Sic(k) Transit

Why does SEPTA hate us so much?

by Steve Conn

SEPTA's workers and management want your help. They need your help. And it might be easier to get it if SEPTA's workers and management didn't make it so obvious that they don't really care about you.

While SEPTA's management and its unions spend most their time at each other's throats, lurching from labor actions to budget crises and back again, they can at least agree on this much: Customer service doesn't matter too much to either of them.

If you've ever ridden SEPTA on a regular basis, you can fill in your own stories here. Rude or indifferent operators on buses and trolleys. Filthy subway stations and cars. Byzantine rules that govern transfers, token purchases and day passes. All of that comes home to roost for SEPTA at a moment like this when the agency is fighting for funding in Harrisburg.

Its riders could well be effective political lobbyists. Many, I suspect, have been thoroughly alienated by a transit system that punishes them routinely with small indignities.

In short, SEPTA is run for those who have no other choice, and thus it treats too many of its riders with contempt. Those who do have other choices, of course, too often choose not to take SEPTA. So at a moment when SEPTA needs all the friends it can get, it is discovering that it hasn't worked very hard to make them.

SEPTA's recent announcement that it will eliminate transfers reveals that its board doesn't get it. On paper, SEPTA ought to be one of the nation's premier transit systems and part of the reason it isn't is because the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The system isn't really integrated very well. Transfers, as clumsy as they are, did at least allow people to affordably move between different parts of the system and thus between different parts of the region.

Had SEPTA figured out a better way for people to transfer — starting with more free ones — I suspect it would have made up any revenue lost initially in a longer-term growth in passengers. Without any sort of discounted transfer, SEPTA's new slogan can be: "You can't get there from here."

Nor has it done much to entice new riders to the system, even as more and more people want to get out of their cars for environmental and financial reasons, and to preserve their own sanity.

SEPTA, like it or not, is at the center of this region's future. The roads already strain beyond capacity with car traffic, and the age of big highway projects is largely over. Mass transit is the only way to keep people, and thus the economy, moving. SEPTA needs to be well-funded and it needs to work.

Yet, it would be far easier to make the case for more state funding — funding it absolutely deserves — if SEPTA were run well and had a growing, enthusiastic ridership committed to making the system even better. Instead, when SEPTA shows up in Harrisburg it resembles a social-service project, a lazy relative who demands money from the family but seems to do little to earn it.

Putting riders at the center of SEPTA's agenda, rather than contract negotiations and lobbying efforts, will require a cultural sea change on the part of SEPTA's ineffective management and its ossified unions, and it might well cost some money in the short term. SEPTA will have to spend on more cleaning, on enforcing its own rules of conduct, on training its workers to be courteous and helpful. But as any business knows, you've got to spend money to make money.

In the end, SEPTA might discover that happier riders will make its other problems easier to solve.

Steven Conn is the author of Metropolitan Philadelphia: Living with the Presence of the Past (University of Pennsylvania Press).