The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation wants to know if you’d ride its proposed “Pop-Up Metro” along Columbus Boulevard.
Get a compelling long read and must-have lifestyle tips in your inbox every Sunday morning — great with coffee!
This map shows all the existing bus and rail routes that bring passengers to and carry them along the Delaware waterfront. The orange line shows where the Pop-Up Metro will run. / Map by Hinge Collective for Delaware River Waterfront Corporation
I’m sure most, if not all, of you have been to a pop-up food truck festival, pop-up beer garden or pop-up party.
The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation (DRWC), the quasi-public agency that manages the waterfront’s public attractions, now has a question for you: Would you ride a “Pop-Up Metro” up and down the Delaware riverfront?
Pop-Up Metro is the name of the company that approached the DRWC with a simple proposition: We can deliver the waterfront transit line you’ve long wanted quickly and for less money.
A unit of the Pittsburgh-based Railroad Development Corporation (RDC), Pop-Up Metro takes advantage of improvements in battery technology and refurbished, battery-powered rail transit cars to enable transit operators to adapt existing railroad lines for transit service. Think of it as a metro-in-a-box: Their solution to improving transit comes with all the equipment and facilities included — railcars, accessible platforms, charging stations, operator training, technical support, you name it.
The company is even willing to help adopters clear the regulatory hurdles needed to operate passenger transit on lightly used freight lines like the one on Columbus Boulevard. And the good news here is that the Philadelphia Belt Line Railroad, which owns almost all of the trackage the DRWC wants to use, is a partner on this project.
Pop-Up Metro contacted the DRWC about using its system to build a demonstration rail line down the middle of Columbus Boulevard about a year ago, according to Karen Thompson, director of planning, projects and engagement at the DRWC. Improved transit service on the waterfront has been a key component of the Master Plan for the Central Delaware since its inception in 2009. Previous proposals have focused mainly on light rail transit, either in the form of a separate line or a route connected to SEPTA’s existing trolley lines.
However, says Thompson, “A lot of these projects were very large and would take time” to complete.
“The [Delaware Waterfront] Pop-Up Metro proposal is intriguing because it could happen quicker than some of these,” she continues.
“Getting transit and passenger rail going in the United States is lethargic,” says Pop-Up Metro president Rick Asplundh. “It costs billions, it takes decades, and it’s not working.”
Pop-Up Metro’s secret sauce for fixing this comes from the family-owned company that owns it. RDC has a long track record of running freight lines in the United States (the Iowa Interstate Railroad is the best known) and passenger services in Europe (where it runs the most overnight trains in Germany). So, as Asplundh explains, they decided to come up with “the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup“ of American rail operations.
“We know a lot of short lines and smaller freight railroads in the United States,” he says. “We know their owners. So what we do is work with them.
The proposed Pop-Up Metro on Columbus Boulevard would use refurbished British Rail Class 230 D-Train battery-powered trainsets like the one in this photo. The trains can run for 60 miles between charges at speeds up to 60 mph. They can recharge in as little as 10 minutes. Pop-Up Metro also ensures that the line can operate safely through grade crosslngs like those on Columbus Boulevard. / Photo courtesy Pop-Up Metro, Inc.
“If they’ve got a line that is out of use, like the Philadelphia Belt Line Railroad line on Delaware Avenue [Columbus Boulevard], we say, ‘Listen, we can put the Pop-Up Metro kit on your track and not mess up your operation.’” For lines still in service, Pop-Up Metro works out temporal separation of light passenger and mainline railroad service. For unused lines, it leases the track from the railroad and the Pop-Up Metro package to its operator for a period of up to three years initially.
This also enables organizations like the DRWC to do something that can’t be done with conventional rail transit projects: Conduct real-time, live demonstrations to determine likely long-term ridership instead of running models. If the experiments work out to everyone’s satisfaction, Pop-Up Metro can then either negotiate long-term leases or sell the package to the operator outright.
Pop-Up Metro “can be up and running in a matter of months, not decades,” Asplundh says. The most time-consuming part of the setup process is the people part: “Working with great people like Joe [Forkin, DWRC president] and Karen and the team to build a consensus, build the advocacy, and frankly, to build the funding.”
While neither Thompson nor Asplundh could give cost and project timeline figures for the Waterfront Rail Line proposal, citing confidentiality, Asplundh did offer a comparison with a recently completed light rail transit line in Boston.
“The Green Line Extension” (GLX) — a 4.3-mile extension of the city’s LRT line from Cambridge to Medford — “cost $435 million a mile,” says Asplundh. (It actually cost even more, as the total project cost ran to $2.28 billion.) “Our cost is a rounding error compared to that.”
Pop-Up Metro’s own information sheet states that the cost of installing and operating the line would be less than what it would cost to run a feasibility study for a conventional LRT line. To give you an idea of what that cost might be, a 2005 study to determine whether it made sense to extend St. Louis’ MetroLink LRT further into the city’s Illinois suburbs was estimated to cost anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000. (That would be $241,000 to $321,000 in today’s dollars.)
Think of this, then, as a proof-of-concept experiment that could begin operating as soon as this spring and make the case for long-term financing of the line. This project received a National Science Foundation Civic Innovation Challenge grant to fund the planning.
The pilot Delaware Waterfront Pop-Up Metro transit line would begin at Race Street Pier just below the Ben Franklin Bridge and run south from there to a point somewhere between Queen and Reed streets. The purpose, she said, was to improve mobility along the waterfront and connect several popular waterfront attractions, including Race and Cherry Street piers, Penn’s Landing, Spruce Street Harbor Park, Pier 68 and the Delaware River Trail.
This wouldn’t be the first time passenger rail vehicles ran along the waterfront, however. The original Market Street elevated line ran over Delaware Avenue as far as South Street to connect with ferries to Camden from its opening in 1907 until 1938. And in 1982, the city asked the Buckingham Valley Trolley Association streetcar preservation group to run trolleys along the Belt Line in connection with the city’s 300th anniversary. That line, which ran between the Ben Franklin Bridge and Fitzwater Street, lasted until 1996.
In preparation for launch, the DRWC is conducting a survey that asks “How would you use the Waterfront Rail Line?” You can take the survey on the DRWC’s Pop-Up Metro/Waterfront Rail Line website through February 10. The DRWC seeks feedback from everyone who lives along, visits or might want to visit the Delaware riverfront, no matter where in the region (or beyond it) they might live. The feedback will be used to determine the feasibility of proceeding with the project and how it should operate if it is feasible.
In addition to the DRWC, Pop-Up Metro, the RDC and the Belt Line, Carnegie Mellon University, Metro Labs and Hinge Collective are collaborating on this project.
And by the way, the DRWC isn’t the only local entity interested in Pop-Up Metro: Trains magazine reports that West Chester Borough officials have encouraged SEPTA and Chester County to examine the system as a way to restore rail service to West Chester for much less than it would cost to rebuild the deteriorated stretch of the Media/Wawa Regional Rail Line beyond Wawa.
