I’m fairly new to this site, and I don’t know an awful ot about how transit authorities work, so this might seem elemernatary to many here, but I really don’t understand why SEPTA sucks so badly.
I grew up along the what was then the R3 to West Chester. I was kind of in awe as a kid of what SEPTA did (as far as I could see). They ran trains, scores of them, every day to Philadelphia and back, within a fourth of a mile from my back yard. When I went by the station, I saw the big map with all the lines reaching out in every direction from downtown Philadelphia. To me it was, in the literal sense, awesome.
Then they cut the line back from West Chester to Elwyn. It saddned me, but, in the same way that a child who follows a bad baseball team will believe the management when they say that they know what they’re doing, and that the team is only a little tinkering short of being a contender, I believed SEPTA when they said they knew what they were doing, and that the trains would soon be running back to West Chester.
It wasn’t until I moved away and saw some other transit authorities that I came to see how bad SEPTA is. It has now been 28 years since SEPTA gave up on running trains to West Chester. In that time, New Jersey Transit took over AMTRAK’s Atlantic City line and lengthened the line into 30th Street Station, and lengthened eletrification of the North Jersey Coast Line by 16 miles. They opened the River Line. They built the Secaucus Junction Station and are slowly laying track along the Lackawanna Cutoff, and will in time run trains to East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania and, later, to Scranton.
Sine SEPTA cut the West Chester Branch by half, Virginia Rail Express began service, and now runs trains from Washington, D.C. to manassas and to Fredericksburg. The Fredericksburg Line, 55 miles long, is longer than any of SEPTA’s routes. The Manassas line, at 35 miles, is longer than all but two of SEPTA’s lines (The Doylestown line is a fraction of a mile longer, and the Newark line is about three miles longer). The only expansion that SEPTA has undertaken in this time is to extend the R2 from Marcus Hook Line to Wilmington and then to Newark, and to lengthen the R5 from Downingtown to Parkesburg (since cut back to Thorndale).
People have been asking for SEPTA to run trains back to West Chester for 28 years now. Newtown has been waiting for 31 years. People in Phoenixville, Pottstown and Quakertown haven’t had service for 33 years. SEPTA cut its R6 back from Ivy Ridge to Cynwyd in 1986, claiming that the Pencoyd Bridge was unsafe. The bridge was fixed by 1999, but SEPTA never ran trains back out to Ivy Ridge. Instead they tore up the track.
None of this is news to anybody here, I know that. And I can understand the defeatism everybody who deals with SEPTA feels. Any question of expanding service is waved away as hopeless because of SEPTA’s attitude. What I don’t understand is what the problem with SEPTA really is. Anybody, or any organization, when faced with a project, can either ask, “How can we get this done?” or say, “We can’t do this.” SEPTA reflexively says, “We can’t do this. It’s too hard.” How did this come to be? How did a public transportation authority become an institution that’s utterly hostile to public transportation?
And, yeah, I understand that when the state legislature brought SEPTA into being, it didn’t help that they gave it no power to tax, and no authority in many of the places that it was responsible for serving. That couldn’t have made life easy for the people running SEPTA. But everybody has hurdles to overcome; every organization has to deal with overcoming hardships. How is it that SEPTA is so (seemingly) singularly incapable of overcoming the smallest problem? SEPTA’s first answer to any problem that crops up is, “Well, let’s just give up on this.” They’ve made it their institutional philosophy. How did this happen?
And beyond that, what can people in and around Philadelphia do about it? Surely if people in Northern Virginia can bring two passenger lines into being, the people SEPTA “serves” can do something. If people in New Jersey can get trains running from Camden to Trenton, can’t people in Pennsylvania get some kind of improvement? I know that a lot of people here will smirk at my simplemindedness; I’m not a railroad historian or in the railroad business, so Lord knows, there’s a lot I don’t know or understand. But all the same, I just think it’s nuts to think that it’s utterly impossible to get trains running 15 miles from Elwyn to West Chester, or from Fox Chase to Newtown. How can this be so hard?
I grew up along the what was then the R3 to West Chester. I was kind of in awe as a kid of what SEPTA did (as far as I could see). They ran trains, scores of them, every day to Philadelphia and back, within a fourth of a mile from my back yard. When I went by the station, I saw the big map with all the lines reaching out in every direction from downtown Philadelphia. To me it was, in the literal sense, awesome.
Then they cut the line back from West Chester to Elwyn. It saddned me, but, in the same way that a child who follows a bad baseball team will believe the management when they say that they know what they’re doing, and that the team is only a little tinkering short of being a contender, I believed SEPTA when they said they knew what they were doing, and that the trains would soon be running back to West Chester.
It wasn’t until I moved away and saw some other transit authorities that I came to see how bad SEPTA is. It has now been 28 years since SEPTA gave up on running trains to West Chester. In that time, New Jersey Transit took over AMTRAK’s Atlantic City line and lengthened the line into 30th Street Station, and lengthened eletrification of the North Jersey Coast Line by 16 miles. They opened the River Line. They built the Secaucus Junction Station and are slowly laying track along the Lackawanna Cutoff, and will in time run trains to East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania and, later, to Scranton.
Sine SEPTA cut the West Chester Branch by half, Virginia Rail Express began service, and now runs trains from Washington, D.C. to manassas and to Fredericksburg. The Fredericksburg Line, 55 miles long, is longer than any of SEPTA’s routes. The Manassas line, at 35 miles, is longer than all but two of SEPTA’s lines (The Doylestown line is a fraction of a mile longer, and the Newark line is about three miles longer). The only expansion that SEPTA has undertaken in this time is to extend the R2 from Marcus Hook Line to Wilmington and then to Newark, and to lengthen the R5 from Downingtown to Parkesburg (since cut back to Thorndale).
People have been asking for SEPTA to run trains back to West Chester for 28 years now. Newtown has been waiting for 31 years. People in Phoenixville, Pottstown and Quakertown haven’t had service for 33 years. SEPTA cut its R6 back from Ivy Ridge to Cynwyd in 1986, claiming that the Pencoyd Bridge was unsafe. The bridge was fixed by 1999, but SEPTA never ran trains back out to Ivy Ridge. Instead they tore up the track.
None of this is news to anybody here, I know that. And I can understand the defeatism everybody who deals with SEPTA feels. Any question of expanding service is waved away as hopeless because of SEPTA’s attitude. What I don’t understand is what the problem with SEPTA really is. Anybody, or any organization, when faced with a project, can either ask, “How can we get this done?” or say, “We can’t do this.” SEPTA reflexively says, “We can’t do this. It’s too hard.” How did this come to be? How did a public transportation authority become an institution that’s utterly hostile to public transportation?
And, yeah, I understand that when the state legislature brought SEPTA into being, it didn’t help that they gave it no power to tax, and no authority in many of the places that it was responsible for serving. That couldn’t have made life easy for the people running SEPTA. But everybody has hurdles to overcome; every organization has to deal with overcoming hardships. How is it that SEPTA is so (seemingly) singularly incapable of overcoming the smallest problem? SEPTA’s first answer to any problem that crops up is, “Well, let’s just give up on this.” They’ve made it their institutional philosophy. How did this happen?
And beyond that, what can people in and around Philadelphia do about it? Surely if people in Northern Virginia can bring two passenger lines into being, the people SEPTA “serves” can do something. If people in New Jersey can get trains running from Camden to Trenton, can’t people in Pennsylvania get some kind of improvement? I know that a lot of people here will smirk at my simplemindedness; I’m not a railroad historian or in the railroad business, so Lord knows, there’s a lot I don’t know or understand. But all the same, I just think it’s nuts to think that it’s utterly impossible to get trains running 15 miles from Elwyn to West Chester, or from Fox Chase to Newtown. How can this be so hard?
