CComMack wrote:The 4,000 passengers a day figure is just ridership at the Mall itself; a through-rider on the 124 Gulph Mills-Chesterbrook would not be counted in that figure. I'm sorry I expected you to know that when you didn't, but it's the truth. Some of that is transferring passengers, which is why I brought up the 92, but the vast, vast majority is actually going to or from the mall itself.
You'll get no argument from me that SEPTA could do a better job with what it has; I'd run an actual Norristown-KoP connector route timed off the Regional Rail in addition to the circuitous 99, to pull pressure off of the Wissahickon ridership you mentioned, but I don't run SEPTA.
the 92 is an irrelevant joke, it has been since I rode it as a kid. the fact that it's still alive and kicking with its 9% farebox ratio says a lot about SEPTA and transit.
many passengers transfer at the mall, as someone who actually rode said service, there was most certainly a change of passengers at kop. most got off, a small but not irrelevant contingent got on. assuming they didn't live at the mall, they must have used some other bus service to get to the mall in order to transfer since SEPTA has made the mall into a transfer center (for better or worse) connecting routes norristown/bridgeport, phoenixville,etc. west of the mall, the 124 mostly delivered people to a handful of corp parks along swedesford rd with a few hardy souls making the entire trip. more to the point you've ignored the riders actual point of origin which is not 69th st. you state 4k riders per day at the mall but presumably these figures are on/off's at the mall which include transfers. more to the point, I don't disagree the mall is a busy place, but until SEPTA runs a reasonably intelligent distribution system and provides real data we can't know that this extension is, in fact, better or worse.
as you have ackowledged, SEPTA isn't doing what it should be. It never made sense to me why SEPTA wasn't doing everything it could to minimize drive time on the schuylkill, or even why it didn't provide any direct service from whereever the people at wissahickon transfer lived.
let us consider two expansion studies and two routes which I hope will be useful.
media line and the west chester expansion. the nhsl and the KoP extension. so far, SEPTA has stated that ridership on the west chester extension (about 1900 new riders by dvprc's conservative estimates) at 4 stations over 6.3 miles (cue asburdity). the media line is roughly the same in length as the nhsl. they both have a similar number of passengers per day. how are they different? frequency and farebox. the media line has a farebox ratio of 64% while the nhsl has a farebox ratio of 25%. the reason? the nhsl has lower fares and higher frequency. these two things also result in much greater ridership. the west chester extension had something like ten trains a day. what would the new KoP extension look like with ten trains a day? the fact is they minimize the operating loss on the elwyn line (or think they are doing so) with higher fares and less service. It appears to be successful in mimimizing the operating loss based on septa's allocation formula. the problem is when they go do study an extension, they look at capital cost per rider. well, capital cost per rider is a function of fares and frequency. all things being equal, more frequency and lower fares would make a project more economical on a capital cost per rider basis.
chesterbrook: SEPTA has a powerful tool in Amtrak's four track railroad (19.9 miles from suburban to Paoli) but the service model is weak, particularly for reverse commuters. it takes 30 minutes to reach paoli on a flyer something that doesn't exist for the reverse commute. These trains are big, they can handle an influx of riders but septa chooses to keep the "bus crowd" off the trains even if they are moving in opposite directions and as a result they leave their rail assets underutilized.
