Month: May 2016

In the last bit I wrote about the plan for a new subway in south philly using mostly existing rights of way, but how about two new services for North and West Philadelphia that run entirely on existing rights of way?

Mantua, Brewerytown, Strawberry Mansion, Stanton, Fairhill, Juniata, what do all these neighborhoods have in common?

Not that they are all rough neighborhoods.

They are all situated along train tracks, but have no train stations.

What if stations?

Two new metro services on existing tracks. The yellow line is currently in service for Amtrak and SEPTA routes, the right of way is four tracks wide and could easily accommodate additional Metro service with improvements to switching infrastructure.

The blue line does not currently see passenger service of any kind, and on the surface, seems less useful than the yellow line, it has several unique benefits.

The station in Brewerytown will make a huge difference in traffic on 76 by keeping nearby residents off the roads.

The far reaches of the line cutting through Kensington and Port Richmond carry passengers to and from the Frankford El, encouraging transit use in winter months when long walks encourage people to use cars.

The middle section connects the BSS and the MFL, making the system more multi-dimensional. The blue becomes more and more useful as the transit system develops towards a state of grid integrity.

Perhaps the greatest benefits of the EZ metro will be social ones. Both lines serve gentrifying and blighted neighborhoods alike. By expanding mobility you expand the horizons of the cities poorest residents and expand their opportunities to access employment and education.

Whether or not you care about the well being of the city’s poor, raising the bar for the lowest standard of living just a bit will do good to stem the tide of violence that has plagued the city for so long, which will serve to revitalize the city’s urban experience and metropolitanism by quelling the culture of fear that has perpetuated the cyclic decay of the 20th century.

Grey’s Ferry This is where the plan begins.

I used to live in Point Breeze, before moving to Philly I thought a walk from 19th st to Broad st to get on the subway would be an everyday occurrence. I was wrong for a few reasons. First of all, I have a car and a bicycle, so despite my affinity for transit and preference to use it when possible, the subways themselves are not so useful, and transit in Philadelphia really means buses, which are slow and unpredictable and its generally agreed, they just suck. The bus sucks. Everyone knows it.

Besides being noisy and polluting, they are less reliable than rail transit and subject to traffic and stops meaning a private car is invariably faster (unless its stuck behind a bus, then they can be tied. But a determined driver can usually get around one, even by going up a block if neccessary) .

To native Philadelphians that all may seem like common logic, but back in NYC and in many other more populated and/or more developed cities, the primarily grade separated transit system is often much faster than personal vehicles, especially at rush hour.

Grey’s ferry is close to center city, yet it is so far. Despite being a stone’s throw from one of the country’s major urban centers, the people are largely dependent on cars, and those that cannot afford cars have punishing commutes on buses (if you ask me, any commute that involves a bus is punishing.)

So what about those tracks on 25th st? All we need is some rolling stock and a few stations, and maybe the structure could take a bit of shoring up as well while they’re at it, but as it stands the tracks serve as a division, an archetypal ‘wrong side of the tracks scenario’ and also a path of blight and underdevelopment along 25th st itself. Transit could instead turn 25th st into an anchor st for the neighborhood’s revitalization, maybe bring some retail, some jobs, less shootings, who knows.

This proposed service would run from Suburban station westbound to 30th st following the existing path of trains bound for University City Septa, diverging from there to cross the rail bridge into south Philadelphia ,stopping at Grey’s Ferry avenue outside Naval Square before turning onto the elevated right of way along 25th st. Southbound along 25th st the service will make local stops before entering the only new right of way along the route, a proposed underground segment along snyder avenue eastbound from 25th, bringing the line to its end at Broad st, with a connection to that line for game day service. North from 25th.

The line is worth building if for no other reason than to provide a direct route for sports fans from 30th st to the stadiums, facilitating the use of transit for Suburbanites and West Philly residents alike. If the connection were built, some septa trains could even be routed directly from the main line to the stadiums, wouldn’t that be nice, main-liners?

So there you have it, the 25th St El.

Why should Philadelphia, and the United States invest more in rail transit and less in roads?

Because cars, and the infrastructure we’ve built around them, are a disaster. They kill more than 30,000 Americans a year, and maim many times more. They degrade our air quality and contribute to global warming. They are a huge economic burden to the working poor, and the sheer amount of land devoted to storing them has devastated our urban centers and made housing unaffordable.

That is an excerpt from this article which suggest abolishing the interstate highway system altogether. While that may sound radical, he does not actually mean that roads maintenance will cease or that roads will be destroyed, but rather that the system of allocating funds for maintenance is broken, and that highway maintenance should become a state, rather than federal burden. Its not a terrible idea.

If that federal road paving gravy train were to stop paying for infamously wasteful highway projects (think: all those guys standing around doing nothing when you crawl by at 5mph late for work and all that equipment sitting around idle while the road is still closed for the next month) Think about the average construction cost of $25 million per lane-mile. Consider that more oil is utilized each year in maintaining roads than is burned in gas tanks.

Oil is a precious resource, let’s make it go farther by using it in trains. Consider CSX’s claim to move 1 ton of freight 400+ miles on 1 gallon of fuel.  Wonder why our roads are so full of big, relatively inefficient tractor trailers causing a disproportionately high share of traffic and road damage than personal vehicles when we have the largest national rail network in the world.

Consider that it costs $66 billion annually to maintain the interstate highway system, a massive subsidy on automobile travel. Amtrak receives approximately $1.6 billion in subsidy annually, less than 1/40th the subsidy on automobiles. Imagine if the auto manufacturers had to pay to maintain the road system as Amtrak and the freight companies do, and realize how that burden would instantly put the american auto industry asunder.

According to Amtrak’s website, they took in “$3.2 billion in revenue and incurred approximately $4.3” which would indicate a $1.1 billion deficit/subsidy requirement.

If $3.2 billion could be shaved from the budget for the highway system and allocated to Amtrak, tickets could be free.

And if the rest of the burden of highway maintenance were put on to the states, the rest of that money could be loaned to municipalities to build metro systems.

And then we could have roads, which states would need to fund by user fees in fuel taxes, property tax, and/or tolls- or private roads, perhaps funded by some mandated consortium of oil companies and auto manufacturers. Roads with less traffic, less trucks, and less accidents due to less intoxicated drivers, less poor people in improperly maintained vehicles, less people driving who really shouldn’t be but have no other choice, etc.

…And we could have a system of rail transit that is cheaper and faster than driving, which would really make driving pointless for a large percentage of the population. Think PHL -> NYP in 20 minutes. If we had what they have in Japan, that would be our reality. And why shouldn’t we have what Japan has? This is America!

 

 

In part 1 I made a case for massive transit investments within the city, in part 2, I’ll show you just what that aught to look like.

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=1FisD5NuPL6BmRDGcN7s17dtbm5A&w=650&h=480]

This massive transit overhaul involves leveraging existing rights of way in creation of new services for maximum cost effectiveness and rapid implementation. The currently unused city branch becomes a conduit for a new metro and trolleys alike. Tracks currently in use by SEPTA, Amtrak, and or Freight operators will accommodate metro service between new stations. Many SEPTA stations within the city limits will be converted to fare control, allowing the use of tokens or metro cards with in-system transfers to new and existing lines.

Under this plan, no place in urban Philadelphia will be more than half a mile from a subway station, with trolleys in the gaps.

The plan focuses on North Philadelphia and Southwest Philadelphia, increasingly densifying regions with a large number of cars and busses which won’t need to drive to center city with rail transit in place. Suburbanites, this plan is for you, if the inner city starts using transit, you won’t have to get stuck in traffic amongst all the regals and hoopdies.

 

Keep reading the coming segments of “in Transit” for a breakdown of the new services, and their impacts on the areas they serve.

Transit is what makes a city go. If you’re going to have large functioning high density mobile populations, you either need lots of well planned highways and many-lane roads, or you need good public transit.

Philly on the whole, was not designed for the automobile. Its highway systems are less dysfunctional than say Los Angeles or New York, yet they are a textbook- no, make that the textbook example of varied consequences of 1960s highway planning.

I-76 cuts through Fairmount park, severely diminishing its accessibility, transversability, general usefulness, and as a result- usership, of an otherwise largely pristine refuge from the urban expanse of Philadelphia.

I-676, the Vine Street Expressway, serves as the dividing line between North Philadelphia and Center City, and depresses a varying width of surrounding blocks along its length, with frontage on vine street consisting of some residential and commercial property, but a disproportionately high number of underdeveloped lots, vacant lots and structures,  and parking lots for Center City. This is to spite the fact that the mostly below grade highway is about as unobtrusive as it could be short of being completely buried out of sight, with various greenscaping projects along its many overpasses.

Outside of the highways at rush hour, driving in Philly is less limited by the presence of other vehicles (which are much more a threat to your safety than schedule in general) than by the presence of such a great many stop signs and traffic lights. The 25 MPH speed limit can in some instances seem unobtainably fast in this proto-industrial grid land.

Of course, the city was designed with a 5 mile per hour speed limit in mind, and what is now north Philadelphia was untamed wilderness when the since extrapolated gridlines were first laid. For those fortunate enough to live and work a walking life in Center City, that kind of speed might work fine, but if Philadelphia’s population should return to or exceed its historic peak, those of us driving cars around the rest of the city and suburbs may be slowed to a similar pace.

Part of the ‘solution’ Philadelphia has de facto adopted is immobility. Parking problems are prevent many people from doing many things. In general, People just don’t leave their neighborhoods all that much. Instead of thinking about things in terms of parking problems, lets think about them in terms of transit problems. If transit could get you where you need to go as fast or faster than driving, you wouldn’t need to park at all, and nobody would have to drive home from a bar.

So, what might the transportation situation in the birthplace of freedom look like in 2040? If some serious investments in Transit infrastructure are not implemented, the best case is a city encased in gridlock. The worst case would be the city not growing at all, and remaining economically depressed. So let’s plan on the city growing, and make room for it to do so. Let’s plan to have less traffic than we do now, with double the population. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that no amount of traffic flow optimization, highway expansion, or even driverless car technology could accommodate that goal.

The answer is transit, but for a city that is rather accustomed to an automobile lifestyle, the transit system is going to have to be really good, and really affordable to get people to make the switch. Car sharing services are making it easier for people to give up vehicle ownership, but for the more prideful occasional user of the future, perhaps a culture of off-street storage combined with driverless valet technology will come to replace street parking as the preference of the so-enabled. Some people will always need to use a car, the goal should be to make transit competitive with vehicle ownership in terms of reach, speed, and comfort, so that transit will actually become a viable and preferable method of moving about rather than a last resort, as it is considered by so many.