25 years after the victory of combining two separate rail systems into a single system with Center City as a midpoint rather than an endpoint, we’ve pushed as far as we possibly could from that dream.

Multiple sources are reporting that as soon as Joe Casey signs off on it, we could see an end to Vukan Vuchic’s R designators as early as July. The plan was initially announced at the February 2 Citizen Advisory Committee meeting.

There’s often been complaints of the “confusion” caused by having two of each line, but I never bought that argument. Every subway and bus goes in two different directions, and no one gets confused. What really brings on the confusion is simply how the lines are operated. Roughly 1/3 of trains travel from end to end on their paired lines, so the pairings have become meaningless. One has to wonder if operations would run differently had the Swampoodle Connection been built and the pairing system been fully implemented.

The Transport Politic pulls no punches and calls it, “a waste of transit capacity on a grand scale, and a disappointment for the agency’s 130,000 daily riders.” SEPTA truly is wasting the potential of what could be the best regional rail system in the country. Unfortunately, rather than invest the time, effort, and money into analyzing ridership patterns and figuring out how to better adapt the current system to take full advantage of being able to through-route trains from suburb to suburb, SEPTA is going to take the path of least resistance and simply eliminate any notion of through-routing.