Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
I don't think it's just poor administration. Philly isn't a particularly congested city. It isn't that hard to drive and find parking. It also isn't particularly centralized.
Philly has fantastic rail infrastructure (for a U.S. city), with the RER-style tunnel, but the ridership just isn't there. On paper, Philly should have some of the highest transit share in North America, but it doesn't fully translate. Still decent ridership, of course, but you would think it would have higher ridership than, say, SF, which has a vastly inferior regional network.
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Parking in greater center city is pretty horrible and I would say the congestion is just as bad. Everyone I talk to who lives and works in the city hates driving. Didn't they make some show about parking in Philadelphia?
SEPTA regional rail is actually a good performer, it's highest in the nation after NYC and Chicago systems with a much smaller reach in track miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...s_by_ridership
I agree that we have a pretty great system by US standards, but I'd argue that improving headways, extending operation time and simplifying the pricing structure will improve ridership quite a bit without making any physical modifications to the system. After that extending the system to population centers and better connecting major business nodes in the region will boost it even more. There are some pretty densely-populated regions that are missed by the current system. If anything, SEPTA has shown that an s-bhan type system in the US (and a somewhat neglected one at that) works well and is worth investing/expanding.
Also, I just wanted to add that a fairly large portion of center city residents reverse-commute. I can already walk to 30th street station and get access to plenty of job centers in both the region and other nearby cities (NYC is an hour by Amtrak). Folks living near the trunk stations on the system can do the same, which also encourages building out the system to other job centers not yet served.