there's some good stuff in the report; it makes me hopeful, but it seems like SEPTA's priorities are elsewhere:
https://www.inquirer.com/transportat...-20210223.html
While I agree that traffic around KOP is a mess, there are so many more useful ideas in that OTIS report, to say nothing of the use of COVID relief funds. I really think that the KOP extension will end up a failure and would be a huge deterrent to funding other more useful expansion ideas. KOP would need to be completely rebuilt from the ground up to make people want to use the planned spur. There are no sidewalks, there are highways and on/off ramps all over the place, the planned spur doesn't stop by the town center they just built. Anyone using it would need to sit and wait for a shuttle bus to get to where they're going, unless it's the mall. The area already has two very pedestrian-friendly towns with transit access next door to KOP, one being a county seat in need of some attention. If businesses in the area are looking for something pedestrian friendly and leaders in the region are looking to reduce the traffic problems they're facing, they have two really good options. Encourage more development in Norristown and Conshohocken. Also, working with CSX or NS or whomever owns the old reading mainline to extend RR up the Schuylkill will be so much more effective and probably cost efficient. I get that a lot of people think the KOP spur is a great idea, and I did too at first, it's just the more I think about it the more it's obvious that it's not. The region needs to take advantage of the bones it has to grow into something that resembles a network of interconnected nodes that work together. RR and transit-oriented development can help a lot, but trying to make KOP into something it just isn't is a square peg in a round hole. Meanwhile, some of these towns took hundreds of years to develop the infrastructure they have today. Why start from scratch if you don't have to?
Anyways, it's nice seeing a vision put out there, and the OTIS report is that. Some great ideas in there that probably won't go anywhere, but ideas are at least a starting point. And some of the less flashy plans like trolley modernization, changing RR into something resembling more of a metro and the bus system revamp will unclog the arteries and breath more life into the overall system. It will make what we already have that much more impressive and will increase the desire to expand.