|
|
| Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit (1142422) | |||
 |
|||
| Home > SubChat | |||
|
[ Read Responses | Post a New Response | Return to the Index ] |
|
||
|
Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit |
|
|
Posted by WillD on Thu Mar 1 01:30:27 2012, in response to Re: SEPTA to spend $100 million on PTC (unfunded federal mandate); other projects take hit, posted by The Flxible Neofan on Wed Feb 29 12:35:39 2012. The issue is that this unfunded mandate is taking well needed dollars away from projects to bring the system to a state of good repair, such as renovating old bridges, upgrading ancient substations, and more.Oh please. Every commuter railroad has managed to get along just fine with unfunded mandates for the past 30 years. They're called FRA crashworthiness requirements. They result in railroads paying a premium for rolling stock, then paying more to operate that equipment on a daily basis. Yet the usual chorus around here has been curiously tacit on this particular source of lost capital funding because it suits their purely aesthetic taste in railfanning. Furthermore, why are you taking Luther Diggs' comments at face value? SEPTA has a 311 million dollar capital program this year, growing to $407 million in 2015. That means the PTC system, installed over the same time frame, amounts to around 7% of the SEPTA capital budget for the next 3 years, yet potentially saves them money from the day it is installed. It's ludicrous to claim their capital program is 'endangered' because they're being forced to adopt a regulation seven years in coming. The very aggressive timeline to implement this system is hurting the budget of a variety of commuter rail systems out there. They only have themselves to blame. New Jersey Transit got out ahead of the requirement and began installing ASES on a more reasonable, lower cost timetable. SEPTA was foolish enough to think they could skate by to the last minute without being require to comply with the regulation and now they're being made to pay for that decision. Plus this PTC system (which may or may not prevent accidents on SEPTA) automatically drastically increases the costs of any future Regional Rail extension. There are 446 fixed guideway route miles in the Regional Rail system. Discounting the 105 route miles shared with Amtrak that brings the cost to somewhere on the order of $300,000 per route mile to install the system. To say that is in the noise when it comes to the cost to construct a new regional rail line is an understatement. Having to install PTC on any of the many SEPTA projects it wasn't about to build won't make any of those commuter rail projects any less likely to be built. The fact that they were conceived by SEPTA makes them plenty unlikely they'll be built. |
|
|
|