Infrastructural Shadows: How Unbuilt Transit Shapes Cities

Jay Arzu, Ph.D. Candidate, City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania

In 1913, Philadelphia's Transit Commissioner A. Merritt Taylor proposed extending rapid transit up Roosevelt Boulevard into the farmland of Northeast Philadelphia. More than a century later, that subway has never been built. My dissertation, The Roosevelt Boulevard Subway: A Century of Promise, Politics, and Persistence, 1913–2026, asks why, and argues that the answer matters far beyond Philadelphia.

I introduce the concept of "infrastructural shadows" to describe what unbuilt projects actually do to cities. These are not simply failed plans. They are persistent forces that reorganize land use, shape political coalitions, and structure planning debates for generations. Along the Roosevelt Boulevard corridor, developers built dense rowhouse neighborhoods in anticipation of stations that existed only on paper. Sears constructed a complete subway station beneath its department store at Adams Avenue for trains that never came. Real estate ads in the 1930s marketed homes by their proximity to future subway stops. The result is a landscape of urban-scale density with suburban-scale car dependence, a contradiction Northeast Philadelphia still lives with today.

The dissertation traces this story across three periods. The first (1913 to 1970) examines how technical planning collided with machine politics and white flight to kill the project even after voters approved bond funding and construction had begun. The second (1970 to 2003) asks why Philadelphia failed to build rail transit during the very decades that Washington, Atlanta, and other cities succeeded with federal support. Through comparative institutional analysis, I show that the difference was not money or ridership potential but governance: regional authorities, dedicated funding, and political leaders willing to stake their careers on transit. Philadelphia had none of these. The third period (2003 to present) documents the project's contemporary revival, including my own work founding the Roosevelt Boulevard Subway Movement in 2022, organizing community town halls, and helping advance PennDOT's "Route for Change" corridor study now underway.

That dual role, researcher and advocate, is itself a methodological contribution. Combined with archival research and fifteen stakeholder interviews ranging from former SEPTA CEO Leslie Richards to longtime community organizers who remember the 1960s bond campaigns, this approach surfaces dynamics that detached observation misses: how coalitions negotiate strategy, how institutional memory travels across generations of advocates, and how infrastructure becomes a vessel for questions about recognition and civic belonging.

Cities are shaped not only by what they build but by what they keep almost building. Understanding those shadows is urgent work as American cities navigate historic federal infrastructure funding while confronting legacies of deferral that no single grant can undo.

Jay Arzu is a transportation policy scholar, advocate, and urban planner. He holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPA from SDA Bocconi as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar, and is a recipient of the Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship and CBCF Transportation and Equity
Research Fellowship. He serves as Executive Director of the Roosevelt Boulevard Subway Movement, Co-Founder and CMO of Collective Form, and Adjunct Professor at Temple University's Tyler School of Art and Architecture. A native of the South Bronx, Jay has been recognized as one of Philadelphia's 150 Most
Influential Leaders.