[volguus zildrohar]

miketoronto - no. Just, no.

justremember - The RR is more or less a separate entity. SEPTA oversees all public transit in SE PA and essentially operates four divisions - City Transit, Victory and Frontier (suburban bus and light rail routes) and Regional Rail. New York's MTA is laid out in a similar manner - city subways and buses run as a different part of MTA from the LIRR or Metro-North.

The problem with getting anything done with the system is the fact that there is too much bureaucracy to make big things happen. To get federal money for anything there are ten federal hoops to jump through, there is community input, there is overcoming SEPTA's congenital inertia, the issue of worker's unions and issuing contracts to say nothing of navigating the byzantine jungle of building anything larger than a rocking chair in the city of Philadelphia. A determined leader is an essential element to making such a thing happen but even with money so many other things have to operate in concert to make such a thing happen in this city. We've just gone for so long here without doing anything huge that the concept is totally foreign. There are tons of ideas out there for Philadelphia but where Philadelphia has ideas other cities have actions. They don't just plan - they build and some of them have governments and agencies no less ungainly than ours. But where other places just have had to deal with impotent municipal governments or lethargic planners or transit agencies that don't care or unions that decide who builds what and how, Philadelphia has had to deal with all of that at once. The last era of great building in this city occurred before the Great Depression and other than Penn Center, there really hasn't been anything of a grand, sweeping scale that ever ended up being executed. I wish I knew what the reason was.