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Ron hates Transit Infrastructure (was:Re: My Route Suggestion of the Old Abandoned LIRR...)

Posted by WillD on Sat Jul 29 23:50:53 2006, in response to Re: My Route Suggestion of the Old Abandoned LIRR Rockaway Beach Branch, posted by RonInBayside on Sat Jul 29 02:14:42 2006.

No, you're simply for the destruction of valuable transit infrastructure and the creation of a light rail network which would require costly trucking of vehicles for maitenance. If you were to actually live in the area you'd see that SEPTA has rebuilt the Subway Surface tracks to the point where they're a simple T-rail with a plastic or rubber flangeway mounted in concrete. This design has a minimal effect on tires when compared to the previous girder rail installations. The cobblestones or belgian paving blocks are an issue, but the northern end of Germantown Avenue is being rebuilt by PennDOT with the tracks being reinstalled. Clearly PennDOT and the City of Philadelphia's Streets Department disagree with your and SEPTA's assessment that such street construction is deleterious to cars that travel that road. Since you have a history of simply siding with NIMBYs that's well documented in this thread, and SEPTA has a history of destroying perfectly good trolley and electric rail routes for no good reason it'd seem the weight of credibility falls largely on PennDOT and the Streets Dept. At least they seem to have the city's best interests at heart.

We've been over the emergency vehicle issues and while you can claim all you want that the fire department needs Germantown I've actually talked to firefighters and ambulance drivers who have explicitly stated that unless an emergency is located on Germantown they'll take alternate routes to get to a call. Even if we were to accept your wrong-headed notion that trolleys would impede emergency traffic then you must also believe that buses do the same. Parking along Germantown Ave is such that no SEPTA bus is ever going to find 60 or even 40 feet to get out of traffic for an emergency vehicle to overtake so your 'steerable' trolleybus may as well be fixed to those rails. In addition it would be extremely easy to order a 96 inch wide Skoda Astra for around 1.5 million dollars. OTOH one 40 foot 102 inch wide E40LF would set you back three quarters of a million dollars, and a 96 inch wide one-off ETB designed for Germantown Avenue would increase costs even more, and as I've stated would offer no appreciable increase in the ability for emergency vehicles to overtake. I suppose I should just be glad that you finally pulled your head out of your ass and stopped advocating diesel or hybrid buses where there's a ready supply of 600 volts DC.

You do realize that without the 23 a restored 56 is an isolated line, right? You'd be forced to truck LRVs with significant mechanical problems from whatever depot you're proposing to use down to Woodland depot to be repaired. With the 23 restored you could simply couple the broken LRV up to a working one and tow it from one depot to another, saving a huge amount of money in heavy haulage fees. Unless you want to keep the 23's tracks between Girard and Erie, but if you're going to do that then you'd have a hard time running ETBs on the 23. It's clear you haven't thought any of your stances through to completion, you simply side with the uninformed NIMBYs and bolster their arguments through your own naive ignorance.

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