SEPTA Awarded United States Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity Grant
November 23, 2021
SEPTA is thrilled to be awarded a $15M grant through the United States Department of Transportation’s Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity Grant – or RAISE.
With RAISE Grant funding, SEPTA will make greatly needed accessibility improvements to 37th and 19th Street Trolley Stations.
Together, these stations provide vital access to employment, healthcare and education for residents of West and Southwest Philadelphia, and we are pleased to be making these investments on behalf of our customers and the communities we serve.
We are extremely grateful to Senator Casey and Congressman Evans for supporting our application, and to the members of our Congressional delegation for funding the RAISE program, which enables large-scale projects like these to advance.
We are also very thankful to the Department of Transportation for their thorough evaluation of SEPTA’s proposal.
Station accessibility is a very important part of SEPTA’s capital program. While we have considerable work to do to achieve our goal of making SEPTA accessible to all, we have a positive story to tell that is only getting better.
System-wide, 58 percent of our rail stations are accessible. In the City of Philadelphia 25 of 28 Market-Frankford Line Stations and 12 of 25 Broad Street Line Stations are fully accessible. And our most recent capital budget includes a commitment to make both lines fully accessible within the 12-year capital program.
Funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will bring our accessibility goals into closer reach, and again we are grateful for the efforts of our Congressional delegation to pass this historic legislation and deliver critical investment in public transportation.
Through the RAISE Grant, SEPTA will be bring both 37th and 19th Street Stations into full compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
We will be installing 2 new elevators at each station, reconfiguring entrances to improve accessibility, raising the platforms to accommodate future accessible trolley cars, as well as other infrastructure improvements to enhance conditions and operations at the stations.
These projects are more than stand-alone accessibility projects - 37th and 19th Street Stations will be the first trolley station accessibility projects to advance under SEPTA’s transformative Trolley Modernization Program. With Trolley Modernization, SEPTA is undertaking a once-in-a-century initiative to re-imagine one of the nation’s largest light rail networks, one that will dramatically improve transit accessibility, capacity, and reliability for the benefit of communities. As part of this major transformation, we will be making all of the trolley stations accessible, procuring a new fleet of ADA-accessible trolleys and improving the street track infrastructure, which together will increase passenger capacity by more than 150 percent and make the system more usable and accessible
Trolley Modernization is one of our Projects of Significance that we are committed to advancing in order to move the region forward. Today, with funding from the federal RAISE Grant, we are able to kick off the physical construction of this critical initiative.
19th and 37th Street Stations and the Trolley Modernization program are going to be critical to the region’s recovery and future success.
