SEPTA’s new Accelerate vision offers much to welcome. It proposes major improvements across the region, including Regional Rail service frequent enough to become part of everyday life rather than a trip planned around a timetable. Chestnut Hill East is among the lines promised trains every 15 minutes or better.

Chestnut Hill West (CHW) gets a different answer: hourly service. SEPTA’s Regional Rail Master Plan says its ridership modeling supports that decision because our line offers “duplicative service.”

Duplicative to whom?

Tell a working parent who walks from western Mt. Airy to Upsal, Carpenter or Richard Allen Lane that a station way over on the Chestnut Hill East line serves the same trip. Tell students commuting to school or seniors traveling to medical appointments that the other railroad is an adequate replacement.

The East and West lines come close together in parts of Chestnut Hill. Elsewhere they serve different streets and different walks. An hourly train can make work and childcare pickup schedules incompatible. A cancellation or delay can mean late fees and missed pickup deadlines. School communities at Penn Charter, Germantown Friends and Springside Chestnut Hill could also benefit from more frequent service. Those institutions alone serve over 3,300 students and probably about a third as many employees, alongside the many students and employees at Jefferson East Falls, and Drexel’s Queen Lane campuses, all served by our Chestnut Hill West line.

SEPTA’s weekday timetable offers a revealing starting point for testing alternatives. From the first morning departure at Chestnut Hill West to the last evening departure, trains leave an average of about 52 minutes apart; much of the day, the gap is an hour. Working through the published Chestnut Hill West and Fox Chase trips, which run through Center City as connected services, I find that covering the full weekday timetable requires at least six trainsets given the nature of the current weekday schedules.

Now, consider what those trainsets could do in a more regular schedule. Given that it is a 180-minute round trip from CHW to Fox Chase and back (CHW trains continue on to Fox Chase and then return to CHW, going through Center City each way), six continuously working sets should theoretically produce a train every 30 minutes. If the round trip was be shortened to 160 minutes by reducing time spent turning at each end from 20 minutes to 10, just eight sets would theoretically produce a train every 20 minutes.

That would be three departures an hour instead of one, with only one-third more trainsets than the six needed to cover today’s combined timetable. Crews, maintenance, track capacity, operations alongside Amtrak and the cost of running more trips all matter. But SEPTA should investigate better service for CHW, not leave our essential neighborhood line at hourly service while dreaming big elsewhere. According to the latest data I could find, Chestnut Hill West actually serves more passengers annually than Chestnut Hill East, adding insult to injury.

We should support Accelerate’s ambition for the many communities it could serve. We should also insist that SEPTA apply that ambition here. Publish the ridership and access analysis behind “duplicative.” Show what it would take to run Chestnut Hill West trains every 30 minutes throughout the day and into the evening. Test a 20-minute option. Name the obstacles, the remedies and the costs.

These stations helped shape the connected neighborhoods we value today. Their riders deserve more than an hourly train and an explanation that another line exists somewhere to the east.

Greg Smith is a financial analyst who lives and works in Mt. Airy. He is a Springside Chestnut Hill Academy parent, a board member of West Mt. Airy Neighbors, and a Save The Train volunteer. The views expressed here are his own.