Monthly Cross County Pass?

Is it safe to assume that 69th St Terminal is considered a suburban location since it's located in Upper Darby?

I'm looking at houses in Drexel Hill and would likely sell one of our cars and commute via 101/102 and the 100 to Gulph Mills and I'm trying to estimate costs. I want to be sure the County Pass would work for me.

Thanks,

Bob

Ah, the eternal Best Fare Problem. Given SEPTA's fare swamp - I mean structure - you're almost forced to get out the calculator and sometimes even an Algebra I book.

AFAIK 69th St. terminal is classed as a suburban location.(*) You really have 3 alternatives:

(a) The CC pass is a flat $85 with no zone charges.

(b) A City Division Transpass. That's a possibility because it's good for one suburban zone anywhere; there are no transfer charges, only zones. You could ride the trolley from Drexel Hill (my old home area, btw - you should enjoy living there!) and just pay the zone fare from Bryn Mawr to Gulph Mills. Any additional trips such as the 95/124/125 would be included since boarding is considered a "first zone". The average monthly total there would be $70 + 40*(50c /zone) = $90.

(c) Tokens and transfers. Probably not reasonable if you're working a full month and/or expect to do more than just out-and-back commuting. You have a $1.30 token + a 60c transfer at 69th St. plus a 50c zone fare between Bryn Mawr and Gulph Mills. That's $4.80/day or $96 for a typical 20-day month assuming no extra trips. And remember, SEPTA is Serious About Change - quarters, nickels, dimes, Sacs ...

So long as you never go into the city, the CC pass wins. You also can use it on the Regional Rails outside of the city w/o paying extra, if that matters. The downside is that you would have to pay an extra charge if you ever needed to go into Philly.

If you go downtown enough you might recoup the extra five bucks for a City pass. It's good on the El and any other city transit line without an extra charge. You can't use it on the RRD during the week, but on weekends and holidays you can use a City pass anywhere on any line without a zone charge.

Yeah, the whole thing works out to be a crapshoot, especially if there's a chance you won't use a pass the entire month. If you take a vacation you have to go re-figure everything based on the cost of tokens vs. a weekly City Transpass, since there is no weekly equivalent of the CC pass. And then there was the time I bought my nice shiny monthly pass and then got sent on a 10-day business trip. I had to swallow the unused cost, but for a week and a half I was eating and sleeping on an expense account so I still probably came out ahead.

Whatever you do, don't let SEPTA's genius planners try to talk you into buying one of the numbered-zone TrailPasses. They're priced for RRD use, but I've seen more cases than I care to think about where the info-desk person insisted a suburban transit rider had to buy one even if they never set foot on a Regional Rail train.

HELLO 1234!!! IT SHOULDN'T BE THIS COMPLICATED!!!

(*) Interestingly enough, you can't use a CC pass (watch out for the clowns who insist it's a "Cross Country" pass!) on the MFSE between 69th St. and Millbourne even though they're both outside the city limits. No doubt it's 'cause there's no conductor to check the pass and you could just head on downtown.

I remember sitting down with calculator and figuring it was actually better to buy a Cross-County Pass (bus to 69th Street) and then using tokens to take the El into Center City than it was to purchase a Zone 4 pass. This was especially true when I didn't go in to work every day. The minimal savings though wasn't worth the hassle and I think I ended up just going back to the Zone 4 Pass.

That's very surprising, to say the least. I assume you were only riding the transit (bus/trolley/subway/El) lines and not any of the Regional Rails. It would be quite difficult to plan a trip that would make a Zone 4 pass worth considering even if you eventually rejected it, since its price is based on the much-higher RRD fare structure.

About 4 years ago I worked out a cost comparison for the late and lamented original version of phillyfriend.com(*). In every standard scenario we came up with, the numbered zone RRD passes were completely out of the ballpark for anyone riding just the transit lines. In some cases you'd have to ride 35 days a month with no days off to even approach breaking even versus a Transpass.

I don't know your exact situation but most of the bus routes serving 69th Street are no more than Zone 2s. What route(s) were you using for Zone 4? For Zone 2, you'd just need a Transpass that would cover both the El and the first bus zone, then just some change for the second zone.

Remember that a Transpass is good all the way out through Zone 1. But on top of that many people are not aware that a Transpass is also valid for a single zone of travel anywhere on a transit route. You only pay extra for multiple zones when you are on the same vehicle. If your trip came from the far suburbs and involved another transfer before you reached 69th Street, that transfer would also be covered by the Transpass.

What does put a piece of barbed wire somewhere uncomfortable is the repeated insistence of many SEPTA employees and their website that an RRD pass is required to ride suburban transit lines beyond Zone 1. Ain't so.

I know I have a reputation for sounding like a small bird ("cheap, cheap") but I would rather carry a CTD Transpass and put up with the hassle of carrying some quarters or Sacs for the zone charges, as opposed to paying train fares to ride a bus or the El. Just one guy's opinion, btw!


(*)The name has since been bought by another tourist info company that does not provide transportation info on any of its sites, sadly.

As a general rule, if most of your riding is in suburban zones and you do not ride the railroad into center city very often, the Cross County pass is the best buy. It gives you everything except the Center City Zone on the railroad and the city zone on CTD at no extra cost. CTD would cost an additional $0.50 for the zone except on weekends when it is free.

You need to do a lot of riding on CTD to make this a bad deal. Of course if you only ride transit and only ride one zone at a time the Transpass is the better deal. To ride the railroad into the center city zone you would need a $3.00 ticket with the pass on weekdays so this would eat up any savings on the pass rather quickly.

Septa rips off people going to Trenton, forgetting that most of them are Pennsylvanians heading to New York. The single ride fare is quoted as $7.00. A ten trip ticket is $60.00. But the single trip can be had for $6.00 if you buy two tickets, a zone one ticket for $3.00, and an intermediate fare three or more zones for $3.00.

The whole problem with SEPTA's fare structure is that it is so complex that it can flummox almost anybody. There are so many options and "gotchas" such as the $7 vs. $6 anomaly that there is often no rule of thumb that says what the best choice is. You're forced into working everything out almost on a month-by-month or even case-by-case basis.

When I worked in CC many of us in the R&D area ended up building little spreadsheet models to figure out what the most cost-effective payment choice was. All right, some of it was geeks showing off, but there were enough variables that each person ended up with custom calculations for their own special situations. When I was contributing to the old PhillyFriend site I tried to construct an on-line fare calculator that would serve as a more general tool. I finally gave up because it was becoming so complicated as to be almost unusable. If those of us with piles of technical experience have trouble, what's the situation like for people without that background? You shouldn't need linear algebra to pay a train fare, fer cryin' out loud!

To me the most disgusting aspect of all this is not just the inconvenience and waste. It's that on two separate occasions SEPTA employees (both management types) told me, off the record, that there were others in the hierarchy who expressly do not want to simplify the system! The rationale was that SEPTA would lose money under a simpler system because a certain percentage of riders cannot untangle the maze and thus regularly overpay their fares. Unfortunately I've seen enough examples to make me think there is some truth here.

time to whip out my trusty TI-83!