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.

Improving Transit in Baltimore

Some time ago I started a 3 (now 3.5) part series on improving transit in Maryland and D.C. The first part designed improvements to the Washington Metro via targeted extensions to underserved areas--especially jobs centers--and a more complex downtown D.C. network with more routes and increased interlining. Also recommended was the installation of an express track between Rosslyn and East Falls Church (the extent, that is, the Orange and Silver Lines are interlined outside of Central Washington). The second targeted improvements to MARC, firstly by merging it with VRE, and secondly, by greatly increasing commuter rail services around Baltimore. The second-and-a-half took this a little further, discussing natural extensions of the core network proposed and the technical issues inherent in creating an S-Bahn-like network through downtown Baltimore. This third post discusses improvements that can be made in Baltimore.

...Except my work's already done for me. More or less.

What the MTA has proposed is a wide-ranging light rail network that builds on the two existing mass transit lines in Baltimore (the Central Light Rail Line, marked blue, and the Baltimore Metro, marked green, on the map). Even though this proposal dates back to 2002 now, and has not seen much in the way of new work, the plan, the principles behind the plan, and the plan of implementation are all sound. When I argue for more long-range mass transit planning, this is exactly the kind of thing I'm arguing for. The Washington Metro wasn't built in a day; in fact, it took roughly 30-40 years from the start of the planning process to the completion of the first-generation network. The first-generation Baltimore network would take on the same look, but done with more light rail and less heavy rail. See below.

Of course, there are still issues and longstanding mistakes. Extending LRT towards Columbia is nowhere near as effective as extending commuter rail (i.e. a variant on the Orange Line); similarly, the Blue/Yellow Line towards Hunt Valley, following ex-Northern Central Rwy. rights-of-way is nowhere near as effective as an alignment towards Towson, following ex-Maryland and Pennsylvania right-of-way (assuming it still exists) would be--although the northern Yellow Line proposal (along Charles Street) would go quite a long way in rectifying that. And the Red Line proposal that has the most traction has piss-poor interconnection with the existing lines (not so much a network as a motley connection of lines).

Even so--a strong long-range framework for local transit exists, or seems to, in Baltimore--much stronger than what you would find in e.g. Philadelphia. Which, again, is the point of this blog.

In the long run, I would encourage Maryland to consider the MTA and MARC as layered networks in a wider system, and quit trying to (like Dallas) overextend its light rail network.

Washington Metro, Improved

This is the first post of a three-post series (maybe) on improving transportation in Maryland, D.C., and northern Virginia. In the first post, I concentrate on the D.C. Metro. In the second post, I will talk about commuter rail in Maryland and northern Virginia (MARC and VRE), and the third, improvements to the Baltimore metro.

The D.C. Metro is among the most convenient subway networks in the U.S., being about equally as convenient as, say, Boston's or Chicago's (though nowhere near as convenient as New York's). However, it has two conflicting mandates: at its nether reaches, it acts as a commuter rail line, and in the city, a traditional subway. This would work a lot like New York's Far Rockaway or Jamaica Bay subways...if there were express tunnels. Instead, since the tunnels are all two-track and there doesn't seem to be a way for overtaking to be scheduled in, all trains are effectively local trains. This works well on lines, in theory, where there are connections with MARC or VRE, since it enables local/express passenger transfer--that is, passengers originating on the Metro but wishing to skip intermediate stations and go straight downtown can use the commuter rail going to Union Station from places like Alexandria, Silver Spring, or New Carrollton, or passengers originating at Manassas and going to Bethesda, or Gaithersburg going to Rosslyn. However, since the ticketing networks of MARC, VRE, and the Metro are mutually exclusive, this is made prohibitively difficult for most passengers. Therefore, the first major action needed is to unify the ticketing schemes and operational patterns across the three networks, in a way that mirrors European S-Bahns. This is, of course, organizational improvement.

Even so, there are real concrete improvements that do need to be made. The network offers poor access (service gaps) into parts of the metropolitan area to the north, south, east, and west of downtown--most pronounced all along the Potomac, in east D.C.'s poorer neighborhoods, and directly west of the Pentagon. Additionally, as the core of the system was designed with the 1970s downtown in mind, it offers an increasingly inadequate service. (See Exhibit A.)

Exhibit A. Note how current system, while adequate by American standards, has major gaps in several directions, and downtown service can be improved.

Greater Greater Washington recently ran a series on second-generation improvements to the Metro, and while some of the ideas were pretty good (such as running the Yellow Line out to Union Station via 2nd), others were merely okay (the north-running Blue Line idea and its Silver Line kin: same idea, different lines), while others were just atrocious (the how far outside D.C. would the Brown Line be extended, anyway?

Exhibit B. The new network idea.

Taking the best three ideas--the Yellow Line tunnel out to Union Station, the southerly separate Blue Line tunnel, and a modified version of the Green Line spur to National Harbor, I came up with Exhibit B. This Metro system sports two new lines (Brown and Pink), and, to complement the new tunnels, extensive new interlining. This interlining would, in addition, offer superior Generation II downtown service. A final addition is the construction of an express track along the interlined Silver/Green section between Falls Church East and Rosslyn; this track would allow for faster commutes along what is now the single longest interlined section in the network (see Exhibit C).

Exhibit C. Downtown lines and interlining.

These lines would be as follows:
Red Line would be unchanged.
Orange Line would be unchanged.
Green Line would be unchanged.
Blue Line would run a new downtown tunnel from the Anacostia River, via H Street, to Union Station, where it would curve down to the National Mall, servicing the primary jobs and cultural centers in the city. It would then curve up through Foggy Bottom to Georgetown and return to the current Blue Line at Rosslyn.
Yellow Line would (1) be extended south from Huntingdon to Beacon Mall, (2) run a new tunnel via I and 2nd Sts. to Union Station, and (3) follow a new alignment north along North Capitol Avenue to Rhode Island Avenue and thence 18th St. NE out to Langdon and Howard Divinity School.
Silver Line would be extended along a new route along North Carolina Avenue, Tennessee Avenue, and the Bladensburg Road to Bladensburg and thence across the Anacostia out to Riverdale, where it would terminate in a new transfer stop with the MARC Camden Line.
Purple Line light rail would be unchanged. (It's a Maryland project, anyhow.)
Brown Line would run from Carderock, MD, via Langley, VA, and American University through Georgetown and thence interline along the Yellow and Green Lines into Anacostia, where it would peel off and continue running south to Forest Heights and National Harbor.
Pink Line would run from Walter Rand Medical Center in northern D.C. down through Columbia Heights, where it would interline with the Green Line to L'Enfant Plaza, and then interline with the Yellow Line to Pentagon, where it would follow a westerly route into Virginia via Columbia Pike to Bailey's Crossroads and Annandale.

This network would implement service to the D.C. area's major service gaps and greatly improve downtown circulation (especially around the Mall). Combined with fare and schedule unions with MARC and VRE, making cross-platform connections infinitely easier, this network would offer the D.C. area an impressive Generation II metro/commuter rail network.

Lindenwold Line

The final full line utilizing the Loop is the Lindenwold Line.

This line already exists: it is called the PATCO Lindenwold Line (colloquially, just PATCO) and it utilizes the east and south sides of the Loop framework, terminating at 15th-16th (the tunnel ends at 18th, or Rittenhouse Square). Added to the existing system is a new stop between Walter Rand and Ferry Avenue (mislabeled on map, mea culpa) at Kaighns Avenue. Another possibility is the closure of the Ashland station and its relocation closer to the Echelon Mall (it is currently a mile-long walk between the two), although rail transportation tends to be separated from destination uses in South Jersey in the grossest way. Woodcrest is a natural park-and-ride, right off 295 and the New Jersey Turnpike*.

The lack of fare parity between this line and the SEPTA network is one of the major barriers to its incorporation into the Loop. Two possibilities exist for the amelioration of this: either the PATCO fare is amortized with SEPTA's such that free transfers are in fact possible where the two lines interconnect, or SEPTA leases PATCO such that the separate PATCO fare is eliminated. Either way, the fare separation ensures an additional barrier for New Jersey patrons wishing to access Philadelphia, thereby undermining the goal of access; furthermore, the Lindenwold Line is the connecting through-route linking lines terminating in Camden (such as the River Line and proposed Glassboro Line) with ultimate destinations in Center City. Making these connections as easy as possible plays its part in inducing transit ridership--one of the major goals of the program.

Finally, some of you may notice that the Lindenwold Line and 25th Street Line terminate in the Loop, coming from opposite directions. There is the possibility of them interlinking, such that trains originating in Lindenwold terminate at Sports Complex South, but the major reason I declined to show this is because if these lines were joined it becomes exceptionally difficult to properly balance service within the Loop, since if the joined line uses one section of the spine, it disproportionately adds service to just that section, and if it is broken up so that each direction uses a different section of the spine, it disproportionately services one direction at all stops over the other direction. The only ways out of this operational asymmetry in Center City are to either: (a) terminate the two services in the Loop, running opposite directions, or (b) introduce an extra service to terminate in the Loop, running the direction opposite (clockwise), assuming 25th-Lindenwold service is split such that each direction runs different branches of the Loop. This could work, but only if the Roosevelt Boulevard Line (see section here) is interconnected into the Loop...the current general idea, however, is that it terminates on the Broad Street Line at Washington Avenue and peak-hour Fern Rock express service enters the Loop. The connection is there via the Ridge Avenue Spur, which would be transformed into a maintenance track with the creation of the Pennsport-Andorra Line, but could just as easily be reactivated for a new service.
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* One of these two duplicate roads really needs to be closed. Seriously.

25th Street Elevated Line

Our penultimate addition to the Loop Network segment of Philadelphia2050 is the 25th Street Elevated Line, a subway which follows the Pennsylvania's Delaware Extension from the Sports Stadium District to Washington Avenue, and then an underground right-of-way to Rittenhouse Square, where it meets with the existing Loop. This underground right-of-way follows Grays Ferry to South to 19th, about two miles.

This line fills a real need in South Philadelphia. Currently, transportation access in western South Philadelphia (west of 20th Street) is relatively limited and serviced mainly by the 2, 7, and 17 north-south buses, as well as the various east-west feeder buses (7 and G on Oregon, for example). However, South Philadelphia hosts the city's most-densely populated neighborhoods (by tract) and the neighborhoods themselves are very much inherently transit-oriented, when not unbuilt with suburban-style small-box Rite Aids and other such dross. South Philadelphia is, indeed, considered a North American example of European-style urbanity, and neighborhoods such as East Passyunk and Southwest Center City are booming, while Point Breeze is gentrifying.

Existing elevated line. Formerly electrified.

Furthermore, this line is less expensive to construct, and can tap into more funding sources, than initially meets the eye. 25th Street makes sense because of an already-existing elevated line, currently used by Norfolk Southern and CSX to access Greenwich Yard and the Packer Avenue Marine Terminal; since nearly all of the subway line, other than the Rittenhouse-Washington Avenue segment, uses this easement (barrier-separated), or else otherwise existing or proposed Loop tracks, this line can be built via a public-private partnership with Norfolk Southern (the owning entity): as the existing trestle is quite literally crumbling, the partnership would involve a renovation of the trestle, benefiting all parties, along with the setting aside of about half its right-of-way for this use. Modern, ultra-efficient signaling will help enable this, as well as the single-track Arsenal Bridge creating a pre-existing bottleneck making the trestle just too plain wide for purely freight use. In exchange, direct structural ownership would transfer to the passenger rail operator for future maintenance.

The running of mass transit and freight trains side-by-side is feasible: it is commonly done in Chicago. 25th Street offers the best access of any alignment in South Philly--directly servicing SWCC, Point Breeze, Grays Ferry, Girard Estates, and Packer Park--and the formerly industrial badlands surrounding the trestle offer abundant opportunities for upzoning in the city's fastest-improving section. Finally, since one of the propositions of Philadelphia2050 is that the city is both large and dense enough to support heavy rail mass transit within the most-urban core, this heavy-rail running is accomplished via the least expensive means available, and that is the repurposing of existing infrastructure.

Society Hill-Mt. Airy Line

Along with Pennsport-Andorra, the Society Hill-Mt. Airy Line forms the second half of the Loop backbone. This line is the Germantown Avenue backbone, connecting the sections of this area where transit access currently is relatively poor. Additionally, it stretches east, servicing Society Hill and Penns Landing.

This line would lie between the two major spines of North Philadelphia, the Broad Street Line and the Pennsport-Andorra Line. Its major purposes would be to (a) serve Mount Airy and central Germantown, (b) serve lower and central North Philadelphia, (c) to serve western and southern sections of Center City, and (d) to serve several institutions along the way, primarily the Eastern State Penitentiary and Girard College.

Another feature of this line is its expandability: this line can easily be extended along Front or the Delaware, should demand permit. Combined with the Pennsport-Andorra line's first phase, the first phase of this line, along with the Lindenwold Line, is envisioned as the 2025 system core, the Loop skeleton these lines sprout from.

Extending the Market-Frankford Line

This is another post in the Philadelphia2050 series.

The Market-Frankford Line (locally called the "el") is the busiest heavy-rail route in Philadelphia, with some 180,000 daily riders, a number that compares favorably with anything the CTA, MTA, WMATA, or MBTA could put forward. It is a broad-gauge line using under-rail contact third-rail electrification, a setup totally unique in the United States, and its dynamic envelope is somewhat narrower than the Broad Street Line's. The line doesn't have any express tracks, and in fact, its daily operation pattern is near-optimized given its constraints. Its current trains are 8 cars, the same length as the line's shortest station, 5th Street; lengthening this station might allow longer trains, certainly necessary given the line's frequent crush loads.

The line currently terminates at Frankford Transportation Center in the near Northeast; while the capacity constraints laid out above prevent it from being used as a Northeast subway, a relatively short extension may be used to help the capacity problem.

This extension would involve a connection with the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard subway at Bustleton Avenue. Since the Boulevard subway would connect into the Broad Street tunnel, which does have express tracks, and a surprisingly high proportion of el riders go from Center City to the Northeast, with a transfer at Frankford, this expansion would be integrated into the Phase I construction of the Boulevard line in order to hopefully cut the el's ridership some--as I mentioned, congestion is an issue at peak hours, when train cars are beyond SRO and simply packed to gills.

The second part of this extension is an extension to place. The corner of Cottman and Roosevelt is one of the major retail centers of the Northeast, and the el extension there simplifies access to place. With improved access, of course, densification of the heart of the corridor--the stretch of Cottman from the Boulevard through Bustleton to Castor, would be encouraged. Also of interest: the proximity of this stretch of Cottman to Pennypack Park suggests a possible sub-use as a bicycling trailhead.

The three new stops (Roosevelt Bvld., Tyson, and Roosevelt Mall) would be expected to generate some new traffic, but this is counteracted by the siphoning effect of the major junction at the Boulevard and Bustleton. A study earlier this decade suggested that a Boulevard subway would have as many as 300,000 daily riders; this extension, being limited in scope, would have far less.

Pennsport-Andorra Line

The Pennsport-Andorra Line is one of the three new lines in Philadelphia2050's Loop network. It is the backbone which connects between Andorra, Roxborough, Manayunk, East Falls, Strawberry Mansion, Brewerytown, Fairmount, Spring Garden, Callowhill, Chinatown, Wash West, Bella Vista, East Passyunk, and Pennsport; it directly serves the Italian Market, Rodin Museum, Community College, and Art Museum; it offers a development spine along Fairmount Park's eastern edge; and it's generally an all-around good guy.

This line forms the northern and eastern spine of the Loop, and interconnects with the existing Lindenwold Line and Ridge Spur, as well as the proposed Tasker Park and Society Hill-Mt. Airy Lines; it is built to the same dynamic envelope (of course) as its existing interconnections, and is planned to eventually be able run ten-car trains. Its Phase 1 is also the easiest to implement.

This ease of implementation comes from the fact that it utilizes existing easements and rights-of-way wherever possible. Phase 1 replaces the Spur, for the time being, with a train that follows the current Spur line from 8th and Market to Ridge and Noble, and then follows a subway under Noble Avenue to about Broad, where it emerges into the City Branch Cut. It then follows the Cut through to its connection with the Pennsylvania Avenue tunnel, which has one in-use track in a space built for six; it runs along this tunnel's eastern half and into the cut north to Girard Avenue. The only new tunnel to construct on this line is, in fact, along Noble between Ridge and Broad--only about half a mile. Current Spur trains would be transferred to this line, eliminating the need for new equipment; the only remaining expenses are the installation of the trackwork, the third rail, and stations. Phase 1 would run two-car trains, Phase 2 five-car trains, and Phase 3 the full ten-car sets eventually envisioned.

The extreme lack of expense relative to the solution it offers: connection of Center City's northern sector into the heavy rail network, and the expandability of the plan, suggests merit for immediate implementation. More than almost any other Philadelphia2050 proposal, this one would solve a lot of problems right away.