16
votes
Philadelphia SEPTA won a $317 million federal grant to help replace aging Market-Frankford Line cars
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Authors
- Thomas Fitzgerald
- Published
- Feb 16 2024
- Word count
- 459 words
Comment box
The Philadelphia metro area is the 7th largest in the United States, at around 6.2 million people, tied with Washington DC. However, the relatively conservative state legislature of Pennsylvania has consistently withheld adequate funding from Philadelphia-area transit agencies like SEPTA.
If you compare a map of Philly's subway to DC's subway, you can see just how little coverage the system has. (Note: the line in red is not operated by SEPTA and is more of a suburban line.) While the city has an extensive regional rail service, fares are high and frequency is abysmal. There are many densely populated regions of Philadelphia with no adequate rail service at all, including most of historically black North Philly.
In addition, despite having only two actual subway lines, the city has failed to maintain either one in decent order for the past couple decades. The "Market-Frankford Line" (recently renamed the "L" and referred to locals as the "El" for its elevation outside Center City) is in particularly poor condition, with cars around 25 years old. It is also the most highly trafficked transit line of any sort in the entire city, with about 170,000 daily riders (2019 data), or about 62 million trips per year. However, Joe Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) has unlocked funding for SEPTA via the Rail Vehicle Replacement Program that could allow them to fully replace the L's fleet of subway cars within the next few years. The grant will allow SEPTA to purchase around 200 new traincars.
Why is this necessary? I'll tell you!
Disclaimer: I am a transit lover and regular transit taker. I take this line in particular pretty often. Here is my personal list of problems with the L (not even close to complete). You will notice that most of them are related to the seating arrangement, which is something that could be directly solved with new traincars:
Will the new traincars solve these problems? Maybe, but SEPTA has not announced any specifics yet. This grant actually only covers less than 50% of the cost of a full fleet replacement.
Let's hope that this happens sooner rather than later. 2030 sounds believable. The newspaper claims that SEPTA wants to award a contract this spring or summer.
Regional rail, for all its faults, mostly does a damn fine job of getting large quantities in and out from the suburbs, reducing car traffic substantially. In the pre-COVID days I don't think there was a single day where it wasn't almost completely at capacity.
If it just ran like, once every 2 hours overnight, that'd be plenty good to handle late-night crowds as well.
It'd be nice if the subway was as well-kempt as regional rail.
IIRC that red bit is operated by PATCO, but the philly stops are still owned by septa
Comment box
The regional rail system is nice and I take it regularly. Unfortunately, many/most of its stations outside Center City are not accessible. I agree that nighttime frequencies would be beneficial, although the system is already pretty expensive to run and SEPTA wouldn't be able to afford it.
A Philly subway costs about $4.04 in "operating expenses per unlinked passenger trip" (OE/UPT, with UPT being a generic way to describe a standalone trip) compared to $18.94 for the regional rail. Source: National Transit Database: Transit Agency Profiles (2022). Despite the latter's high fares and generally privileged denizens, it still does not recover those costs. For this reason, even though I would selfishly benefit, more regional rail service is maybe not the game plan now. No part of the transit system is profitable, but it is kind of nuts how expensive some services are over others.
So when SEPTA proposed extending the Norristown HSL to KoP for $3 billion (lol) instead of building the Roosevelt Boulevard subway, a little part of me died inside. (The HSL isn't regional rail, but it has the same problems.) That little part of me was brought back from the dead when the federal government thankfully refused to pay for that boondoggle, but there has been little movement to build any better alternative. I attended some community meetings with Brendan Boyle (I think) et al. last year but I have heard nothing since then. Even the governor's "revised" and generous transit plan, which has yet to be accepted by the legislature, is so insufficient as to barely address SEPTA's fiscal cliff and do absolutely nothing to address its $5 billion backlog.
That article mentions fare evasion costing "tens of millions" per year, but that's a drop in the bucket against a $1,122,769,062 annual farebox recovery deficit. County funding from the suburbs would be nice.
Yea, half the reason Philadelphia has a wage tax at all is because of how badly the rest of PA refuses to provide funding to the largest economic hub in the state, which subsidizes that low 3% state income tax everywhere else.
I did the math awhile back, so it's a hazy memory to be taken with a grain of salt and inspiration... that if Philadelphia + suburbs broke off from PA into its own state, they could flatten out the income tax at an even 5.5% across the board, resulting in a tax break for all residents and have more money in the coffers. The rest of PA needed to raise income tax to something like 10% in order to make up for all the lost revenue.