This would be an excellent solution and perhaps by the time the M4 cars are replaced, whoever is responsible at SEPTA would be receptive to them. They would also seem likelier to prevent trackfalls than multilingual eye-level height signs and automated announcements.
I think that an obvious solution is higher service frequencies, which would require signal improvements and new rolling stock at worst, which is probably more attainable and cost-efficient than anything entailing excavation and underground construction would be. I don't know what the maximum throughput of the MFSE is, but if they would like to increase capacity by a third, running trains every 3 minutes rather than every 4 minutes seems as though it should be feasible. The platform extension idea always seems cockamamie to me. I think that the MFSE would do well to have more capacity, but platform extensions almost seems like solving a problem that the PRT or its successors had dealt with a long time ago using more or less the same infrastructure as I assume that the line had higher ridership in the past when the city's population was higher, more concentrated in central areas and owned fewer automobiles.
I recall reading claims somewhere in the
annual reports of the Department of City Transit or
this report on construction of the Frankford Elevated that it would be possible to run 44 trains per hour on the Market Street Subway-Elevated with the never-built Darby Elevated tied into it, pending its never-realized later routing into a Chestnut Street Subway. I also recall citations for the PRT having run variously 20, 30-34 or 40 trains per hour over the MSSE. Some time ago I chanced upon a fleet management plan for the M4 cars that cited intended service of 20 trains per hour and noted that the M3 fleet had run headways sometimes as close as 2.2 minutes between trains. (I wish that I could find that again)
For some reason a fleet of 218 M4 cars is insufficient for better service than 15 trains per hour. I assume that simply multiplying trains per hour by cars per train and adding the FTA prescribed 15 % spare ratio is too simple to yield the actual number of cars needed for service, but something seems amiss. Using that simple calculation for illustration note that there are 218 M4 cars in service, crudely using 104 cars per hour (6*15*1.15=103.5, rounded up to 104), which is 47.71 % of the fleet. By contrast, the crude calculation for the Broad Street Subway is 113 cars per hour (((16*5)+(9*2))*1.15=112.7, rounded up to 113) or 90.4 % of the fleet. Maybe some difference in infrastructure explains the MFSE's comparative fleet inefficiency, but I wonder if something is wrong with the M4 cars themselves that limit service levels beyond what infrastructure limitations would. Page 7 of
SEPTA's most recent capital budget notes that the $ 1.3 billion project would include,"associated vehicle procurement," which I assume refers to just some additional cars, as $ 1.3 billion would be a little light for the required construction and a whole new fleet.
I think that this whole extensions project might just have been Jeffrey Knueppel's pet idea. It almost seems designed to address the issue with the most construction possible. It's not just a failure to follow, "Organization Before Electronics Before Concrete," it's forgetting everything but the third thing.
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