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.

Skirting Light Rail around Center City

Light rail is one of the most difficult aspects of Philadelphia2050 to figure out. In my initial conception of the network, I had crammed both of planned new West Philadelphia light rail lines, the 37 from Eastwick via Lindbergh Boulevard, and the 49 from St. Joseph's University and Wynnefield via the West Park, into the existing Subway-Surface tunnel running from the corner of 40th, Woodland, and Baltimore to Juniper and Market with an additional exit at 35th and Ranstead. Since light rail is essentially a bus on rails, capacity for this tunnel is about as high as you'd expect. Even with five lines (10, 11, 13, 34, 36) accessing this tunnel, there is definitely still space for more.

But then I read this post on Human Transit, and a light bulb went on: why am I cramming everything into the tunnel? Just because I can? I had noticed some SEPTA routes which originate in Overbrook and Wynnefield running to South Philly--the 40 originates at the corner of Monument, Conshohocken, and Ford and terminates at Headhouse Square and the G originates at Lankenau Hospital and terminates at Columbus and Oregon, for example--and I wondered if there might not be some efficiency involved. Then I thought about my heavy rail network (to be explained in a later post) and how both my Ridge-8th and 19th-Society Hill lines are essentially two lines which inter-run via the Center City Loop and I realized that the 40 and G aren't one line so much as they are two lines which have been merged.

Using this, I could justify running my new routes onto Girard and Washington Avenues, thus bolstering frequency on the two east-west roads which bound Center City. The 15 doesn't come any more frequently than 15 minutes where the headway really needs to be 7 minutes, and the 64 is even worse*. As a result, crowding is a frequent issue on both routes.

The modification is thus that Girard and Washington will both get one of my two new routes (37 and 49). But which one? By running the 37 on Washington and the 49 on Girard, I would keep both routes relatively short, but that would also require relying on the 64 for the 40th Street section. So, the opposite was chosen: the 37 would run from Lindbergh up the 40th Street connection to Girard, and the 49 from Parkside down the connection to the Grays Ferry Bridge and access Washington from there**.

But this proposal also undermines the usefulness of the 64, which runs from Queen Village to Parkside via Washington and 49th. Previously under Philadelphia2050, the 64's route had been modified to make the run via the 40th Street Connection, such that it, combined with the 15 along Girard and the waterfront light rail proposal, would form an outer loop around Center City. With the 37 and 49 following 40th, this would give the west side of the loop triple service--too much service. But if the 64 were to be scrapped entirely, Washington would still only have one route servicing it (while 40th and Girard would both have two routes), thus negating the stated aim of this restructuring.

So the 64 was given a new purpose: accessing the job-rich, transit-poor University City Health Center, home to CHoP and Penn where a collector is very definitely needed between the two main points of transit access, both on the district's periphery--University City Station on the Regional Rail, and the 40th Street Portal--and the main jobs center along Civic Center Boulevard. The route shown in the diagrams is very provisional (at best) and will be expanded on in a later post.

 

The waterfront line wasn't considered in large part because it appears there may be compatibility issues between this line and the others. The waterfront proposal, due to the need to preserve a freight spur accessing the port facilities further south, will, in all likelihood, use standard gauge DMU equipment, time-separated à la the River Line, while the other lines will all use broad-gauge electrified LRV equipment, like that used on Boston's Green Line. This compatibility issue will allow for connections, but not interoperability. If, on the other hand, the waterfront line is built in such a way as to be interoperable, or able to be converted into being interoperable, with the other lines, then that opens up a raft of new possibilities for the 64, one of the most delicious being the use of American Street to reach Fairhill, a neighborhood where the addition of new rail service is at or near its most difficult.

A final note about the light-rail map: like heavy rail, Philadelphia2050's light rail system is composed of interwoven overlain networks, which are broadly classifiable as urban and suburban. Urban can be further classified into four networks: the Subway-Surface, the Loop, the Upper Network, and the Waterfront Line; suburban can be further classified into suburban light rail (concentrated at 69th Street Terminal), New Jersey light rail (concentrated at Walter Rand), and interurban lines, like the former 100***, where the lack of concentration is the establishing feature. The ideal solution with all this is to give each network in the system its own color, but the sheer amount of colors (three heavy rail networks + four urban light rail networks + three suburban light rail networks + the regional rail network = 11(!) separate networks in the system) makes this something of a Sisyphean task. Untangling this maze is one of the major cartographic challenges of the proposed system.
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* The 64 being a bus line which would be upgraded, under Philadelphia2050, to light rail.
** Technically, the 40th Street connection is a one-way pair: the southbound line runs along 40th from its corner with Parkside and Girard south to Spruce and thence down 42nd to Woodland; the northbound line up 42nd from Woodland to Spruce, then up 38th to Filbert, then up 41st to Ogden back to 40th and across the bridge over the Main Line just west of Zoo. In the maps, the 37 line runs the northbound section of this connection and the 49 the southbound. Additionally, since the 11 and 34 both use Woodland east of 49th, I decided to run the 37 up 49th (which has available trolley tracks) to Chester, following the 13, in order to not inordinately overload Woodland; since the Grays Ferry Bridge's optimal access follows 47th, to keep costs down, the 49 follows Woodland for a brief section from 42nd to 47th.
*** The 100 is now called the Norristown High-Speed Line, or NHSL for short; in Philadelphia2050, the 100 number is to be given to a new route extending from 69th Street Station to Ivy Ridge Transportation Center (another later post).

Philadelphia2050

"Make no small plans..."--Horace Trumbauer

This is it: Philadelphia's Holy Grail. Patterned on L.A.'s 30/10 effort (so called because of its attempt to get 30 years worth of work done in 10 years), Philadelphia2050 is a holistic transportation plan, and agenda, for the city and region. This plan's core attribute is a holistic plan for the three major rail classes: light rail, subways and elevated rail, and commuter rail; additionally, other public-transportation elements, such as buses at all three levels of the metropolitan hierarchy; and finally bicycle and even road plans are considered.

The light rail element consists of four sections: urban streetcar light rail, New Jersey interurban light rail (focused on Camden), Delaware County suburban light rail, and finally Pennsylvania and Delaware interurban light rail. There are three major light rail hubs: 13th and Market in Center City, 69th Street Terminal in Upper Darby, and Walter Rand Transportation Center in Camden.

The subway/elevated element consists of three overlain networks, two of which interchange with one another, and all three of which are accessible from any other network. These networks are: The Market-Frankford Network, consisting of the Market-Frankford Line; the Broad Street Network, consisting of the lines that consolidate into the trunk line under Broad; and finally the Loop Network, consisting of four lines which interchange in just such a way as to create a loop under Center City. Via the Ridge Avenue Spur, direct interchange is available from the Broad Street network to the Loop Network; free-interchange points at City Hall, 8th/Market, Locust/15th, 19th/Market, Broad/Spring Garden, Bustleton/Boulevard, 26th/Penrose, and Crescent Circle all bind the networks to one another and make it easy to get from anywhere to anywhere in the City. Additionally, this network offers connections with the urban light rail system at numerous points, and the commuter rail network at North Broad, Suburban, Market East, 30th Street Station, the Airport, Wayne Junction, Wissahickon Transportation Center, and Fern Rock Transportation Center. Market-Frankford runs broad-gauge equipment while the Broad Street and Loop networks both run IND-loading-gauge standard-gauge equipment.

The commuter rail network involves both a reconsideration of the system to function like a Subway 2.0 in those places the light and heavy rail networks are unable to reach, as well as line restarts for a variety of destinations including (but not limited to) Vineland, Cape May, Fort Dix, Bethlehem, Reading, Kennett Square, West Chester, Newtown, and New Hope.

Three tiers of bus service are envisioned. Urban bus routes would follow a major street from a transit nexus to a natural terminal; suburban bus routes would extend the urban routes' spokes from city-edge nexuses towards suburban population centers, as well as include two routes whose express purpose is to connect suburban job nodes one to another, and lastly a handful of routes will extend radially but arise and end entirely within suburban dominions; finally, exurban routes would connect suburban-edge transit nexuses with communities on the urban fringe. These routes would run express from town center to town center.

The bicycle network is also much expanded, with a metro-wide system of multi-use trails, anchored along the Delaware by the East Coast Greenway and Delaware Canal, and along the Schuylkill by the Schuylkill River Trail. Trails, such as the Perkiomen Trail, would extend from these arteries further into the region. Multi-use trails are park-oriented, and as such, aside from their use as transportation infrastructure, they are also envisioned as a green cats'-cradle binding the major parks of the city and region together.

Finally, the roads: tolls would be implemented on all limited-access highways, with taxes used to maintain local-access roads and streets. A couple of key limited-access highways need to be built; others unbuilt. The Boulevard was designed so wide that both an expressway and an elevated railroad can fit in its median: use them. The Betsy Ross Bridge is something of an expressway orphan--it needs to connect to the Boulevard and the N.J. Turnpike. The Delaware Expressway, by contrast, needs to be decommissioned between Oregon Avenue and Aramingo Avenue, where it cuts the city core off from its waterfront, and the Vine Street Expressway is just an over-elaborate approach to the Ben Franklin Bridge. Terminate it at 9th, and run the feed along the urban streets. The elimination of these blights in the urban core will also free up hundreds of acres of prime developable land and reknit split neighborhoods.

Philadelphia's transportation infrastructure today was determined by decisions made literally 50 years ago. It's time to learn from our mistakes, make new plans, and invest in our future.