The southern line adds about 4 more miles to the PA-309 line that was chosen.
The thing I liked about the southern line back when the bypass was being proposed, was the connection with the Turnpike at a location where it could effectively serve I-78 to the east of there.
According to the article, at least by omission, the list of interchanges would not include a Turnpike interchange.
I thought it was a bit strange that there was no Turnpike interchange with the proposed southern route shown...but then again, this is PA we're talking about. I wouldn't have put it past them to not plan that interchange!
They typically didn't, or relegated the Turnpike interchange to sometime in the future after the PennDOT freeway was built.
That was the case with the I-476/I-276 interchange, PennDOT had a scheme worked out to connect it to the Plymouth Meeting local interchange with the Turnpike, until some day when the direct connection could be built. Fortunately the PTC and PennDOT worked out a funding arrangement to build the direct interchange connection at the same time.
Nice that the newspaper showed the southern line. I looked around for about 10 minutes and I found no such map posted on the Internet. PennDOT has historical maps for every tenth year, but the 1980 and 1970 maps did not show the proposed I-78 Bypass route.