Re: North-South Rail Link
There's nothing wrong with SEPTA Center City as it's physically constructed, the destinations it serves, or what service ceiling it can handle. The only things wrong are the other unrelated tactical blunders made in Center City's name and the hapless way SEPTA goes about its daily business with both hands around neck. Philly's system divide was from two competing private RR's each going 1-on-1 at each other for the same traffic. 2 competing lines to New York, 2 competing lines to Chestnut Hill, 2 competing lines to Ivy Ridge, 2 competing lines to Harrisburg, and head-to-head competition in New Jersey out of their terminals. With transfers to other RR's or streetcar/bus companies at those duplicate destinations sometimes being achievable on 1 competitor but not the other, being priced differently 1 vs. the other, and wildly varying by time-of-day one vs. the other. It was inefficient, and it really broke down in a hurry when competition could no longer profit over inefficiency.
When the private carriers fell the competing terminal setup no longer worked.
- Intercity all went to Amtrak in 1971 so there was no longer any need for two limited-stop New York or Harrisburg routes or division in who could transfer to what via which route. It all got consolidated, and today offers superior frequencies with that consolidation eliminating any practical need to spread the field with alt-routings.
- Commuter rail was reorganized at the state level, and no longer functioned correctly with lines pointing in the same direction in spitting distance of one another not being accessible from the same terminal. They had lousy frequencies because of how much inefficiency was chewed up by the poor organization of the system under unified ownership. Yes...local frequencies above all else was too the main driver for how they approached their radical-reconfig choices.
- The Philly terminals were relieved of nearly all New Jersey duties, as NJ Transit absorbed a private RR triple-merger of its own that threw open Hoboken Terminal to nearly everyone and allowed trimming non-Philly oriented service from originating in Philly. Reading Terminal retained only 3 lightly-traveled South Jersey routes inaccessible from the rest of the state, of which Atlantic City is the only post-1984 survivor.
- Throw in the usual mid-century slate of private abandonments chopping most branchlines and whittling it all down to intra-city and the strongest freestanding trunks.
- The SEPTA district was created very small, subsidizing only out to Philly's 128-equivalent distance. Their 495-equivalent routes had to have state/local funding laundered through Amtrak and then- federally owned freight carrier Conrail to operate them.
- That's how the Keystones came to be: NYC-Philly and Philly-Harrisburg commuter schedules were shotgun-married under an Amtrak quasi-commuter umbrella, and the Trenton and Paoli locals were walled-off from them within district borders.
- The diesels routes under Conrail all got booted out of the terminals and moved to outer transfers because of unresolvable labor and trackage rights incompatibilities with Conrail.
You were left with near-empty terminals who lost nearly all long-haul traffic, lost nearly all their NJ routes to a geographical reorganization, lost much of their Philly metro traffic to network atrophy, was constrained on what it could serve by the district charter, and sucked ass at running what was left because the geographic distribution was all wrong. Even if Postwar atrophy was to give way to a 21st century re-expansion era, they would never need the capacity of those terminals and always would've been hobbled by the territorial fractures. There'll never again be direct-competing routes to the same places, Amtrak corridor service isn't going to fragment, intra-Jersey's going to stay in New Jersey, too many ROW's are gone forever, and there's not a lot of places on this system where endless alt-routing provides any utility over stiffened frequencies. They needed a drop-in replacement to fix their glitch, because the glitch broke their CBD and broke the newly-formed transit district.
Boston couldn't be any more different.
- Northside has always been about due-north. Pre-1900 the competing railroads on the northside all impaled themselves trying to get in on the NYC intercity market with inferior gimmick routings. Post-1900 when Boston & Maine consolidated all it they put an end to those follies and went about cementing their geographic monopoly; all roads to Northern New England went through them. It's no coincidence that both of Boston's first two rapid transit lines were built to North Station in the same 5-year span that B&M cemented its monopoly.
- Southside is a very clean geographic split: Boston & Albany/New York Central had just the due-west Worcester Line and all intercity traffic therein. New York, New Haven & Hartford had everything else due-south and southwest. One owned all traffic to Springfield, Albany, Buffalo, and Chicago. One owned all traffic to NYC except for some 'coopetition' on the Springfield Line to keep antitrust forces at bay. Nothing running north out of the CBD, nothing in each other's grill running out of the CBD. Shoreline vs. Inland Route remains the #1 and #2 dominant travel corridors in MA on both rail and the highways that were built alongside.
- Boston's sharp geographic transit split developed from very different competitive practices than Philly. In Philly the Reading and PRR were competing for each other's territory life-long, as well as competing with other carriers in New Jersey. In New England there was outright collusion between monopolists. NYNH&H bought all all competition in CT, RI, and southeast MA; B&M bought out all competition Boston to Portland. NYNH&H briefly took control of B&M and controlled everything up the coast until getting in hot water and backing off. The gentleman's agreement forged between monopolists was this:
- B&M got its all-roads-north monopoly
- New Haven got its all-roads-south monopoly
- B&A/NY Central got the middleman's position with the premier east-west finger that set the proverbial '49th parallel' the other two didn't cross. They were the party the other two always had to (*wink-wink*) cut a deal with, and the party that kept the illusion of direct competition intact.
- There was zero route cleanup that had to happen when the public subsidy era began here, because there was never a Competition Era to begin with. Zero out-of-district messes to clean up: Rhode Island said 'yea' on self-subsidizing continuing service, New Hampshire said 'nay'. Zero routing anomalies to clean up. Zero operational anomalies to clean up. Zero that had to be laundered through Amtrak or third parties. It was so clean a handoff that B&M just stayed on as the system's first hired-gun operator running its old stomping grounds. Then bid on the southside contract too, because they didn't need to re-integrate anything to take on new territory foreign to them.
- Our system has bounced right back on the same footprint as old, re-filling out the same terminals with the same routes as before run the same way as before. Local, hyper-local, Massachusetts intercity, and Amtrak intercity. It is not the same as Philly, where intra-district SEPTA demand has re-grown like gangbusters but the out-of-district Jersey routes re-trenching in Hoboken/Penn and elimination of head-to-head competition left behind slack that will never need filling and an imbalance that needed immediate correction. Our terminals didn't undergo any territorial and competitive realignment. It changed radically and irrevocably in Philly.
- Because territory passed intact there were no major functional deficiencies threatening our system's long-term survival. No "brokenness" like Philly's terminals after the great realignment. North Station and South Station need lots of augmentation...but they need it because they're doing their jobs well enough to stimulate endless demand and don't have enough extra frequencies to give the demand they're generating. NSRL does not propose retiring either terminal...even in the underground portion. South Station and North Station are still the anchors of the CBD.
- ^^THIS NEEDS REPEATING.^^ Nobody is replacing NS or SS even with the tunnel. Philly replaced its terminals in one big killshot because of their systemic brokenness as destinations. We are augmenting ours because they're so very not-broken they're oversaturated as destinations and getting bigger each year as gravity wells.
Also...WE WERE NOT PANTS-ON-HEAD STUPID ENOUGH TO CUT SERVICE to the bone as a "feature" of our terminal 'enhancements'. If you think traffic's bad getting in here from I-495, at least you can hashtag your Legislator with #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid and get them retweeting it up the chain with some consistency like the MetroWest bloc is on behalf of the Worcester Line. Philly's 495'ers are never getting
their diesel routes back. They're all gone, and it took until 2008 for ridership to recover to 1979 levels because of that "feature".
Caveat emptor to anyone who thinks the conceptual integrity of obsessive target fixation on steel-and-concrete triumphs over #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid. SEPTA is the #1 all-time blunder in the transpo history books when it comes to the real-world consequences of planners telling their riders: "It's politically and ergonomically in
your best interests, says I, to have an immediately shittier commute for greater triangulation's sake." Philly felt the economic drag of 30 years of tanked ridership during an era where everyone else's ridership was trending back up. All because their management thought they were playing a clever game of eight-dimensional chess sweeping every unsexy-solve problem on their transpo network under the rug and re-branding the whole shit sandwich of cop-outs as Progress and Reinvention™.
Buying into the SEPTA Fallacy that "tunnel is superior to surface terminal because concept, therefore we should do what SEPTA did because reasons" tosses aside all the other network considerations for a bad case of target fixation. It doesn't do shit for mobility and doesn't satisfy shit for demand if you don't run the frequencies, or if the frequencies never graduate from studies to reality. SEPTA set the all-time high achiever mark by taking a fairly logical and straightforward steel-and-concrete build that should've solved the brokenness of their network for adding frequencies...then CUTTING frequencies permanently in a pique of political sandbagging and trying to paper it over by saying "Look! A run-thru tunnel!" The T's never going to self-harm to that extreme a degree, but it has racked up a long rap sheet of taking eyes-off-prize re: #ItsTheFrequenciesStupid with excessive steel-and-concrete target fixation confusing the issues. The more anyone's own sense of conceptual perfectionism or political triangulation forces them to bargain away the bottom line of that value proposition before advocacy has even begun, the more likely this is to just be another muddled mess that lands on the pile of missed opportunities.
That's the enduring lesson from SEPTA. It wasn't the frequencies. It wasn't the network. It was too much the political rationalizations. It was too much the target fixation and conceptual perfectionism. And they can never undo the full scope of damage they brought on themselves by letting it go down that hole. Learn from it; don't repeat it. Because it's all about the frequencies, stupid.