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Presentation by @MontCoPlanning on new Turnpike interchanges. Mission is explicitly to attract offices away from better-accessed places (incl transit-oriented) to highway-adjacent business parks
Some of these are certainly Regional Rail adjacent (Fort Washington, Norristown) but many others are not. Why is Montco neglecting unused potential capacity in RR while urging taxpayers to fund costly interchanges?
They are literally building in expectation of 36% VMT increase in autoscapes like Willow Grove. Insane.
FEED THE LOS GOD
This is your traffic engineering lobby at work. Assumption that the interchanges *will* be built and local road widenings *must* happen in conjunction
Prepare for 3-4 lane road widenings for all of these local suburban roads. Good bye bike lanes, hello traffic deaths
Based on this I'm guessing we're about 50 years away from the planners learning about induced demand
Regional planning simply has no normative goals about how to change transportation mode share in the long term. Just forecasts additional population and the requisite road infrastructure to boot
With a no-build, average vehicle delay would literally double from... 2 to 4 minutes. Somehow this is worth 100's of millions in funding
In a build scenario, a quadrupling of delay, a blatant acknowledgement that the road network would perform far worse. But this is somehow justified because of 
economic development
economic development
So instead, we "mitigate the local impacts" by widening the local roads!!! We're not in 2020 anymore, this is 1960
This plan would forever entrench a postwar garden apartment suburb with the potential for frequent bus transit, into a car-dependent hellscape.
And remember, the planners explicitly couch their language in "long-range" planning to ignore any "one-off" trends they don't think fit in their conception (like a pandemic or reduced VMT). What they think is a focused vision is actually tunnel vision.
Montco funds a paltry $5.5M/yr into the SEPTA operating budget, and gets a skeletal bus network and hourly Regional Rail in return. Instead of building a legit transit network that could transform the office parks, the Turnpike is their savior. May God have mercy on their souls
