procurement," which I assume refers to just some additional cars, as $ 1.3 billion would be a little light for the required construction and a whole new fleet.

I think that this whole extensions project might just have been Jeffrey Knueppel's pet idea. It almost seems designed to address the issue with the most construction possible. It's not just a failure to follow, "Organization Before Electronics Before Concrete," it's forgetting everything but the third thing.

Clearly cool to fantasize, but the point of the SSTs in Center City is and always was to give the populations along those lines in West Philly a direct, single-seat ride to the center of town (and to be that "local" along West Market). The SSTs also collectively have higher frequency and almost as much capacity as the El currently does (101x5 v. 103x6); the SSTs carry almost as many as the Broad Street line and 72% as many passengers as the El, which is nothing to sneeze at (130K v. 180K daily). It would seem the better thing would be to increase capacity on the SSTs, which is more possible than either removing them (and isolating the folks who are currently along those lines) or extending El platforms, though reducing headways on the El might be possible. And for the relatively able-bodied, switching between the two is not a difficult thing to do, but for 25 years I've lived in a town where switching back-and-forth b/w locals and expresses (and schlepping long blocks and up and down stairs to transfer lines) is done without much thought.

Anyway, with the El, the SSTs, Suburban and 30th Street Stations, West Market does not suffer from a dearth of rail transit compared to other arteries that absolutely do. So w/r/t fantasizing, my priority fantasies are running the B/R Spur all the way out Ridge in addition to one or two N/S heavy rail routes, the extension in the Northeast, crosstown light rail on Washington and Erie, and light rail on Delaware.

IIRC the SSTs were always intended to be temporary and replaced by subways.

Does 2301 JFK have its own thread yet?

Does 2301 JFK have its own thread yet?

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/show...61#post8788761

You... just answered your own question.

Im just saying it's not being explored, planned or anything similar at this time. The #1 thing that needs to happen in that area is to add elevators to the trolley stops.

Didn't want to bump the thread but were there renderings of a downsized version of 2120 Market Street?