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to promote civic engagement in the Philadelphia region.Ka-ching! SEPTA looks for it’s share of stimulus
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 5:59 pm - by Dan Pohlig. Filed under: Transportation.
Random picture of some SEPTA rail construction along the Route 100 from SVMetro.com.
Following up on Ben Bradlow’s introductory explainer piece about how the stimulus money will get to this region, I wanted to post a link to this Philadelphia Business Journal story (via SEPTA Watch) from Friday that indicates SEPTA is expecting about $200 million.
The salient parts:
Under the $790 billion plan, which is expected to receive a final vote Friday, Pennsylvania would receive close to $4 billion for Medicaid, $1.3 billion for roads and bridges, between $400 million and $410 million for public transit and about 5 percent of the $39.5 billion allocated for education in the package, Rendell said.
…
Schools will be able to use funding to prevent cutbacks, layoffs and modernize schools, Rendell said. Some highway projects could get underway as early as the end of April in the state, Rendell said. Locally, SEPTA expects to receive in the neighborhood of $200 million, but is still awaiting details of how dollars will be allocated, SEPTA Chief Financial Officer Rich Burnfield said.
The urbanist in me is going to put up the sarcastic “thank goodness that those highway projects can get underway so quickly” refrain. Gotta say, I wish those funding figures for highways/bridges and transit could have been reversed but this clearly isn’t Western Europe. In the grand scheme of what the stimulus was supposed to accomplish - putting people to work and sending us on our way to a more sustainable infrastructure - $200 million doesn’t seem like a whole heckuva lot. I’m pretty sure we won’t be seeing that Roosevelt Expressway or Broad Street to the Navy Yard rail extension any time soon. So we’ll all stay tuned to see whether it is in fact $200 million and what it will be used for.
Anyone for restoring the Route 23 Super Trolley?
February 18th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Cost overruns on the Market-Frankford El restoration reached $290 M. How far is $200 M gonna go?
February 19th, 2009 at 10:07 am
@crd: My point exactly! I’m not going to just return $200 m but when you get down to the level of individual transit systems it really makes it clear just how crappy the overall amount for transit in the stimulus is. And as I understand it, this is supposed to be for capital improvements, not for improvements to operations. Otherwise, I think $200 m would go a long way towards a improving information delivery on train platforms and at bus stops with signs saying where the bus is and how long it will be before it arrives. Having waited at the 23 stop at 12th and Market for 25 minutes, I can tell you it seems like an hour when you don’t know when the bus is coming.