Passenger rail service: A bonanza for bureaucrats

Given the remarkable transformation of Phoenixville, why would residents jeopardize a quality of life that could be adversely affected by the restoration of rail service from Philadelphia?

This was one thought that crossed my mind over the course of a recent Schuylkill River Passenger Rail Authority hearing at the Pottstown Campus of Montgomery County Community College.

My first impression was that a meeting scheduled at 3 p.m. on a

Monday was not intended to attract significant public participation, even with a remote video feed. My second impression was that most of the 50 or so in attendance had a vested interest in moving the project forward.

At one point, the chairman of the hearing, Republican Berks County Commissioner Christian Leinbach, remarked that support for restored mass transit was significant. As passenger train service to Philadelphia ceased decades ago due, in part, to a lack of interest, I questioned what has changed.

If anything, Philadelphia has far less to offer. Its permissive drug culture and normalization of criminality have bled into surrounding suburbs. A renewal of rail service could fasttrack such dysfunction into our backyards.

An unspoken but logical consequence of restored rail service with stations in Reading, Pottstown and Phoenixville is “development” on the order of that envisioned in metropolitan Boston where the state has assumed control over local zoning in communities proximate to rail lines.

A variation on the Obama Administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program, the intention is high-density, multi-family residential property development. It is difficult to believe that such would have a positive effect on our communities given the impacts on law and order and, infrastructure.

My guess is that most reading this opinion piece have been exposed to projects that took on lives of their own and were ultimately not what was envisioned or promised.

While restoration of rail service would clearly benefit developers and the politicians who benefit from their support, other winners appear few and far between. It is a subject to be discussed, particularly at the township level where control over zoning could be undermined by those who live elsewhere. Mark Furlong, North Coventry