{"id":14427,"date":"2021-07-01T13:11:13","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T17:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/?p=14427"},"modified":"2021-07-02T09:36:47","modified_gmt":"2021-07-02T13:36:47","slug":"going-big-and-going-home-philadelphias-mass-transit-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/2021\/07\/going-big-and-going-home-philadelphias-mass-transit-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Going Big and Going Home: Philadelphia\u2019s Mass Transit Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg made a promise. His <\/em>administration would be non-partisan. At the inaugural in December 1911, according to historian Lloyd M. Abernethy, Blankenburg proposed to operate \u201con a sound business basis with experts rather than politicians at the heads of municipal departments.\u201d The mayor \u201csurrounded himself with able and dedicated professionals\u201d and spent four years envisioning, modernizing and improving city services\u2014especially mass transit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Philadelphia had 600 miles of streetcar lines, but the passenger experience was slow and disconnected. The city\u2019s \u201cmeagre 14.7 miles of high-speed trackage compared very unfavorably with other major cities: Boston had twice as much; Chicago, 10 times more; and New York 20 times as much.\u201d Blankenburg recruited an experienced railroad executive, A. Merritt Taylor, to direct his new transit department. And Taylor immediately took a deep dive assessing the situation and developing a comprehensive, city-wide plan that would quadruple the city\u2019s high-speed trackage to nearly 60 miles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took two years for Taylor to complete his study and present his vision for a mass transit system. In an essay entitled “Philadelphia’s Transit Problem,\u201d Taylor pointed out that \u201clarge cities of the United States are constantly outgrowing the capacity of existing facilities for public service.\u201d These systems \u201cmay be likened to the arterial system of the human body.\u201d They can \u201cbecome inadequate and choke the circulation which they are designed to carry.\u201d They often \u201cfail to expand as the body grows\u201d falling short of meeting the city\u2019s \u201cincreasing requirements.\u201d That, Taylor said, would lead neighborhoods to \u201cwither.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without a healthy transit system, \u201cthe body as a whole must suffer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cRapid Transit Lines Recommended for Immediate Construction with Princial Surface Transfer Lines,” February 12, 1915 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Philadelphia, Taylor pointed out, wasn\u2019t a city of tenements and flats. Rather, it \u201chas always been a city of individual homes spread over a comparatively large area.\u201d Now we are \u201cconfronted with the necessity of providing rapid transit facilities to eliminate existing congestion of traffic and the excessive loss of time in traveling the increasingly great distances between available residential areas and places of employment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This \u201cpractical, scientific and complete study of what is needed\u201d led to a series of \u201ccrystallized\u201d recommendations in a report published in 1913. To sell his plan, Taylor and his allies released a battery of illustrated articles, maps and presentations\u2014including a giant, electrified model.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tentative Location of Future Rapid Transit Lines, Report of Transit Commissioner \/ Rapid Transit Development \/ City of Philadelphia, July 1913.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Taylor\u2019s \u201cprogram,” wholeheartedly endorsed by Mayor Blankenburg, urged the immediate construction of twenty-six miles of high-speed lines, subway and elevated, that would effectively connect with the existing \u201csurface system\u201d extending \u201cthe advantages of rapid transit \u2026 as equally as practicable to every front door in Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPassengers will be enabled to travel in a forward direction \u2026 between every important section of the city and every other important section of the city, conveniently, quickly and comfortably by way of the combined surface and high-speed lines, regardless of the number of transfers required in so doing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Rapid Transit Lines recommended for immediate construction with surface feeder lines, November 18, 1914 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

At the groundbreaking for the Broad Street Subway, the first major element in the plan, Taylor asked the public to think of the system as \u201cone great machine [designed to] transport passengers quickly and conveniently between all points on the combined system . . . by the joint use of the surface system and the high-speed system for one five-cent fare.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAny citizen could ride from any part of Philadelphia to any other part of the city, for five cents and within thirty minutes time,\u201d echoed the mayor. \u201cWhen such a condition becomes an accomplished fact, then our great body of skilled labor, 300,000 strong, can choose its residence in any part of the city, irrespective of the location of the factory or office in which they find employment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Detail of \u201cRapid Transit Lines Recommended for Immediate Construction with Principal Surface Transfer Lines,\u201d February 12, 1915 (PhillyHistory.org)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The cost of the system: about $46 million, with another $12 million more for equipment. (In today’s dollars, that would be an investment of $1.5 billion). Without delays, according to the mayor, \u201cthese high-speed lines could be in active operation by 1919 or 1920, thereby giving Philadelphia one of the most comprehensive transit systems in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But as was often the case, politics trumped transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After many delays, the Broad Street Subway opened in 1928. By then, the “Taylor Plan” was largely abandoned. The system\u2019s most visionary element\u2014possibly its proudest single feature\u2014a subway-surface line running from City Hall, under Logan Square, up the Parkway to the Art Museum before travelling north on 29th Street to Henry Avenue and beyond to Roxborough . . . never materialized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Sources: A. Merritt Taylor. Report of Transit Commissioner: City of Philadelphia, July, 1912<\/a>. [Philadelphia, 1913], Vol 1; \u201cTaylor Plans $57,578,000 Transit Development for Philadelphia.\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, July 31, 1913; Conference of American Mayors, Philadelphia, and American Academy of Political and Social Science. \u201cProceedings of the Conference of American Mayors on Public Policies as to Municipal Utilities,\u201d<\/a> (Philadelphia, American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1915); \u201cMayor Launches Work on Subway as Crowd Cheers,\u201d The Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>, September 12, 1915; A . Merritt Taylor. “Philadelphia’s Transit Problem.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science<\/em> 57 (1915): 28-32; Donald W. Disbrow. “Reform in Philadelphia Under Mayor Blankenburg, 1912-1916.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies<\/em> 27, no. 4 (1960): 379-96; Lloyd M Abernethy, \u201cProgressivism, 1905-1919,\u201d in Russell Weigley, Philadelphia: A 300 Year History<\/em> (W. W. Norton & Company, 1982).]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg made a promise. His administration would be non-partisan. At the inaugural in December 1911, according to historian Lloyd M. Abernethy, Blankenburg proposed to operate \u201con a sound business basis with experts rather than politicians at the heads of municipal departments.\u201d The mayor \u201csurrounded himself with able and dedicated professionals\u201d and spent four […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.phillyhistory.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}