Quote:
Originally Posted by Boku
It's nearly 2019 and you're complaining about a $37 million upgrade to be completed "by 2020."
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My complaints start with a very unclear and poorly written article, which makes it hard to impossible to understand the nature of the upgrades. Plus, sure any upgrade is good, but I see nothing wrong with commenting on or are 'we the people' getting our monies worth. And until we know what's being done it's hard to know if that money is well spent.
Some examples about the article----is all this $37M new money? Does the mentioned upgrades include that work presently being done to the station? Do these upgrades make provisions for a underground connection(the tunnel) to 30th St. Station to be smoothly added in the (hopefully near) future?
Lastly it mentions platform widening, and I'd like to know how that might be done---SEPTA's subway station at track level is a center platform, meaning there are tracks on both sides of the platform, next to those subway tracks are the trolley tracks, and there are steel columns between the tracks, so unless the whole complex is going to be re-engineered and rebuilt from Market St. right down to the track level the only possible platform that might be widened is the trolley platform, which is not needed. The trolley platforms are very long, with room for 3 or 4 trolleys, but today's safety requirements only allow one trolley at the station at a time.
I want to trust SEPTA that it is spending it's funds wisely and carefully, but when SEPTA spends nearly $500M!!! on its Key Card fare system that uses ATM ticket units that cost nearly $100K each which means there aren't many around instead of working with a off the shelf system that uses a regular ATM format (that cost only $5K) and every other big project they tackle, and there are MANY needs, seems to end up with similar problems, its hard for me to get too excited. We all want the State to put more tax dollars into SEPTA but when the State House hears about the way SEPTA spends money, compared to Pittsburgh, it doesn't help our case that more State support needs to sent in this direction.
But, it's better then not getting the money!