Circuitous and Serpentine

With the recent announcement that they are acquiring 901 Market from Vornado (a New York landlord's only significant Philadelphia holding) for $60m, PREIT has finally completed the onerous task of assembling the Gallery complex into a single ownership structure. To do this, they have had to acquire the former Strawbridge's and to make peace with the City and the RDA. And this had to be done before any significant modernization effort could get underway.

All this time, the Gallery has been declining; I documented its effects last fall. After withstanding the 1980s urban retail exodus, the first chink in its armor was cut in 1989, when Stern's (having replaced Gimbels) pulled out and the space was restructured for Clover and more office space. This became a new equilibrium through the 1990s (similarly-placed Kmart replaced Clover in the space) until 2006, when Macy's closed the flagship Strawbridge's, moving their operations to the Wanamaker Building, in a space that remains significantly undersized relative to shoppers' needs. Note to Macy's: Don't try to cram yourself into a Lord & Taylor space, it just doesn't work.

After 2006, the Gallery's fortunes accelerated on their downward track. Without Strawbridge's to anchor it, the east wing failed; the west wing has remained significantly stronger, but still weak. The profit margin-poor food courts have become the leading customer draw, further isolating activity on the concourse. Nearly all the Strawbridge's space has been turned into offices--State and City offices. And hotel guests at the Loews, Marriot, and Hilton Garden right next door are bussed to King of Prussia as the Gallery further weakens.

Two more announcements: (1) PREIT is planning on pumping $300m into the Gallery, totally repositioning it, and (2) Kmart is not renewing its lease.

This is good news! The Kmart space has long split the Gallery into two separate wings, and half the office space sits unused. Meanwhile, the Gallery is the key to Market East, and strengthening it will also strengthen the corridor.

What PREIT exactly has up its sleeve is still a mystery, but I would like to present my optimal Gallery redesign, based on a modification of the Westfield San Francisco Centre layout optimized for the much more linear Gallery corridor. Westfield, where they undertook a $440m renovation in 2006 completely replacing the interior of the former Emporium department store, also functions as a model for PREIT going forward.

Pink is offices, sky blue inline retail, blue anchors; orange the multiplex, yellow the food court. Brown is Market East's platform level.

In this model, I have retained three anchor spaces. The basement and first floor of Strawbridge's is one anchor space; the 2nd, 3rd, and half the 4th floors of the Gimbels the second, and the extant Burlington Coat Factory the third. In a nod to Chicago's former Carson, Pirie, Scott, I have placed City Target in the remnants of the Strawbridge's space; a Century21 is placed in the Gimbels space, becoming the complex's dominant anchor. A multiplex uses east wing third floor space, while the main food court is relocated to Strawbridge's atrium, the kitchen spaces along the party wall between the Gallery and the original Strawbridge's on the second floor. Cross-floor access is revamped, with the multiplex's main entrance being along the corridor leading to Gallery I's parking garage, and a secondary entrance being from the food court's new "Dining Porch"; the third floor on the bridge across 9th will be eliminated.

The large spaces left behind on the first floor will be subdivided as need be, with an optimal mix mixing medium-size "big boxes" (e.g. Toys "Я" Us, Barnes & Noble, Bed Bath & Beyond, etc.) and inline stores. The goal of this project is to attract budget fashion retail (Forever 21, H&M, Hollister, Aeropostale...) to the upper inline levels, while having casual eateries and at least one secondary anchor face the street. Redevelopment here will complement Girard Square, although the large anchor space in the latter complex does not currently have a tenant.

Finally, a major element of any Gallery project is to activate the three built-in pads. As Hilton now has two nameplates in proximity (Home2, Hilton Garden), I recommend a Hilton proper on the 1001 Market pad site, and rental apartments on the 1000 Filbert; currently, however, there is no good use for the east wing pad site.

Remember above all that the success of the Gallery, both internally and as cityscape, is crucial to the success of Market East as a whole. To make Market East a place people want to go to, the Gallery must be a place people want to go to; to see development on the un- and underbuilt parcels on Market East, Market East must be a place people want to go to.

The Space Between

The 30th Street area is marked by a few very large presences: the railroad and the two universities, Penn and Drexel. Both are putting heaping hands into the pie that is its redevelopment and (hopeful) eventual extension of Center City, particularly as these institutions are something of a bulwark separating it from the neighborhoods beyond.

But Penn does not operate north of Chestnut, and Drexel only operates parcels south of Chestnut facing it. This is resulting in an incipient micro-fault line splitting the two from one another, and handcuffing access along the 100 blocks of 31st and 32nd*.

Why is this important? Well, looking at the Drexel Master Plan, 31st St. is to become a boulevard framing the High Line, and 32nd (already is) a greenway that links the campus together. Neither are extended south of Chestnut. Both should be.

This is increasingly apparent along the further-developed 32nd: Drexel is extending active uses as far as campus borders allow, but the corner of 32nd and Walnut is dominated by a large Penn parking garage--one that turns blank faces (somehow) to each and every single street it faces, which in turn makes the Penn part of this block have a borderlands feel and 'tood--one not at all helped by either the uncovered SEPTA line along the 32nd St. right-of-way or by the way Penn has the street become Rittenhouse Labs' access alley.

But it is also increasingly apparent along 31st, which Drexel wants to turn from another glorified alleyway into a proper street**--in fact, a boulevard--as part of its redevelopment program of the Abbots Dairies, Five Star, and Bulletin sites. 31st Street lies under the High Line and is thus defined by it; once in the Penn hegemony across Chestnut, the 3100 blocks of both Chestnut and Walnut are, however, High Line Park, now redundant with Penn Park and thus a placeholder green space.

Again, therein lies the problem, and along it, a fault line. Penn is currently utilizing its Walnut Street properties relatively marginally; Drexel is only extending its much higher-use plans to Chestnut. Whither between Chestnut and Walnut? Will we see a sharp delimitation between Penn and Drexel's hegemonies?

Penn is currently content with its situation, despite the fact its master plan is all about taking Penn to the river. The most recent update did not take Drexel's improvements or intended improvements across the street at all into account; it still treats Penn as something of a monolithic juggernaut. Instead, the update includes the (albeit also-necessary) still-unbuilt Hill House and building on its parking lot on the 3300 block of Chestnut.

Still, Penn's Walnut Street property has to be considered a landbank, and the best way to integrate it as an urban grid is to integrate Drexel's improvements into its plans. Drexel's current master plan was developed under John Fry's aegis, and as the existing Penn framework was developed when he was there, I don't doubt John Fry still has many friends at Penn.

The solution--already alluded to--is simple. Extend 31st and 32nd St. improvements to Walnut. On 31st, this will involve extending the streetscape the Drexel buildings are beginning to frame across High Line Park, allowing its other section to be redeveloped; this boulevard would have a wedge shape (from ~150 ft. at Walnut to ~100 ft. at JFK) and thus thrust Penn Park into the Drexel hegemony. The tri-level bridge structure at 31st and Walnut would become the boulevard's natural terminus, as 31st would loop around, providing access to 30th St.'s lower level; the greenway would exist at the lowest (31st St.) level, offering a naturally-flowing park connection. A bike ramp to Walnut would also be built, with a traffic light at the intersection allowing for a scramble crossing.

32nd's improvements would be rather more expensive. Here, the major issue is service bay access; this can be dealt with by linking the existing service bays in the Sansom St. bed into a new lower level of 32nd St. On top of this a greenspace like the one across Chestnut can be built, a easy concrete deck with the masonry retaining wall separating SEPTA and the public street becoming a pier for the structure above. Another scramble would be built at the intersection of this and Walnut.

This is only half the solution, though. While we have ensured that both 31st and 32nd have become platforms for development through the 30th St. core, the second half is to capitalize on this offering. Again, what Drexel's doing along 32nd leads the way: Chestnut Square, the new LeBow College of Business, and improvements at both Stratton (a new retail annex) and Disque (a new learning terrace, probably a reskinning) are all evidence of intensive reurbanization.

For the Left Bank, this will likely mean shifting onsite Penn functions to the 32nd St. side as the current (High Line Park-facing) side would become shared service bays and parking entrances. And for Penn, this means (a) axing the 3201 Walnut garage, replacing its spaces in the High Line Park redevelopment, and redeveloping it into a significantly more intensive use, (b) opening Rittenhouse Labs' notoriously blank Walnut Street wall, and (c) offering an active urban use at 3200 Walnut.

More work needs to be done along 31st, where, of six potential streetwalls, only one is fully functional. For Drexel, the Alumni Engineering Labs building needs to be totally rebuilt, as it is aging, architecturally inferior to Stratton, and shows evidences of poor maintenance; a renovation of the (much newer) Center of Automation Technology to provide for a 31st St. street frontage is also recommended. Drexel also intends to build a new Engineering building on the Abbots Dairies site (to replace Hess and supplant Alumni while it's redeveloped, speculatively) and rebuild Drexel Plaza around 3001 Market, extending 31st to JFK.

This leaves under Penn's aegis the High Line Park. As already mentioned, it is now highly redundant with the much newer and larger Penn Park just across the street, and from an aesthetic perspective, its continued existence breaks streetscape too early. Not to mention the spaces in the 3201 Walnut garage are to be buried in the core of this site! The site offers an ideal space for larger, loft-style structures, perhaps as an extension of the Left Bank, but more likely sharing a service alley with it but being de novo construction like Domus or Chestnut Square down the street.

A final note: The south side of this stretch of Walnut hosts the Class of 1923 Ice Skating Rink, one of the most underutilized buildings on Penn's campus as well as the Cira South and Penn Park parking lot landbank sites. Since Penn, like Drexel, owns huge plots of land in this area, the character of their development will reflect the character of development in this area in general.

Someone get John Fry on this.
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* Yes, I know there are stairwells onto both from Walnut, but they are only accessible from the less-traveled north sidewalk, and relatively rarely used. My impression of the area is that that Walnut from 30th to 33rd is a superblock, not an integrated part of the street grid--this is at least in part caused by the lack of safe crossing available at either 31st or 32nd.
** Despite the fact that the Drexel buildings themselves are one of the primary reasons 31st feels so much like an alleyway.

Easy, Medium, Hard

Flourtown. Jenkintown. Ardmore. What do all these places have in common?

They're all four-lane Main Streets in rights-of-way really too narrow to handle them. Too much of the right-of-way is dedicated to making through traffic move fast; too little to ensuring good pedestrian movement. Each of these Main Streets is a historic Main Street with average or above-average place intensity; in each, there is no good reason to sacrifice parking and sidewalk for traffic lanes.

Let's start with Flourtown. Built as a linear village sprawling along Bethlehem Pike, it stretches (and has stretched for at least 150 years) through Springfield Township--its primarily population concentration--from Chestnut Hill to Whitemarsh. It is subdivided into three sections: Erdenheim and Valley Green bookend Flourtown proper.

Now, tell me why on earth is this stretch of Bethlehem Pike four lanes? Certainly, it used to be the south end of the main trade route from Philadelphia to the Lehigh Valley--which is why Flourtown grew in the first place--but that function has since been bypassed by the Fort Washington Expressway, which connects rather into Cheltenham and Ogontz some miles off. A suburban extension of Chestnut Hill, Bethlehem Pike in Flourtown functions as a natural Main Street, albeit one cut in several places by strip malls, and never gets the kind of traffic four lanes should demand. Indeed, in a spontaneous experiment, Aqua has been repairing water pipes under the street, which has halved effective capacity, without inducing onerous traffic conditions.

Its through-road capabilities diminished, it is apparent this stretch of Bethlehem Pike needs instead to capitalize on placemaking to help further develop Flourtown. This can be done by simply getting rid of the two extraneous lanes, narrowing them to parking lanes, and in the four-feet-a-side of added space run either (a) a bike lane, or (better) (b) expand the sidewalk.

If Flourtown was easy, Jenkintown is harder. PA-611 runs along its Main Street, Old York Road, which (due to the region's underbuilt highway system) is the main artery from Philadelphia to points north. Old York Road links Broad Street with Easton Road, the long-distance pike, and is as such still very much a key trade route.

But it is not an insurmountable problem. Like Ambler, Jenkintown is enough a place to hold its own without through traffic--traffic that usually stops not on Main Street, but rather in strip malls beyond (in this case, primarily Willow Grove to Noble). And Easton Road is reasonably straight and meets the city at Cheltenham-Ogontz, allowing 611 traffic use of (very) wide Cheltenham Ave. to Broad St.

...Unfortunately, this passes through downtown Glenside and Roslyn. If the point is to bypass downtown, what use is it to simply bypass one downtown for another? A better route between the two would be Rices Mill Road-Highland Avenue, which would thread between Wyncote and Glenside.

The hardest is dealing with Lancaster Pike, Ardmore's Main Street, in a situation like 611, but with more downtowns still--this would also involve a bypass of Bryn Mawr.

The reason this is more difficult is because of the nature of the Main Line, and because no useful bypass exists for Wayne or Paoli further up. Regardless, a feasible bypass begins at Villanova, and follows Spring Mill Rd. to Montgomery Ave. This route follows Old Lancaster Pike to 54th St., a better one would follow Wynnewood Ave./Rd. back to Lancaster Pike by Lankenau, sucessfully bypassing the heart of the Main Line but leaving the through route intact.

All of these solutions are inexpensive. I am not talking about building new freeways here; rather, I am simply talking about re-signing numbered highways along different routes to allow strong Main Streets better placemaking. Keep in mind that Ardmore, in particular, is a major transit village and a development model for much of the Philadelphia metro.

Feedback Loops

Earlier today I was reading the Atlantic Cities article on whether or not Millennials will stay in the cities they now call home, and through the comments, when I noticed:

What will happen when the baby boomers who are living in suburban mansions they've built over their lifetimes find that their home, which is their biggest if not only financial asset, doesn't have any appeal or demand to younger buyers who prefer city life? If they can't cash in on the value of their home because demand is down it means they can't access what they thought would have been their retirements savings... 

An unasked question? Perhaps, but in the answer we find the driver of a feedback loop: If (a) you can't access your retirement savings, (b) you can't retire, meaning (c) you have to stay in the workforce. Since the workforce isn't growing (in fact, it's shrinking) that means (e) you're taking a job away from a Millennial, which (f) deprives them of the opportunity to buy your home, thereby (g) preventing you from accessing your retirement savings (forcing you to keep working and so on)...

Feedback loops are compounding cyclical phenomena, and what I have just described is a compounding cyclical phenomenon--a feedback loop. Note that this feedback loop assumes the New Geography* status quo, that of continuing unhindered suburbanization (despite the considerable evidences to the contrary).

In the New Geography worldview, living choice is a function of affluence, and suburbanization a function of increasing wealth. But the ideal of increasing wealth assumes unlimited growth--a common tenet of economics, but one that is decreasingly justifiable. Even assuming economic stability (note: not stagnation, although there is no doubt we live in an economically stagnated era), we note that by the rather poor choice of storing your "savings" in your home** you have inadvertently triggered a feedback cycle whose ultimate effects are (a) a devaluing of your home and (b) a mismatch between your home's market and buyers' markets--because, in search of jobs, those who would ordinarily replace you have moved on: in this case, to the cities, because that's where the strongest economic engines are.

Multiply this thousands upon thousands of times and you go from a few people making bad choices to a macroeconomic trigger.

How stunningly naïve New Geography's worldview is! Their entire analytical framework is built on a single aberration in American history, a hopelessly linearized misunderstanding of the rise of American (autocentric) suburbia. To look deeper, which we must, we have to recall that from 1950 to 1990, American cities were locked in a negative feedback loop, one triggered long before their population peaks.

We must understand the Chicago School is a reasonably accurate understanding of prewar urban dynamics, and in all Chicago School models, immigration was the population dynamo. Can you imagine the effect of the Immigration Act of 1924, crowning glory of the nativists? Suddenly, cities stopped having a ready replacement supply for those leaving, as the immigration quota was (and continues to be) far too low for replacement. Worse, the quota failed to solve the problems it claimed to, and produced new ones--illegal immigration and visa fraud wouldn't exist if we didn't have a quota-based immigration system.

Of course, like all feedback loops, the effects wouldn't become apparent for decades. The Great Migration was initially able to hide the dynamo collapse, but it is no coincidence city populations plateaued 1920-1950; worse still, the Great Migration happened at the same time as the nadir of American race relations. Like all poorly-thought-out "solutions", this, unsurprisingly, increased the problems of the city.

The second major trigger of suburbanization was the automobile. Here was this absolutely amazing invention that could whisk you from skyscraper canyons to the Grand Canyon. And, once the opposition movement was quelled (thanks in no small part to astroturfing on a grand scale) it suddenly became--not only ubiquitous, but essential. Every new development after ca. 1930 had garage space--in the beginning, rear-loaded. But cars are the enemy of cities. Everywhere, they push things apart to their own scale, and their scale is gigantic, inhuman. At first, developers applied the living traditions to humanize their streets, their blocks--but to no avail. A pushing-apart is evident beginning in 1930s developments, culminating in exurbia. (There's a reason postwar suburbs are called autocentric.)

What happened is simple. After their fathers were defeated in the great car wars of the first third of this century, the Greatest Generation youth came to adulthood in a society re-forming around the car. And this wondrous new(ish) invention could do great things--but at a price. Worse, those people were all over the place in the places they grew up. What was a fellow of the Greatest Generation to do?

The Baby Boomers were not the first suburban generation--merely the first to grow up there. The Greatest Generation chose suburbia. They were the first "suburban" generation. And in that choice, they set in motion a feedback loop that would eviscerate cities.

In their wake, it wasn't just the middle class shriveling. The collapse of the immigration dynamo three decades previous reared its ugly head: there was no new middle class forming. Tax bases began to hollow out, while at the same time, as a greater percentage of residents remained in poverty, the need for services multiplied. The collapse of cities wasn't just a result of the formation of suburbia--it was as much a result of turning off the immigration spigot. It was the result of rampant social mores that wouldn't begin to change for two more decades. It was the result of an entire finance built around these mores...

And once those gears had begun to move, no matter how many well-intentioned people tried to stop them, they would not stop. The collapse of American cities that has been the defining urban reality for Boomers' lifetimes would further compound on itself by driving Boomers away, ever further away, and would drive their attitudes about the city, the way they viewed the thing.

The nadir of the American city occurred around 1990, and several factors led to the feedback loop stalling--most importantly, bringing the crime rate under control. The maturity of Gen Xers, who did not have the memories the Boomers did, also helped: it was under their purview that urban middle-class populations, particularly around downtowns, finally stabilized and, over time, began growing again. And this was both catalyzed by and further catalyzed the growing idea of downtown as destination: a place for nightlife, fine dining, and culturally important activities***. This middle-class stability, in turn, fuels the only long-term sustainable solution for dealing with what has today become the most pressing urban issue: schools.

It will be on the strength of how well Millennials deal with schools, how much they have the initiative to deal with them, and how much factors-at-large force them to deal with them, that the American city will be said to have stabilized--or will grow again, and explosively.

Schools are at the crux of the Millennial urban feedback loop.
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* No, I will not link to that wretched hive stricto sensu.
** Or, more accurately, your land; the improvements are a constantly depreciating asset--like your car--while the proximity value of the land it's on increases slightly year-over-year; part of the inflation of the housing bubble was an overvaluing of suburban land (combined with a persistent undervaluing of city land).
*** It is also important to note that attempting to isolate elements within a feedback loop has the effect of short-circuiting the whole thing. Arts and entertainment districts fail because of this; "natural" arts and entertainment areas blossom and then are subsumed within the greater system. When they arise, they can be marketed, but they cannot be created out of whole cloth.

Dealing with Zoo

In the comments on the last post, the conversation--inevitably--turned back to Zoo, and I pointed out in the comments that

...Zoo does have a very real time cost, and the only way to ameliorate it is to, well, bypass it. And the only way to bypass Zoo is to build a new Schuylkill crossing.

So, now that we have established how to provide high-speed Airport service and augment the 30th Street approaches; so, now that we have established that the existing alignment is operationally superior and that neither speed nor capacity is an issue south of 30th Street, we must take a look at what is the real crux of Philadelphia's rail transportation problems: Zoo.

Before we begin this discussion, keep in mind that (a) Zoo has unused capacity and (b) of all the speed restrictions to address between New York and Philadelphia, Zoo has, or should have, the lowest priority. What this means is that we can compromise on Zoo and still get good or very good service before needing to actually address it as a problem. There is no way to solve Zoo as a speed problem without concrete, and organization and electronics need to be optimized before concrete goes in. What this means is that rebuilding Zoo is a project with a long-term outlook: 2045 or later. It is also the final element of my program of improvements for HSR in Philadelphia (see here).

The least expensive feasible HSR bypass of Zoo is this one: all bypasses will necessarily involve a new Schuylkill crossing, as the existing interlocking is optimized to provide the fastest north-south path from 30th St. onto the bridge. And due to all paths across the river needing to pass through the park, we can assume that all new sections of the alignment will be wholly underground (else we risk regulatory wrath).

The other--straighter--option would be a tunnel under Lemon Hill and Boathouse Row. Such a tunnel would, however, cancel out many of the savings achieved by abandoning Market East for a time gain of mere seconds, and would necessarily involve disturbing Boathouse Row, which lies on top of where the bored tunnel would meet the immersed-tube one. So we will not pursue this option, and instead pursue the option with the least amount of tunneling. Hence the one I provided.

This tunnel has (hopefully) a geometry offering 150 mph service, significantly faster than the 60 mph service we can optimize Zoo proper for; however, if the curvature requires a 120 mph speed limit, that would be acceptable, as the time difference would be infinitesimal. It also maximizes utilization of existing easements, beginning its approach alongside, and then under, the Schuylkill Expressway, and then curving back under the NEC ROW via an immersed tube crossing the Schuylkill under Girard Ave. It would then have to clear under Fairmount Jct.'s approach before returning to the NEC main in the Strawberry Mansion area. Designed for Velaro-, Zefiro-, AGV-, and N700-type equipment (i.e. HSR EMU trainsets) to the exclusion of all else*, this tunnel would allow for significantly steeper max gradients than elsewhere on the NEC as it is strictly a speed bypass of a complex interlocking.

Its expense--though a fraction of the total Market East tunnel's--combined with the relatively marginal improvements it offers is what cements its low priority; as I have mentioned before, upgrading the intercity network to 25kV 60Hz (with the possible exception of bypassable individual terminal systems, if clearance is an issue in urban cores) will single-handedly generate the most time savings, and be the primary mover chopping PHL-NYP time to an hour. The most expensive PHL-NYP improvement needed is, of course, Gateway, which would double the available Hudson tubes and address the choke points on the New York approach. All other projects on the line, such as what Alon Levy suggested, see time improvements of only a few seconds, which, while important, do not get the bang for the buck that addressing the archaic overhead system and the Hudson capacity issue do.

That said, this is my cost breakdown of my program of improvements, in terms of priority:
1. Zoo Interlocking Improvements
has the highest priority, as it costs the least and offers the most significant immediate speed improvement. Let's peg it at $100 million, tied up mainly in incremental track upgrades and path-sorting improvements.

It's followed by the 
2. Chester Branch HSR Line, including
2a. Hospital Interlocking,
2b. Grays Ferry Interlocking,
2c. Double-Decked Chester Branch Grays Ferry-Bartram's Gardens,
2d. PHL AirTrain**,
2e. Darby Creek Viaduct (Essington Aerial), and
2f. Eddy Interlocking, along with
2g. Local Stations (a) Bartram's Gardens, (b) 63rd St., (c) 70th St., (d) Eastwick, (e) Airport, (f) Tinicum, (g) Essington, and (h) Industrial Hwy., combined with freight improvements
3. 52nd St. Branch Reactivation, including
3a. Brill Interlocking, and
3b. Baldwin Interlocking,
that is, the integrated and interrelated complex associated with bringing HSR to the Airport via the Chester Branch. This would be the most expensive element of the whole package, as the relatively simple and low-cost interlockings are dependent on the higher-cost line optimizations and reactivations. Of particular note is the Darby Creek Viaduct, extending all the way from proposed Eddy interlocking to Tinicum, essentially a second deck over the freight Chester Branch. The cost of this complex would be in the neighborhood of $2 billion, most of which--that is, all of it railroad south of the Airport--would have to be borne by the Market East Tunnel as well (see why I say Amtrak is dangerously lowballing Market East's costs?).

Finally, the lowest-priority element of my program is
4. New Zoo Bypass,
which, as has been detailed earlier in this post, offers a minute or two time savings, but at a cost of around $1b. The Northeast Corridor is neither congested nor time-optimized enough for this cost to make sense at this time, which is why I stress incrementally improving the rest of the corridor in order to make it viable, if it must be done.

Let me repeat myself. The Northeast Corridor is currently neither congested nor time-optimized enough for a Zoo bypass to be economically feasible.
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* Push-pull equipment and motor-based HSR trainsets (like the Acela, KTX-II, and Duck), none of which can achieve the maximum speed EMU-based ones can, would still be routed via the existing Zoo interlocking.
** An automated train along the Airport Line's current fishhook. The Airport Line would be extended to Chester/Wilmington via Tinicum and Essington stations.

30th St. Footnote: Hospital Interlocking

In the main post on this matter, I mentioned that the actual pinch point on 30th St.'s southern approach occurs where it passes under the High Line, as what were clearly the SB approach tracks (let's call them 3 and 4) pinch down from two to one to accommodate a large bridge pier where Track 4 should nominally go. I mentioned that I did not believe this pinch point was an issue, since it was clearly in place during the 1930s and '40s, when more passenger rail was operated than any other time in our history, and does not appear to have ever negatively impacted 30th Street Station operations. So creative dispatching can deal with a three-track approach.

The footnote is that if the inclination to apply concrete to simplify dispatching is pursued, then there is a simple way to ensure a four-track approach at all times into the station: duck Track 4 under Track 3. As (what was) the interlocking between the SEPTA and Amtrak 30th St. approaches is immediately west, or railroad south, of the High Line pinch point (see here), Track 3 can sort at the east end, and Track 4 at the west end, of this area^.

University Ave. is where it gets complicated. As it turns out, there are only four available passenger tracks across it, and split onto two different girder structures to boot. It's fairly apparent the PRR originally had at least an at-grade interlocking to sort here (a tower is still in place), but Amtrak and SEPTA, through agency fiefdom, have completely disassembled it, each crossing University Ave. on its own girder.

Fixing this so that Tracks 1-2-3-4 are N-N-S-S at University Ave.--important for implementing the proposed Chester Branch interlocking, not far to the west--will require agency cooperation as well as figuring out how the SEPTA NB track can fly over Amtrak's and still wind up at ground level to service University City station. This will be easier if we can replace the girder so that it has five tracks of space to work with, but let us try to deal with current site congestion to create "Hospital" interlocking.

This map shows how Hospital works assuming a Track 4 duckunder: Track 3 NB of Hospital becomes Track 4 SB of it, and the station throat interlocking would need to take it into account. Accepting the pinch point makes it far easier, as Track 4 can simply diverge railroad south of the Track 5 flyover (West Chester Branch EB). In either case, however, the need to end the incline at University City's railroad-west end will likely require the 30th St. approach tracks to depress slightly to make clearance; this depression will translate into a lengthening of the Track 3/4 incline between South and Walnut, with its technical limit station throat limits^.

Hospital Interlocking is the east half of a pair of interlockings intended to sort between the NEC, Chester Branch, and West Chester Branch railroad south, and 30th St.'s two approaches railroad north. The freight High Line/Chester Branch interlocking does not interact with these two in any way, and so will not be considered aside from noting that Chester Branch tracks 1 and 2 are 20 feet directly beneath two* CSX tracks.

Edited to add: One of my concerns about the Track 5 flyover was the lack of distance between the end of the University City station and the NEC main (Tracks 2 and 3). A quick check revealed, however, that there is 500 feet distance between those two points, which allows a flyover to just make an 18-foot girder clearance, 20 ft track clearance, at a 4% grade.
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^ Addendum 9/20: Another possibility that occurred to me after I completed this post is to simply run Track 4 on the surface and Track 3 underneath it. That does away with the excessively complicated wayfinding necessary in what I had first described.
* The High Line has the capacity to be a two-track main; the second track is disused. This exercise assumes that freight traffic growth allows NS and CSX to rebuild the second track and CSX to run a two-track line from its main to it.

30th St. Approach Capacity?

Professional transportation engineer Liam left me this comment on my previous post, The Alternative to the Market East Tunnel:

What would be your response to criticisms that you're overlooking capacity issues at 30th Street? There are only two tracks headed south from the station, after all; the line doesn't open up to 4 until the Regional Rail tracks come in from University City.

I think it's a manageable constraint, but there's definitely more going on here than just Zoo.

This is true. Agency turf wars are a continuing problem, and have resulted, more than once, in extraneous concrete dedicated to eliminating versatility and redundancy previously built into the system--Zoo is a good example of this, where no fewer than half of the paths through the interlocking have been removed. And when the Market East tunnel was first proposed, a popular theory was that Amtrak didn't want to to have to share space with SEPTA anymore (never mind the fact they have different concourses, and different platforms with different approaches)...To put it another way, the Market East tunnel, like lobotomizing Zoo, is a concrete solution to an organizational problem.


Now we move to the real meat of Liam's specific question. There are two questions embedded within this query: (1) how do we increase the capacity of 30th St.'s south approach, and (2) (what he assumes the answer to is yes) does the 30th St. approach present a capacity problem?


The answer to (1) is that only 2/3rds of the approach's capacity, at its narrowest point, is currently in use. The ROW pinch occurs under the High Line overpass right before the Amtrak and SEPTA approaches meet; under this overpass there is room for three tracks, two of which are currently in use. Those two were originally the northbound approach; the southbound approaches have been converted into two spur tracks. Originally, they merged just before the High Line underpass and would have merged again where the upper- and lower-level approaches met, resulting in four passenger-dedicated tracks at the University Ave. overpass, tracks which would then sort into NEC tracks 1-4 and the two West Chester Branch ones.


So we can assume that--if full capacity can be reactivated--30th St.'s south lower-level approach is (technically) three tracks at its greatest pinch, and with smart dispatching (effectively) four tracks. Plenty of capacity, especially since through trains really only need four or six tracks (three platforms), half the station's current capacity (five platforms, ten tracks).


Of greater concern is the north approach, which runs straight into one of the most complex pieces of rail infrastructure in the United States: Zoo Interlocking. Remember in this discussion that the historical owner of this infrastructure, the Pennsylvania Railroad, maintained two different paths for any possible movement through the interlocking, and that there are six feeds into it (Main Line, Northeast Corridor, Reading interchange, High Line, Upper Station Approach, Lower Station Approach). For our purposes, that means the PRR maintained a four-track north lower approach, only half of which is now in use*--this is what I mean when I say Zoo has been lobotomized.

The simple solution of reconnecting several switches, and putting the Schuylkill River bridge's fifth track back in, grows the capacity of this, the busier side of the station.

Now we can address the second question. Passenger rail growth will demand capacity improvements, indubitably, but 30th Street Station was one of the last prewar passenger rail termini built in the United States, and as such, was engineered with a far greater capacity than e.g. the original layouts of any of the stations Broad Street Station was built to replace. Its approaches were state-of-the-art and able to handle 1940s-scale rail traffic without a hitch; it's very unlikely that the approach tracks within the existing PRR footprint (not all of which, remember, are currently in use) will hit "concrete" capacity limits even in the most optimistic future traffic projections (such as those Corey Best produces).


That said, as with any finite structure, there certainly is a capacity ceiling--but the traffic scale one would expect near it, which we are currently far from--would be able to justify even the most futuristic infrastructure improvements--much as the Chuo Shinkansen has become viable largely because traffic demand between Osaka and Tokyo has surpassed every capacity ceiling the Tokaido Shinkansen has to offer. Then, and only then, would a Market East tunnel become feasible.

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* The current situation offers two possible southbound approach tracks, but only one northbound one, through the interlocking. Only one of the southbound approaches, however, shows high-grade maintenance.

The Alternative to the Market East Tunnel

I have already spoken about my criticism of Amtrak's proposed Market East tunnel, a cogent enough piece Alon Levy relies on it and The Economist has quoted from it--but I have yet cogently articulated what the alternative is.

Part of it is, it's simple. Really simple. But it's complex. It's not complex in the way the Market East tunnel proposal is--that is, as an engineering challenge--but rather as an organizational one--that is, getting the right players at the table talking the right tones.

There are two, and exactly two, transportation elements to the Market East tunnel proposal; everything else is highly speculative land-use development claims. These are to (1) connect regional/high-speed service to Philadelphia International Airport, and (2) bypass Zoo Interlocking, which, for this proposal, is seen as one of the corridor's major pinch points.

My response to Zoo to begin with. It is true it is a pinch point, but a necessary one. There is no better way to provide a wye junction between the Northeast and Keystone Corridors, two high-speed lines, without egregious tunneling and investment. Much better, then, to simply optimize Zoo for 100 kph (~60 mph) traversal, particularly since one goes directly from it into the 30th St. yards and station throat.

Certain transit proponents claim Zoo traversal takes 45 minutes; this is demonstrably false: a much more accurate time penalty can be ascertained by comparing the commuter rail times from North Philadelphia to 30th Street and North Broad to Market East, respectively, to one another. This is approximately four minutes, and for local services; express trains can run the same route more quickly. The reality is that, for the fastest services (the Acela and Northeast Regionals), the time penalty is more like 45 seconds, and can be reduced to 30 with an optimized interlocking. Besides, there are improvements elsewhere on the corridors that can ameliorate Zoo's impact--switching to modern 25kV 60MHz constant-tension catenary (the most advanced currently available), for example, will effectively double speed limits throughout the corridor.

So, because (a) it's a junction between two high-speed lines, (b) no form of restructuring is economically feasible, and (c) far greater speed (and thus time) gains are available through a far less expensive project, I urge ignoring the, er, urge to bypass Zoo. Keeping structures like Zoo in place are one of the major compromises one has to make when implementing a high-speed system on top of an existing medium-speed one, as the Italians, French, Germans, Belgians, Dutch, Koreans, Russians, and (soon) British have all found out*.

The second problem this proposal purports to solve is bringing intercity rail to the Airport. The proposed route would break off the existing NEC in the Eddystone area, follow I-95 or the Chester Branch into the Airport area, provide a new station, and then delve under the Schuylkill and the tunnel, coming back out around Frankford Junction--but this is not really the most optimum way to bring passenger rail there.

The Chester Branch is arrow-straight. Don't be fooled by the SEPTA line, which comes off the NEC following the 52nd St. Branch and then curves onto the Chester Branch; look on Google Maps. It diverges from the NEC right under the Grays Ferry bridge and extends past the Airport with no noticeable curvature whatsoever. It continues this pattern, though now with minimal curvature to avoid geographic obstacles, all the way to Eddystone. SEPTA's line makes use of a part of this alignment, but to put it bluntly, it is about as tailored to high-speed rail as you're going to get. Ignoring it is thus foolhardy.

The big issue the Chester Branch has is its mixed traffic. This comes in two flavors: local traffic to Chester (well, duh) and through traffic using its uppermost mile as a cutoff linking the CSX (ex-B&O) main with the (ex-PRR) High Line; this latter section is pretty important for double-stacks originating from the Ports of Baltimore and Wilmington, particularly as the Charles Street Tunnel down in Baltimore and Fairmount Tunnel up here are too squat for them.

This is, however, mostly an organizational issue that can be solved with limited, but judicious, application of concrete (and concrete needed to provide grade separations, anyway). In this case, this involves (a) grade-separating the line through Essington and Tinicum--this will involve an aerial due to the shallow water table and Darby Creek crossing--as well as flying over Industrial Highway to meet the NEC (the existing freight line would be retained underneath this aerial), (b) re-activating the rather more circuitous 52nd St. Branch for freight traffic with a new junction with CSX about a football field north of the apex of the existing SEPTA flyover, a reactivation which would service industrial development along Essington Ave. and parts of the Industrial Hwy. near the Penrose Ave. bridge, and any potential Port expansion around the mouth of the Schuylkill, and (c) a double-deck railroad between the CSX line and the High Line, with the passenger section underneath and the freight section on top. At the NEC, the freight line would veer onto the High Line right-of-way and the passenger one would integrate with the NEC main via either flyovers or duckunders.

While this slate of improvements is not insignificant, keep in mind that the Essington/Tinicum aerial would be necessary anyway, due to the Darby Creek crossing, and that each improvement utilizes existing rights-of-way with technically minimalist solutions for handling passenger/freight traffic separation and the grade separation necessary for true high-speed rail. Costing isn't too hard: I do not believe double-stacks move along the Chester Branch and so undercutting shouldn't be necessary, and the two-level box structure between the NEC and CSX puts Plate K clearance (the double-stacks) up on the highest level. Total costs shouldn't be more than $100 million to $250 million.

There are significant operational advantages to this alignment. Firstly, trains not calling at the Airport can use the existing NEC alignment to bypass it completely, which means that the line can be (re)built to handle lower capacity than the tunnel proposal (which would shove all trains through the Airport station, whether they stopped there or not).

It also offers a new local alignment to Chester, allowing for stops at Tinicum and/or Essington, as well as 70th, 63rd, and Bartram's Gardens in the city. The Airport fishhook can then be repurposed into an AirTrain-type setup.

And finally, there are concrete land-development advantages.

Biggest of these is that the 52nd St. Branch alignment offers freight access to a large swampy area across the Schuylkill from the Navy Yard--an area which, with the completion of the current Port expansion (called Southport, I believe), will become the next logical place for a new Port terminal to handle growing Northeast port traffic. A natural terminus, it lies between a large industrial area and the Airport, and would make the Navy Yard a natural place to handle the Port's administrative (office) functions, lying, as it would, between two of Port's three largest termini.

More importantly for passengers, local stops can be leveraged for transit-oriented development. This is particularly useful around 63rd and 70th Sts. and Bartram's Garden.

Finally, with the speed boost from catenary modernization, PHL would lie about an hour from Midtown--the same time, coincidentally, that JFK is on the subway. Instead of attempting to use less and less tenable suburban airports to handle NYC's congestion, PHL's roomy international terminus can provide necessary space.

This is the alternative vision I have: Airport service provided along a natural corridor, Zoo improved inasmuch as is geometrically feasible, and none of that asinine Market East tunnel proposal--which, I may remind you, would be a bored tunnel through alluvial soil under the water table in a heavily-urbanized area, which can be read as f(x) = Extreme Cost Overruns. There is no way on this earth, or any other, that that project will cost "merely" $3 billion, as Amtrak is attempting to sell us on; peg it more between $10 and $15 billion, and that is at its technical cheapest: a 300%-500% cost increase.

By contrast, my proposal will add in reasonable intercity PHL service for $250 million (note m) on top of the flat cost of modernizing the NEC--that is, catenary conversion plus the costs of Gateway and the Great Circle tunnels under the Hudson and in Baltimore, respectively.
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* The Japanese, Taiwanese, and Spanish high-speed networks are all of a completely different gauge standard than the existing systems, and so don't run into this issue. China, meanwhile, has the resources and attitude to ignore this issue.

Cost-Shifting on the Boulevard

Looking through the Lower (Near) Northeast Master Plan, I noticed that the early-2000s study for a Boulevard subway cost $3.2 billion, and was tabled due to cost.

And then I looked at the render, and it hit me that it doesn't need to be that much, at least on the public-transit end of things.

How so?

A subway is merely one of the (rather long) list of improvements the Roosevelt Boulevard desperately needs. For somebody who is normally very pro-highway-privatization and anti-highway-investment-other-than-maintenance, it may come as a surprise that I agree that the middle (express) lanes of the Boulevard very, very desperately need to be sunken out of the way; because it acts effectively as something between a malformed boulevard and a surface interstate (though, I hasten to add, not as much a true stroad), the Boulevard has a deplorable safety record. Indeed, multiple Boulevard intersections are regularly among the country's 10 least safe.

And because the Boulevard is a 4x3--a 12-lane surface road with three medians (four cartways of three lanes each), it is hell for pedestrians to cross, except at the few intersections where the express lanes have already been depressed (e.g. Cottman). Which leads to abler pedestrians pushing the light. Which leads to accidents between them and drivers (particularly on the express section)...

The Boulevard is one of the few places where "improvements" will actually improve things. Safety on it is that bad, due mainly to it retaining a 1930s-era design.

The only effective way to make it safer is to depress the express lanes, so they act as a true road, and the local lanes restructured to act as an, er, boulevard.

In the act of depressing the Boulevard's express lanes, you'll also create a rather large, rather wide median. (About 40 feet.) A rather lard, rather wide, rather transit-ready median. In doing so, we export the costs of prepping the land (i.e. the median) to the highway department.

And this, in turn, sinks--by quite a lot--the necessary cost of developing a Boulevard subway.

Here's what I believe is the optimal phasing:
Phase 0: sinking the express lanes, incidental prepping of the transit median, highway expense
Phase 1: extending along this median to Cottman
Phase 2: extending from Cottman to Bustleton or Byberry

...And another thing: By sinking the express lanes and providing good transit in the median, we can also free up the space above for an alameda with a bikeway in the middle. It wouldn't be cheap, sure, but the potential's certainly there.

And with the middle express lanes sunk out of sight, out of mind, the heart of the Northeast would start feeling much more pedestrian-friendly.

Viva la 2012 Zoning Code!

Philadelphia's new Zoning Code came into effect today.

What does that mean?

Most superficially, all of the zoning designations in the city have changed. R-10a is now RSA-5, C-2 is now CMX-2, and so forth.

But there are other important changes. The biggest of these is that the Zoning Code is now contextual.

What does that mean? Think of it as a compromise between Euclidean and form-based zoning--while the theoretical structure of the code is still Euclidean, the contextual zoning means that form-based elements are taken into consideration. RSA-5 is essentially each of the three or four different rowhouse designations under the old code mixed into a new designation; the contextual element means that new construction will ideally match existing construction elsewhere on the block (i.e. have the same setbacks, etc.). But large deviations from the norm trigger design review and (probably) rejection.

In short, the code still doesn't allow you to build a commercial addition to your residential property by right (unless your neighbors already have such additions), which is a shame, largely because while it is much less rigidly Euclidean than the old code, it still doesn't allow for the flexibility of use a fully form-based code would.

On the flip side, the new code has made densifying existing commercial corridors significantly easier. CMX-2.5, now the standard on most commercial corridors, allows for mixed-use development up to 55 feet high. 55 feet is by no means an arbitrary number: most major Philadelphia streets are either 50 or 60 feet wide, which means that CMX-2.5, when applied to its utmost, allows commercial streets to achieve a 1:1 street width-building height ratio*.

This does not bode well for midcentury commercial areas, largely because the Philadelphia variant of googie favored single-story commercial structures--essentially, strip malls even if they fronted the sidewalk. We need to undertake documentation efforts, and ensure that an outstanding handful are preserved--primarily in communities where supply and demand are already well-balanced--as well as individual examples that are exemplars of the style (such as Stein Florist at Frankford and Princeton). In this way we can retain a record of the appearance of the built environment without impeding redevelopment and densification of our commercial cores where they are most needed (e.g. along Frankford and Castor).

While the code ensures Center City can be denser and more of a skyscraper canyon than ever before with "Super" CMX-5**, it still underzones other important commercial nodes, leaving them at CMX-2.5 where a FAR-based zoning would be more appropriate. Chelten, Front and Girard, 52nd St., and Bridge-Pratt are exemplars of this issue; all are (or were) crucial commercial centers; all should (probably) be bumped up to CMX-4 (500 FAR, or five stories by right); the main difference is the lack of height limit on the latter. Germantown and Chelten is an example of a cluster of taller buildings that such an upzoning would allow emulation of. Likewise, first steps are being made towards TOD identification and implementation (although that is something that needs to be hashed out in the neighborhood plans).

With parking requirements (one of the more insidious auto subsidies), the Code, again, shows steps towards more current understandings of the role, but not a willingness to fully embrace current understanding. Rowhome parking requirements have been cut out entirely, but larger residential structures still require them, and base commercial requirements have not been changed at all (still at one spot, i.e. 250 ft², per 1000 ft² of commercial space). On the flipside, TOD, car sharing, bike sharing, etc., bonuses quickly, and drastically, reduce them or chop them out entirely. Good for Center City, bad for the Northeast.

I am unsure if RSA-5 is also height-contextual; I believe it partially is, due to 3rd stories on mostly 2-story blocks now needing to be stepped back. Comments have cleared this up.


...Some initial impressions on the new Zoning Code.
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* Or 2:1 on Frankford and Castor Avenues in the Northeast.
** "Super" CMX-2.5 has a base FAR of 1600. For comparison, the Empire State Building has a FAR of almost exactly 3300, or double that.

The Philly Bus Grid

This image shows the primary mass transit grid in the City of Philadelphia. Key: Blue = north-south, red = east-west, yellow = north-south parts, east-west parts, green = trolley network (as it is an integral part of the grid).

The map has been abstracted, so that bus routes are only one line, in order to retain some legibility. Source file here, to download as a KML and play with.

Some changes have also been made to the bus routes:
17 and 33 have been merged, as they are naturally the same route.
30 and 31 have also been merged, as it turned out they were a hot mess with really could only be resolved by merging them together.
The 7, 64, and a couple of others have had some particularly silly bumps straightened out (though with the level of abstraction, it's hard to tell).

With this working model of the grid, we can also see some issues to fix (with varying degrees of difficulty):
1. Concomitant with the model of splitting the 23, the 16 and 23's southern half can be merged, roughly from Germantown and Lehigh.
2. The 43 and (revised) 30 brush each other, but branch in opposite directions. Merging these two routes together, allowing the branched routes to be handled elsewhere on the grid, can further streamline operations (much like with the 17 and 33).
3. Juniata Park is lacking N-S grid connections; the 89 handles some of it, but not all, and violates the grid. What's really needed is for routes along Castor (an extension of the one to Rhawnhurst?), G, and probably ca. D, as well as a revamping of the 15 and 25 so that the former can better serve Port Richmond and the latter does not have several major turns in it.
4. Oft derided because of its low ridership, the 25 is, in fact, very important to the grid.
5. A N-S link is necessary in Grays Ferry (but the 64 bump is insufficient). Extending the 79 northward may help, especially if it can be to the 40th & Girard turnaround. Alternatively, the G can be revamped and a 30th-to-Oregon "L"-shaped route may be considered.
6. The 7 is unnecessarily duplicative, with the G along Oregon and the 48 north of Market. Shifting the 7 to 25th north of Market would greatly improve overall access.

What else can you see in the grid? Strengths? Weaknesses?

"Super CMX-5"

The new Comprehensive Plan has a new subdistrict of CMX-5 (old C-5), called "Super CMX-5", which has a FAR of 1600% (allowing 16 stories with 100% lot coverage) along the Market Street corridor in Center City.

...This is around 2/3 of the existing C(MX)-5 designation, already concentrated in Center City.

It makes sense to think of it more as a new ceiling zoning designation (CMX-6?), which allows us to start thinking about expanding C(MX)-4 and -5. These significantly denser zones allow us to upzone around subway and Regional Rail stations, especially in extant commercial centers, thereby offering (obliquely) a tool to create and leverage TOD.

In other words, "Super CMX-5" (=CMX-6 for all useful intents and purposes) allows "normal" CMX-5 to be applied at e.g. Broad and Spring Garden, Broad and Washington, Broad and Girard, Broad and Lehigh, Broad and Erie, Front and Girard, and so on. It also allows CMX-4 to be applied along Chelten Ave. and 52nd St., and around Frankford, Olney, and (maybe) Wissahickon Transportation Centers.

Instead of concentrating all density in Center City, it allows us to spread it along our mass-transit system, thereby creating more use, more ridership, and (eventually) a tool for developing and re-developing along new mass-transit corridors.

(Which brings up the issue of demand- vs. development-oriented transit, but still...)

Putting Henry on a Diet

Henry Avenue is too wide. Drivers treat it like a speedway with traffic lights, and people keep getting run over and killed along it.

I've never seen it congested. Traffic flows along it, barely any stacking, and speed is a problem.

There's a bridge being renovated between Monastery and Dupont; half the driving lanes have been taken out of service. The verdict? The merge movement's confusing, speed's gone down while throughput remains the same.

It's like one of Marohn's spontaneous experiments. Henry's functioning less like a mini-Schuylkill and more like a street between Monastery and Dupont. More than anything else, it proves that Henry only needs two lanes.

So what to do with the rest of the space?

My suggestion: turn it into a busway, like the one in Ardmore. Integrate a bikeway into it as well; it'll offer a very bike-friendly resource to match the one at the bottom of the hill. Put a median between the two, and fill it with some nice tall trees. Put some proper bus stops in--more than just signposts.

Make the only intersections on the busway the ones at Dupont and Leverington--that would be where the 32 exits it, and the 27 enters it.

There. Now we'd have a much slower, saner, safer street; some proper bike infrastructure; and a good separated busway. And all in the footprint of today's Henry Ave.

Not bad, eh?

Returning to Philadelphia2050

As time goes by, ideas metastasize and further develop. Philadelphia2050, always intended to be a model long-term transit infrastructure plan, is no different. It's not like my ideas are preserved in amber.

Remember, the core point of this is not (and never has been) that this is the optimal mass-transit network for the City of Philadelphia. Rather, the point is that we need to think of mass transit infrastructure in terms of a necessary utility. SEPTA's bus network, while extremely legible (once you figure out the system core, and they don't help with that) and frequent, is hardly the optimal solution for mass transit in an urban core routinely averaging ~20,000 people per square mile. Rail solutions are the only way to further optimize service.

The point of Philadelphia2050 is to describe a model of what optimized mass transit would look like for the city; to develop a model that can then be used to develop a funding scheme (à la L.A.'s 30/10, a funding scheme to develop 30 years' worth of transit in a decade). The L.A. example is especially poignant, since they, like us, never properly invested in a high-quality mass transit core, and as the PRT proved back in 1907, mass transit must be a public expenditure, a utility: it would drive any private concern to bankruptcy, but it must be provided, in order to ensure intraurban access and mobility, especially at the densities needed to maximize resource efficiency on the environmental scale.

Anyway, here's the map.

This map shows light and heavy mass transit in the City and (in heavy rail's case), across the Delaware.
Pastel blue is the MFL.
Orange is the BSL and constituent branches.
Black is the Loop core and branches.
Green is the Subway-Surface trolley system.
Royal Blue is the Outer Loop and constituent branches.
Red is the Delaware Avenue line and a branch via the former North Penn Branch.
Purple are heritage lines.

Changes:
1. With the Swampoodle changes proposed, there is no reason for both Chestnut Hill lines to utilize the Regional Rail tunnel. For this reason, the former Reading Chestnut Hill branch (Chestnut Hill East) is proposed to be converted to heavy rail, saving on (among other things) the cost of bringing a TBM straight up Germantown Ave.
2. The Ogontz Branch has been extended up Cheltenham Ave. to Easton Ave.: this better services upper Stenton and Ivy Hill (while the Chestnut Hill East line services the lower portions of these neighborhoods).
3. A long-term plan to extend the Chestnut Hill-Society Hill Line to the Morrestown Mall via Kaighns Ave. Prior to this happening, the Kaighns Ave. route can be developed as a "light heavy" line linking to the existing River Line way in downtown Camden.
4. Major changes have been made in the way the rail network interfaces with the Airport. Ignoring the existing (and feasible only when hell freezes over and the sun burns out) Market East proposal, the optimal HSR path to access the Airport utilizes the (ex-Reading) Chester Branch from a new junction with the NEC at Crum Lynne to the Chester Branch interchange with the NEC up by Bartram's Gardens. SEPTA can (and would) be expected to alter its routes to take advantage of this new alignment, allowing local stops in e.g. Essington, which allows the current Airport Line routing to be converted into an Airport people-mover or (better) an extended BSL terminus.
5. The Lindbergh Bvld. light rail has been extended down 84th to terminate at Eastwick Station, instead of its originally-planned Heinz terminus.
6. Light rail via Health Sciences Dr. and Civic Center Bvld. has been abandoned. Instead, Baltimore Ave. is now interlined between the existing 34 and a new Angora-Queen Village light-rail line.
7. The Washington Ave. light rail link has been moved from the Grays Ferry bridge to the 34th St. one.
8. Light rail can be added along American St. and the former North Penn Branch ROW from Northern Liberties to Fern Rock.

The largest problem with the current alignment structure occurs around the La Salle campus, believe it or not. I've resisted linking Ogontz to Broad via Stenton because of its inferior La Salle access, an issue the CHE Fishers (now closed) and Wister stops do little to obviate, despite the latter's paper proximity to campus, but the Ogontz alignment, south of Olney Ave., is most definitely overkill. It occurs to me the optimal move is to find an alignment that runs through Wayne Jct. and links to Broad via Germantown. Maybe.

The next-largest problem concerns utilizing 19th St. north of Girard. The distance between Broad and 33rd is 19 blocks; a more central location would thus be 22nd or 24th.

Finally, it occurs to me some more light-rail crosstowns may be needed. Allegheny and Lehigh, for example, host some of the most profitable bus lines with the highest farebox-recovery ratio.

What To Do With The City Branch: Return It To Transit

(Author's note: Ed. put the "...As Light Rail" at the end of Hidden City title.)

Reading Crusader model from Reading Terminal Market display | Photo: website Found Connections

The ViaductGreene proposal being entertained is for a sunken linear park between the Rodin Museum and 13^th Street, where it would meet the Reading Viaduct (at Noble). This proposal has proved controversial. In fact, the majority of readers who commented on the Hidden City report announcing a planning grant for the linear park were strongly opposed to the idea.

What are its problems?

First off, it doesn’t fill an immediate need for parkland, the way the Reading Viaduct does. The Callowhill neighborhood doesn’t have any parks. By contrast, the small Matthias Baldwin Park at 19th and Hamilton ... Read more at Hidden City Philadelphia.

A Dialogue on the City Branch

(Author's note: This was originally intended to be an apology for City Branch rail transit on Hidden City. Its length, as well as the excessively technical discussion the dialogue form led to, led to its replacement.)

Controversy embroils the City Branch, my friend. An advocacy group has proposed converting it into a sunken park, which has met with considerable public skepticism and resistance.
Why the resistance? It's because, unlike the Reading Viaduct, the City Branch is still a viable transportation asset. Viable transportation assets which get converted into parks, tend not to get converted back again.

How do you mean, it's a "viable transportation asset"?

Think about the area between Vine St. and Spring Garden St., west of 8th St. Crystallize it in your mind. Think about the giant elevated blob east of Broad, an omnipresent blight in Callowhill. That's the Reading Viaduct. It was built as part of the 9th St. Branch, the Reading Terminal's station lead. A little over a mile remains, from Vine north to where the Regional Rail tunnel cutoff rejoins this branch, just north of Spring Garden St.

This structure has a kind of "Y" or "V" shape, with two branches diverging where it crosses Callowhill (between 11th and 12th). The right-hand leg runs northward--that's the 9th St. Branch proper. The other leg curves west until it parallels Noble St., which it meets between 12th and 13th. Both Noble St. and the line cross over 13th, but Noble proceeds to elevate to the level of Broad St., which is an overpass over the line.

It is here the cut proper begins.

From Broad west to 22nd, the line extends as a sunken industrial lead along the former course of Noble St.; at 22nd it curves north and enters the Fairmount Tunnel, where it interchanged with what is today CSX's Philadelphia Subdivision--but was originally the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O). Less than a mile further north, the B&O ended at a wye called Fairmount Junction, where it interchanged with two other railroads, the Reading (RDG) and Pennsylvania (PRR)*. This wye still exists, just west of Brewerytown.
Back in the days when the area between Vine and Spring Garden hummed with industry and activity, the City Branch was the freight terminal lead. The Terminal Commerce Building, that giant beige-bricked behemoth across the street from the Inquirer Building, was the Reading's primary freight terminal as much as the Terminal was its passenger terminal. Between four and six tracks wide and busy 24/7, the City and the railroad collaborated to separate the traffic from the streets late in the 19th century. A section was roofed over to produce the Fairmount Tunnel and Pennsylvania Ave. above; the remaining dry cut is the City Branch.

OK, history is cool and I get you're a nerd, but wouldn't this mean that the line isn't a "viable transportation asset" anymore? There are, after all, hardly any industries left!

Well, yes, there aren't any industries left along this line. That's why it's dormant. There are a lot of other industrial spurs in this city whose industry either dried up or switched to trucks--the North Penn Branch down American St., the Oxford Rd. Branch into the Near Northeast, the old Fairhill and  Frankford Branches, the 54th St. Branch in deep Southwest Philly, and others--they all lie abandoned or dormant, their customer base (usually one or two major ones, but occasionally a plethora of minor ones) gone. They are relics of a time when factories and mills were large multistory loft structures served by rail--nowadays those factories are single-story suburban groundscrapers served by truck.
What has happened to those old loft industrial structures? They have been demolished for redevelopment, or rehabilitated--frequently into apartments and condominiums. What was once a place to work is now a place to live. People today live alongside the City Branch Cut, where sixty years ago they worked. And servicing communities is the basis of strong ridership.

So it sounds like you're not talking about like a railroad-y kind of rail?

Indeed I am not. I'm talking about urban rail. Light rail or heavy rail.

As opposed to...?

A park. A proposal has been making the rounds to convert both the Reading Viaduct--the elevated structure, remember--and the City Branch Cut--the sunken one--into a park. Remember what I said before? It's okay to turn the Reading Viaduct into a park, or, more accurately, it will be in a few years, as Callowhill starts to really fill in. It would be a beautiful attraction and a jewel of the city.

But the City Branch Cut, it's not. Sunken parks don't work. We've tried them before. Remember what happened to Dilworth Plaza?

It filled up with homeless, didn't it? People avoided it, didn't they? It was pretty, but it sure wasn't safe.

Exactly. And we're going about tearing it apart and rebuilding it to get rid of that sunken plaza, turning it into a proper waiting room for the subway, the El, and the trolleys. Elevated park areas may work, especially if well looked after, but sunken ones, as a rule, fail. And that's what a lot of people are worried about.
But what I heard about the sunken park, a bikeway would be routed through it.

That's the proposal. But it would duplicate a bikeway about to be installed on Spring Garden St. That bikeway would be easy to find and to navigate to, and consequently more heavily used than a sunken one well away from major streets.

So I take it you're not enamored with this park idea.

Nope.

Talk to me a little more about urban rail, then.

Well, poor transit access to the Art Museum area has been a recognized weak link in our city's transportation network for a while now. I'm not talking about the Museum proper, remember--I'm talking about the neighborhoods around it. Phlash serves the Museum proper, but it doesn't serve the neighborhoods--so whenever you hear the comment that Phlash serves the needs at hand please realize it's fallacious.

There are several buses that serve the Art Museum area: the 7, 32, 33, 38, 43, and 48 right off the top of my head. Without exception, these buses are packed to the gills as they pass through the area, during any time of the day. They head to or through Center City (except the 43, which links Parkside and Fishtown along Spring Garden), and they all extend to neighborhoods deeper into the city.

So the need is for a route which links the area with Center City, and which provides relief for the overburdened local buses.

Precisely! There are two ways to do this: light rail, or a metro.

What are the differences?

Light rail would lay tracks and trolley wire, and would use the trolley tracks along  11th-12th and Girard to access Center City and points west (the Zoo is popular, and there's a turnback loop at 40th Street), respectively. A metro would lay tracks and a third rail, and connect into the Ridge Avenue Spur and use its equipment.

Couldn't light rail use the trolley equipment we already have?

Unfortunately, no. That equipment was built in the 1980s and is in violation of ADA standards. We'd need to procure new equipment. It's because of this that light rail and a metro begin to approach cost parity--as well as the fact that the trolley tracks along 11th and 12th haven't been used in 20 years and would need to be rebuilt.

There aren't any public roads with a railroad crossing along this line. CSX, the active freight railroad, has one near the corner of 30th and Pennsylvania, I think, but it's for a private access road. This is what industry professionals would call a grade-separated right-of-way, and most of the expense of a metro comes in creating this kind of right-of-way, usually as tunnels under streets. That cost, here, was borne long ago. We just have to connect what already exists.

So it's like the Second Avenue Subway, but in the hundreds of millions rather than nearly ten billion.

Yes. But initial ridership would be lighter along this route. Because of this, we can use Broad-Ridge cars and shorter, wooden platforms and upgrade as we go.

I don't know, though. You seem to have this all thought out, but didn't SEPTA want to do something with this a decade ago and decide not to?

Well, yes. How much do you know about that study?

I know that it studied a light rail line from Broad St. using the City Branch to Girard, where it connected to the trolley tracks. I can't remember whether it used Girard to Lancaster or a new routing along Parkside, but it would have connected to the Regional Rails at 52nd St. Didn't it get axed when the Schuylkill Valley Metro got axed?

That's about what I remember too. As I recall, there were three major issues with the study: a shoehorned connection to the Schuylkill Valley Metro (so that it could be included along with the whole package), lack of a proper Center City gateway despite two to choose from, and a broken ridership projection.

Can you explain?

OK. Part of the Schuylkill Valley Metro--SVM for short--proposal was a reuse of the Cynwyd Line across the Pencoyd Viaduct into Manayunk; this line diverges from the Paoli/Thorndale Line at 52nd St., which was the reason for termination there--rather than some more intuitive destination, such as St. Joe's. The line's natural terminus, however, is the turnback loop at 40th and Girard, if one doesn't want to extend up Parkside. That's my first criticism. The second one is that the line was expected to terminate at Broad St. with a long connection to the subway, severing any Center City connection. The study thought about connecting the line with the Ridge Spur, but decided not to in favor of the shoehorned-in SVM connection; it also pointed out that the 11th-12th Sts. lines would need to be rebuilt after a decade of disuse.

The third problem is that the ridership projection of the era was broken. Subsequent studies have shown that urban rail routes have exceeded expectations 200% while suburban ones underperformed 50%. So the average urban line had double expected ridership and the average suburban one half it. It was later demonstrated that that particular model had an implicit suburban bias, remedied with a relatively easy mathematical "fix". I don't know if that fix has been incorporated into the projection model, though.

So, as an urban rail system, the City Branch should have double the ridership projected in 2002?

Likely enough I would bet on it. Natural population increase since would also boost the numbers some more.

Like what kind of increase?

Well, let's look at the last Census**--those numbers are still valid. Notice that the tracts around the City Branch have grown considerably: Callowhill doubled in population, and Franklin Town grew a good 20%. Notice that the tracts around the route all have between 2,000 and 5,000 people--those north of Spring Garden, stably so. Tally up the numbers and you'll notice that the population adjacent to the route north of Vine is about 25,000, concentrated along a route two linear miles long, and inhabiting an environment that disfavors driving. In addition to this, you have the Community College of Philadelphia, which can be exploited as a major ridership source, with its total enrollment approaching 40,000.

But the CCP has a bunch of campuses. That's just Main Campus.

True. I don't have a campus-by-campus breakdown, but it's fairly safe to say that about half the students go there. Between the student population and the neighborhood population(s), I'd say we'd have a catchment area of about 45,000. We can invoke privilege of destination for the Art Museum, Logan Circle, the Rodin Museum, Barnes, and Lemon Hill, and, for light rail, the Zoo, and assay that the combination of those increase capturable ridership by 5,000, to get a nice round 50,000. It is, however, important to note that while these places can augment ridership, they can't create it--that's the downfall of the Phlash.

What are a "catchment area" and "capturable ridership"?

Both are technical terms for how many people would have opportunity to regularly use the service. The "catchment area" refers to the population living and working close to the line; "capturable ridership" refers to people that can use the line if there's an incentive to, such as convenient access to a destination. Destinations are great for lots of things, but they aren't the main ridership draws. Realized ridership--how many people actually do--is usually a percentage of this amount. Transit planners working on new lines usually attempt to broaden their catchment areas as much as possible, through use of devices such as transit-oriented development, and capturable ridership with park-and-rides, because the more people can use a service and find it convenient, the more they do. Realized ridership, however, can vary--on the high end, about 20%, on the low end, about 5%, of the catchment area. Most traditional models model for about 10%.

Those numbers seem strangely familiar...

Yep, and wouldn't you know it, the less somebody drives, the more likely they are to use transit!

Hm, I see your point. But all this technical stuff is really starting to bore me. Let's get back to the controversy you were talking about. You said you had safety concerns about the park. Is there anything else you're concerned about?

Yes, actually. I think a park will cost more than transit.

Can you elaborate?

Of course. As it turns out, building parks on old railroads is trickier than it first appears. There are lots of parks around that incorporate parts of old railroads, yes, but they get away with it by maintaining relatively simple landscaping without needing to destroy the roadbed--a sort of compacted dirt-and-gravel subsurface all roads share.

But the kind of park proposed for the City Branch Cut would lie entirely over the roadbed. That means, if you want anything more fancy than a grass lawn or a woodlot, like lights or grove trees, you're going to have to dig it up. In addition to this, the line was an industrial line, which means there are probably carcinogens buried in the roadbed. To make it safe, you'll not only have to dig it up but clean it out.

This has been an ongoing problem with the Reading Viaduct, in fact. Known PCP pollution--railroads of the time used it in their ties--makes renovation of the Viaduct surprisingly costly, as the existing roadbed has to be dug up and clean soil put in. New York's High Line had to deal with this problem, too, and part of what made it possible was the fundraising acumen of the Friends of the High Line. Even so, even with all the pollution, demolition of the Viaduct is even more expensive, because of the solidly-built trestles and city wall-strong embankments. By contrast, reactivating the City Branch Cut for rail use would bypass the PCP problem partly by grandfathering it in--the same way it's dealt with throughout the Regional Rail system and along active railroads nationwide--and by the platforms acting as caps, or being elevated away from it.
The cost of removing the carcinogens puts any park conversion of the City Branch Cut in the $350,000+ range. Ouch. And that's before actually building a park. A reasonable expectation of rail restart, by contrast, is $200,000, ranged down with strong value engineering and up with government contract bloat.

But don't the park proponents already have money?

What they have is a preliminary planning grant. In essence, they're getting paid to produce some fancy renderings and draw up a budget. What they don't have is money to actually clean up the City Branch (or the Viaduct, for that matter)--this money is hard to find. The Friends of the High Line had to raise it privately, through funders and massive donation drives. In other words, they had to make the park a shared community vision, and then spend a decade gathering the money to make it real. They were able to do that for a variety of reasons--the High Line is on the park-starved West Side, and the right-of-way had limited potential connections with the existing subway network. And remember, even after the community shared their vision, it took many years of blood, sweat, and tears to make it real.

There is no such consensus here. The Reading Viaduct is the closest to such a consensus, and it is plagued by politicking between park-starved Callowhill loft-dwellers and a Chinatown looking for cheap land. Even though all parties agree that a linear park along (at least a part of) the Viaduct is a good idea, they differ--strongly--on how to go about it.

If anything, the City Branch Cut is even further from a consensus. Pressing safety and environmental
concerns, relatively abundant parkland west of the Community College, a hunger for increased rail access, duplication with the Spring Garden Greenway project, and ongoing funding concerns all work against any park proposal.

So they don't really have money, is what you're saying.

Yes.

Then do YOU have money?

Unfortunately, no. Rail advocacy for the City Branch has existed consistently for several years, but has been much more nebulous, mostly consisting of conversational agreements. ViaductGREENE has only existed for about a year, and mostly in conversation with other Reading Viaduct proponents. Rail advocates, even those in on the Viaduct conversation***, thought that their City Branch Cut proposal was more silly than serious, a way of differentiating themselves from other Viaduct advocacy groups. It's only in the past few weeks that the City Branch Cut greenway has been advanced as a serious proposal, and moving far faster than they expected.

In other words, rail advocates have to organize themselves, and fast.

Join the conversation on Philadelphia Speaks here. If you want to make your voice heard, we are looking for help, and would value any sort of skill you bring to the table. Let's get enough voices together, and we can start working on a serious proposal of our own.
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* Yes, all three of these railroads make an appearance on the Monopoly board.
** When you click on this link, you'll get a map showing all the Census changes in the country. To find more specific information, zoom in or search for "Philadelphia" or, even better, a zip code around Center City, like 19130.
*** I.e. me.

Building A Political Coalition

Everything is politics. To do anything, a strong enough coalition must be assembled to counteract the opposition. These kinds of coalitions can take long times to assemble, or coalesce quickly, depending on the scale of the problem.

Let us take, as an example, the road coalition. It took a half a century from the invention of the automobile before a strong road coalition came into existence--a half a century during which the car had to go through an image shift from rolling death machine to tool for freedom--and the development of movements and companies providing improved auto infrastructure (e.g. tire companies, gas companies, Better Roads, etc.) It took fundamentally proscriptive and ultimately myopic urban movements (Garden Cities, public housing) as well as a tapping into Americans' escapist tendencies. And it had to do it all fighting the rail lobby, then one of the most powerful in the country. It ultimately gained the upper hand not due to itself, but rather because the ICC insisted on draconian rail policy, undermining shippers' profitability, while states saw them as rolling banks and incurred high taxation on them, all the while absolutely subsidizing their competition.

Ultimately the rail lobby failed, the roads movement succeeded beyond its wildest expectations, and American railroading began its long half-century collapse from the cream of American pride and culture to a peripheral transportation solution focused on moving bulk goods. Alongside our railroads' collapse has been our manufacturing sector's, to a state where it, too, is now economically peripheral.

The road-based system then established itself as culturally central. Interstates replaced the great rail networks as our country's crown jewels. But it's a system that is internally unsustainable, starting to grind toward its own collapse; a generational shift has begun to reject it; and it's time to build a coalition toward a major transportation shift.

In his Sunday Train blog, Bruce McF began feeling the way toward such a coalition. But a coalition that would ultimately be successful would have to unite a majority of Americans, a majority of American politicians, and (ironically enough) couple into the dominant economic hegemony of the era*. So the question isn't just what vested interests would be interested in his Steel Interstate proposal--it's also what compromises are needed to win over otherwise unaligned interests.

Right now our politics are dominated by a neoliberal/neoconservative ascendency which has been in power, regardless of party alignment, since 1980; these politics are linked to Austrian School neoclassical economics, which favor "free-market" solutions and dogmatically believe in the idea that markets can and always will self-correct--but this hegemony is opposed by those both on the right and the left, by populist movements both progressive and regressive (Occupy v. the Tea Party), by ideologies by both right and left.

The two largest ideologies opposed to the current status quo are the progressives and the libertarians**.

In order for the Steel Interstates to be politically viable in any form, it must be as a coalition between these two ideologies. To do that, a compromise must be reached.

This is not a difficult compromise. Steel Interstates mark a realization that our current transportation paradigm is unbalanced, structured to support ecologically self-destructive means, and that only massive investment or economic/ecologic ruin can rectify this imbalance--just as Better Roads did in its day. Libertarians, too, recognize this imbalance, and (what is today) the radical proposal*** to privatize the Interstates would likewise begin to rectify it.

Granted, the Steel Interstates, as a populist proposal, grew out of a plan opposing a road privatization. We must remember here that that so-called "privatization" was really just a government handout, a boondoggle where the government had all the capex risk, but the private entity all the reward. In a true privatization, the private entity must assume both risk and reward. Leasing the Interstates as-is would do so.

The compromise I offer is that we convert the embodied capital in the Interstates into a financial asset, which we then use to improve our railroads to a like condition (i.e. subsidize the railroads to develop their core mainlines to Steel Interstate standards). In this manner, both major forms of higher-level ground transportation are handled by equivalent enterprise, that is, private enterprise. The alternative is nationalization of the railroads--politically untenable in our day and age.

At this point, the coalition can court interested vested interests, such as what Mr. McF mentioned.

Bring the progressives and the libertarians to the same playing table, and real opposition to the status quo begins to cook--and I would not be surprised if there are many more grounds for progressive-libertarian compromise. If a coalition can assemble a powerful enough policy package, one (this is dominated by Millennial policy concerns) concerned with improving mass and non-motorized transportation, the changeover from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources, and social policies like some form of universalized^ healthcare, a separation of church and state in the field of marriage, empowering (rather than disempowering) labor policy, and so on.

It is clear that, even in its infancy, Millennial political policy is radically distinctive from the post-Progressive status quo. The work involved in bringing Millennial policy to reality will be fascinating to watch and work for.
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* One could say the current road-based transportation paradigm has been running on its own inertia since 1980, when the economic hegemony that built it (Progressivism 1.0) failed and was replaced by "neo"
-ism and its economic policy, Austrian School neoclassicism. Railroads 1.0 where the product of an era of laissez-faire libertarianism. Our road coalition arose alongside the Progressive ascendency.
** I'm not talking about the status quo that masquerades as libertarianism, I'm talking about that particular branch Republican Party elite enjoy ostracizing.
*** Just like the Steel Interstates are a radical proposal...
^ Note term.