SEPTA: Fix It, Fund It, Nuke It, Start Over?

I thought I'd bring this thread back to the front lines, because in 22 days, we will know what kind of funding, if any SEPTA will get to avert the collossal service and staff cuts being planned for January 1st.

Out of those 22 days, only 14 of them are working days for our great state assembly, so time is running short. Will the 2 bills proposed get passed? Doesen't seem likely. As Republican majority leader Smith put it, its not "on their agenda" to vote on the bill. Seems like Harrisburg also has a mistrust of how SEPTA spends their money. From what I gather, Rendell and our local reps like Dwight Evans are SEPTA's only allies. Evans thinks the bill will be passed, but after the recent elections, we all know how people like to spin things.

In any case, nevermind how SEPTA is with their money and service, or how our politicians behave, this whole process is very inefficient, in that for the past several weeks, SEPTA management has been using all of their resources to plan for the shutdown. Some may say its a hoax, but they have put the wheels in motion to make these cutbacks happen.

Operators have had to pick their contingency assignment for January, layoff notices have been mailed out, new schedules are being printed, etc. Where does the madness end?

The next 3 weeks should be quite interesting, but it won't be the end. Beware the ides of March!

jrevans wrote:In my opinion, a railroad needs to be run as a railroad, not a bus line, and SEPTA is a bus company. I'd love for there to be a way to spin the railroad lines off to private companies, or some sort of similar solution.

Bah.

That might work for awhile but historically that won't work for several reasons. 1) the railroads themselves divested themselves from passenger service. 2)They simply could not compete with government subsidized suburbs and highways. 3)They could simply not compete with monopolistic companies such as GM. 4)They simply could not keep worker productivity up as there was no new capital flow because of there battle with cars.
This idea of "free" markets doing wonders is a joke. To keep mass transit after privatization would mean heavy government subsidization or an end to service. In the end privatizing Septa would mean we would just end up with another government subsidized corporation. In other words socialism for the rich. The general tax-paying public would pay for a service and the profits would go to the corporations.
One idea for Septa would be for the state government to hand over Septa to its workers and for those workers to fire there unproductive managers. I'm only half-joking, mind you.

Good points Eugene, but under SEPTA we have seen both heavy subsidy (alomost 50%) and a loss of service (Quakertown, Newtown, West Chester, Reading, etc.) In certain ways, I think the gov't did make a mistake in running public transit. Look at the Amtrak disaster, and SEPTA isn't far behind. Would we have been better off keeping the Reading & PC in business, letting them focus on their core business of moving freight while paying them to run the commuter lines? We didn't have much choice with PTC. They wanted out, they were broke so SEPTA was needed there. But in some cases, making most of our commuter network passenger only means that freight companies are discouraged from moving their profit-making freight trains over the system.

I still think operators and conductors should be paid some kind of commission. That would at least eliminate the problem of trains and buses leaving without us.

I do like the idea of SEPTA employees having some stake in the business. Most of these guys have no incentinve to perform other than keep their job for 25 years to earn a pension and keep their health benefits. Most employees do the bare minimal and don't care how the system is run. Its amazing that we do have a number of good people out there.

Matthew Mitchell wrote:AFAICT, the reason the big media (translated: the Inquirer) have been so reticent about the mismanagement at 1234 (*) is that going back to the Lou Gambaccini era, they've been bamboozled into thinking that criticizing public transit management (**) is the same as criticizing public transit, and is an act of disloyalty. (***) Perhaps they're rationalizing that any negative stories by them could be read by some state legislator from Potter County and cause him to vote against transit funding.

***--another reason is that the Inquirer has never been pushed. For many years, they didn't even have a regular writer on the SEPTA beat (Knight-Ridder being cheap?). It wasn't until Metro brought a perceived threat that Inquirer management put Jere Downs on the beat. I've worked with Jere on a number of stories, but some of the most damning ones never made the paper. I don't know why.

Speaking of which, Sunday's Inky ran an article that was almost identical to one that ran in Saturday's editions. The paragraphs that were cut from Sunday's article:

"If there is going to be a Band-Aid solution, I need to to know because I have to tell people if they will have a job or not," Moore said.

Also cut from the article were comments from newly elected TWU 234 president Jeff Brooks and a rather terse reply from Fearless Leader:

"The legislature should hold SEPTA management accountable for the deficit," Brooks said. "Remember the boy who cried wolf? Nobody believes they are really broke this time."

But no SEPTA employee is safe, Moore said yesterday.

"Tell Mr. New Person that he better get his act together and read his contract," Moore said of Brooks. "A big part of this will be TWU operators and mechanics."

Somehow, I don't think it's a coincidence that those comments were cut...

Would we have been better off keeping the Reading & PC in business, letting them focus on their core business of moving freight while paying them to run the commuter lines?

Yes, I think so.

One problem I think has been that the state legislature has generally ignored mass transit except when they're begging for money, at least as long as I've been paying attention. What they should do is pass emergency funding in the next couple weeks, then when they reconvene, really take some time and discuss the situation. Find a dedicated and adequate source of funding, and set some service standards, with "head rolling" clauses if the standards aren't met, thus preventing further games of chicken as well. They should also discuss more radical solutions, perhaps trying to pay a company to run the passenger trains, things like that. But the current method of running the state's transit just won't cut it any longer.

PARailWiz wrote:One problem I think has been that the state legislature has generally ignored mass transit except when they're begging for money...

At the risk of opening another us-vs.-them volley, remember that the same statement can be made about many issues in PA that are perceived as "urban problems". The rural bent of the legislature means that schools, health care, etc. have historically been lumped together with transit as intractable messes that absorb dollars from the rest of the state without ever showing improvement. It's not just Philly; PAT is on the verge of similar service amputations, and we've already seen the failure of schools and health services in places like Chester.

Unfortunately, to be blunt, all of those institutions have contributed to their problems through bureaucracy and ineptitude (sound like any organization we know??). You end up with each side playing the blame game and no real solutions being put forward.

As I've noted before, we run a real risk of having a Buffalo, NY scenario develop, where the transit agency and the state played chicken and no one blinked. I wish we had some answers, but short of regime change in a lot of places(*) I fear that the swamp is only going to get deeper.

(*)and we saw how likely that was, last week

At the risk of opening another us-vs.-them volley, remember that the same statement can be made about many issues in PA that are perceived as "urban problems".

Like it or not cities and suburban areas of cities pay the majority of the state's taxes. The cities subsidize the rural areas, not vice-versa. As destroying a mass transit system hurts a city, destroying mass transit would hurt the state's revenue in the long run thus hurting not only the cities, but also and mainly rural areas. If some people in rural areas want to hurt cities because black people and other "types" live there then so be it. But their racism and anti-urbanism will eventually come back to hurt them when no one is subsidizing them. We should probably go out of our way to show this to people in rural areas. Of course this could easily turn into a "blue-state/red-state" discussion. Sorry.

jrevans wrote:In my opinion, a railroad needs to be run as a railroad, not a bus line, and SEPTA is a bus company. I'd love for there to be a way to spin the railroad lines off to private companies, or some sort of similar solution.

Bah.

Im suprised they dont have seperate companies. This is news to me. I figured they would have done something similar to NJT and had Bus Operations and Rail Operations under the same company name but under differant branches of management.

EugeneV.Debs wrote:As destroying a mass transit system hurts a city, destroying mass transit would hurt the state's revenue in the long run thus hurting not only the cities, but also and mainly rural areas.

I could not agree more.

The fact is that if we expect to be mobile we have to pay for it. There are 2 choices - we pay for more roads and all the direct and indirect destruction they bring, or we pay for transit.

The rural types and the anti-tax campaigners have to realize that no matter what, we have to ante up.

How come we have so many separate transit systems in Pennsylvania? New Jersey transit runs pretty much throughout the state. Perhaps if Pennsylvania's transit was all consolidated under one name with a rail and a bus division, we wouldn't have so much trouble getting representatives from other parts of the state to agree to fund it, and glaring management problems would be harder for the legislature to ignore.

PARailWiz wrote:How come we have so many separate transit systems in Pennsylvania? New Jersey transit runs pretty much throughout the state. Perhaps if Pennsylvania's transit was all consolidated under one name with a rail and a bus division, we wouldn't have so much trouble getting representatives from other parts of the state to agree to fund it, and glaring management problems would be harder for the legislature to ignore.

That would be very intresting if SEPTA and other PA railroad formed a kind of PAT (Pennsylvania Transit) company. And very good point too, this way the whole state is using one service, which would make it harder for any government officials to ignore problems.

I think SEPTA is the only commuter rail operator in the state. Pittsburgh has a few light rail lines, but that's about it. It would be interesting to have a combined Pennsylvania Transportation Company (PTC), but PA is too diverse unlike NJ.

My thought was for the city to take over SEPTA and get reimbursed from the state on the subsidies. Let someone else run the regional lines but the city transit division is in such poor shape. There are so many problems that need to be fixed and can only be done with a good housecleaning.

Save Transit had their big rally in Harrisburg today. Wonder if it is going to make a difference.

PARailWiz wrote:How come we have so many separate transit systems in Pennsylvania? New Jersey transit runs pretty much throughout the state.

Pennsylvania is larger and has more diverse transit needs than any of the states with statewide transit operations (RI, NJ, DE, MD--I don't think there are any others*). New Jersey is a little larger than the rest, but they're all otherwise pretty similar. None of them have the amount of rural territory Pennsylvania does.

Perhaps if Pennsylvania's transit was all consolidated under one name with a rail and a bus division, we wouldn't have so much trouble getting representatives from other parts of the state to agree to fund it, and glaring management problems would be harder for the legislature to ignore.

Don't know if it helps with the management problems, but as far as funding goes, all of Pennsylvania's transit operators are in the same boat. There is one (**) large fund for public transportation assistance from which set percentages are allocated to the various classes of transit operators.

Class 1 is SEPTA (they get in the ballpark of 60-70% of the pot)
Class 2 is PAT
Class 3 is all of the small city agencies like LANTA and Red Rose
Class 4 is the rural agencies

Having the fixed percentages prevents annual battles between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh interests and the rest of the state.


*--I had Connecticut in the list at first, but it turns out CT Transit serves only Hartford, New Haven, Stamford, and surrounding areas.

**--Actually several funds, but they're all doled out by formula. Some of them give a share to community transit providers as well.

After reading the comment that [female dog] Ms.Faye Moore made about the TWU leader,
I am convinced that any aid to SEPTA should be tied to the removal of its current management. If any politician in Philly is smart enough, that should be a condition before any money is given to SEPTA. It would be quite easy to hire someone who would be a caretaker until fresh new management is put into place. In fact, since SEPTA has utterly failed in it's mission, maybe the grand poo-bahs in Philly could simply take this mess and try to start over. Anything would be better than this craptastic mess were miring ourself in now, a mess that threatens the very economic life of this region.

P.S., The stupidity of SEPTA, as well as the crappy quality of life in the City Of Philadelphia was a couple of reasons that I moved to Oaklyn, New Jersey. I can bear the shortcomings of NJT [and there a lot of them], but the last 14 years in the Garden State has been somewhat blissful, with stable fares [one increase in 10 years], a new light rail line [Say what you will about how the RiverLINE is a boondoggle, but it more than whatever half-assed job that SEPTA has put out], and not having to go through the sucky ritual of strike threats [in NJ, it is ILLEGAL for NJT workers to strike, and PATCO has much better relations with its union.], and finally watching how the elected officials just avoid taking responsibility for whatever crisis SEPTA gets itself into. [At least if NJT f#$ks up, the Governor WILL hear about it, or at least the DOT secretary.] I voted with my feet, and with my choice of domicile. If SEPTA puts their cuts in effect, a lot more people will make the same choice I made, and kill the economy of Philadelphia for good.

Pennsylvania is larger and has more diverse transit needs than any of the states with statewide transit operations (RI, NJ, DE, MD--I don't think there are any others*). New Jersey is a little larger than the rest, but they're all otherwise pretty similar. None of them have the amount of rural territory Pennsylvania does.

Good point. But PennDot has the same problem. Managing roadways in Philadelphia and managing them in Sullivan County are very different but they manage to do it. They have the 11 semi-independent regions across the state, but they all work together towards their common goal, and all answer to the same top dogs. I think a PA Transit operation could have some success with a similar set-up.