After seeing SEPTA avoid reality by pushing forward with a $2 billion MetroRail plan that had been rejected by the Federal Transit Administration, PennDOT Secretary Allen Biehler intervened and set up a new task force to rescope the project and get it moving once again.
The move validates what the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers (DVARP) have been saying for four years: that the SEPTA plan for separate tracks and such high-frequency service all the way to Reading was based on faulty estimates of cost and ridership, and had no realistic chance of winning federal funding.
Realistic funding projections from federal, state, and local sources make about $900 million available for the project. With that budget, SEPTA can choose between improving and sharing existing freight tracks and having a conventional commuter rail line all the way to Reading, or getting a few miles of the gold-plated Metrorail service: perhaps as far as Phoenixville. If the latter is chosen, it is highly unlikely that the line will ever reach its full 62 mile length.
DVARP President Donald Nigro said, "DVARP will seek a meeting with SEPTA's consultants to answer any questions they might have about DVARP's analysis of the Schuylkill Valley Metro Major Investment Study." The 73-page report DVARP completed two years ago documents how the study was slanted in favor of SEPTA's preferred alternative. Ridership models were used improperly, while costs of competing conventional rail alternatives were inflated and travel time estimates were biased. The DVARP report also exposed a fatal technical flaw in SEPTA's plan: the planned infrastructure was not capable of handling the very high-frequency service on which SEPTA based its projection. DVARP's report document can be found at www.dvarp.org/svm/ under Formal comments to the Federal Transit Administration (some appendix material excluded).
In that report, DVARP urged SEPTA to change course and responsibly plan an attainable, cost-effective passenger rail alternative for the entire Philadelphia-King of Prussia-Reading corridor to meet financial and operating performance expectations.
"It took several years," Nigro stated, "but now the outside entities have spoken, and forced SEPTA to abandon this gold-plated proposal."