SEPTA NPT card will be "SEPTA Key"?

I'm taking a trip to the Phila area in a few weeks and I have a couple of dumb questions:

First, if I buy a key card at an outlying station with a staffed ticket office (like Langhorne), will the clerk selling me the card also be able to load a round-trip fare to Center-City or an Independence Pass on the card?

Second, I'm looking at SEPTA's website and I can't find any fares listed anywhere for Regional Rail stations and zones. Am I so computer challenged that I can't properly navigate the site or did SEPTA really not include that info on their website, hard as that would be to believe?

If the site seems too confusing, best is to lookup stations and zones in the official rail division tariff.

Some years ago I went to 1234 Market St. and asked to look at the tariff, and they had some trouble figuring out who might have one and what floor they might be on. They finally found a copy, and the tariff was ambiguous. (I used to work with tariffs on the railroad, and that tariff would not have passed muster with the Interstate Commerce Commission.)

Head-end View wrote: ↑Sun Oct 15, 2023 6:52 pm I'm taking a trip to the Phila area in a few weeks and I have a couple of dumb questions:

First, if I buy a key card at an outlying station with a staffed ticket office (like Langhorne), will the clerk selling me the card also be able to load a round-trip fare to Center-City or an Independence Pass on the card?

Second, I'm looking at SEPTA's website and I can't find any fares listed anywhere for Regional Rail stations and zones. Am I so computer challenged that I can't properly navigate the site or did SEPTA really not include that info on their website, hard as that would be to believe?

yes you can buy a keycard
yes they can load it up with a pass including the flex pass (the flex anywhere was previously called an independence pass)
If you'd rather not purchase a pass then you'd just load a dollar amount on the travel wallet that would be deducted from as you rode
The fares for the various zones and methods of payment can be found here https://www5.septa.org/travel/fares/fare-pricing/
If you are just doing a single round trip on the RR generally a keycard is not worth the purchase and you'd just pay on board for the way in and purchase a quicktrip from a machine on the way out. If you are riding additional SEPTA transit on the same day a flex pass with a keycard may be in order. If doing multiple days of travel a keycard would benefit you with either the travel wallet, multiple flex, a 3 pack of flex, or a weekly pass depending on what you are riding and for what duration.

ExCon90 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 15, 2023 10:48 pm Some years ago I went to 1234 Market St. and asked to look at the tariff, and they had some trouble figuring out who might have one and what floor they might be on. They finally found a copy, and the tariff was ambiguous. (I used to work with tariffs on the railroad, and that tariff would not have passed muster with the Interstate Commerce Commission.)

Tariff is easily found here https://www5.septa.org/travel/fares/tariffs/ Not sure what they gave you since paper copies have never been readily available since at least the late 90s

H-E: Something you can look into is getting your SEPTA Senior Citizen Key card allowing FREE rides on ALL
SEPTA services within PA at SEPTA HQ - 1234 Market Street in CCP (near Jefferson/Market East Station)...
The minimum age is 65 to take advantage of this option...

If you ride into New Jersey (Trenton or West Trenton) and Delaware (Claymont, Wilmington, Churchman's
Crossing and Newark) a half-fare is charged on Regional Rail along with the SC Key Card...

Being "Of a Certain Age" sometimes has its benefits...MACTRAXX

MACTRAXX wrote: ↑Thu Oct 19, 2023 8:07 am Being "Of a Certain Age" sometimes has its benefits...MACTRAXX

That "said", I'm frustrated by how SEPTA has cut back options for getting the card. I had to wait a couple of weeks to get mine in the -mail which doesn't help if you're a visitor and/or want to travel in the near future. By contrast when I applied for my senior card in DC it was authorized and handed to me at the same time.

They also stopped accepting PA driver's licenses when the state eliminated mag stripe encoding. That again hamstrings visitors or anyone else who can't / doesn't want to wait for a mail delivery.

Just ranting, but given that PA funds senior travel via the state lottery, it seems to me an equal-access case could be made for SEPTA to offer seniors more state-approved options for travel. Or maybe restricting access is what they want, a bit like the days of tokens being hard to buy in certain parts of the city ... ???

Thanks for all the help guys.

JeffK, I've often wondered about that very point. I don't think the Pennsylvania law allows for exceptions due to administrative procedures; i.e., if you can show that you're 65 or over you're entitled right now. And I think the full-faith-and-credit clause of the Constitution means it doesn't matter what state you live in--if you're in Pennsylvania you're entitled. But I'm not a lawyer and don't know whether this has ever been litigated.

From everything being said here, it appears that things haven't changed too much on Septa from the days of the old fare system, which someone on here once called "Byzantine". LOL

That's just the problem. The present fare scheme is a crazy-quilt inherited from predecessor companies which competed with each other, as others have pointed out. What's needed is a zero-based, integrated fare structure designed from the ground up, but apparently nobody wants to put their toe in the water.

ExCon90 wrote: ↑Fri Oct 20, 2023 8:48 pm That's just the problem. The present fare scheme is a crazy-quilt inherited from predecessor companies which competed with each other, as others have pointed out. What's needed is a zero-based, integrated fare structure designed from the ground up, but apparently nobody wants to put their toe in the water

When the Key (NPT) plans were first being set out I raised exactly those questions with various planners. Semi-off the record, I was told that there was a palpable fear among the higher-ups at 1234 that any attempt to start with a clean slate - whether designed in house or bought and customized - would result in a loss of revenue.

During one long discussion, I was told in as many words that as complex, contorted, and contradictory as the legacy system was, management also understood how it worked. That underlay (underlaid?) the decision to design the Key as a digital replica of the legacy crazy-quilt: if revenue changed, they’d be able to trace the differential to a specific stream or streams rather than chasing through the entire system.

To me as a (retired) systems guy, while I understand their thought process it was absolutely the WRONG choice. As I understand things, maintaining a significant portion of the legacy spiderweb required all sorts of specialized accommodations and exception-processing that would have been n/a if they’d gone clean-slate. Those customizations were a significant (but not the only) reason the Key was late and over budget.

Trying to replicate the legacy system also hit roadblocks when SEPTA found that some legacy manual operations couldn’t be easily programmed, if at all. E.g. transit zones had to be eliminated - which of course cost them revenue - because there was no practical way to duplicate the old practice of paying a token plus a variable number of zone charges. The only way to do that within the Key’s design would be to somehow clone the RRD’s annoying tap on / tap off requirement, a complete impossibility on a bus or trolley.

Sadly, after the expensive planning débacles of the CCM, SVM, KoP Rail, and so on the Key’s problems didn’t surprise me.

Now that SEPTA has some new higher-ups maybe we can hope for a fresh approach.

As to underlay/-laid I'd stick with -lay here, since in this sentence the verb is essentially intransitive; I think decision is really the object of the preposition "under" rather than the verb "lie/lay." (Yes, I realize this is not grammar.net, and I'll say no more about it.)

ExCon90 wrote: ↑Sat Oct 21, 2023 9:17 pm Now that SEPTA has some new higher-ups maybe we can hope for a fresh approach.

I've taken encouragement from their moves to increase the number of free tranfers, at least for card-holders. SEPTA's transit routes often don't lend themselves to single-ride trips (a necessary evil for practicalily, IMO) but the legacy system put thousands of riders in the position of paying for the number of vehicles their trips needed rather than the length of those trips.

That said, the elimination of ALL transfers for customers without Keys, along with their refusal to temper the hated RRD on-board surcharge, still makes me question their commitment to serving occasional and out-of-town users.

As to underlay/-laid I'd stick with -lay here, since in this sentence the verb is essentially intransitive; I think decision is really the object of the preposition "under" rather than the verb "lie/lay." (Yes, I realize this is not grammar.net, and I'll say no more about it.)

As a fellow "word nerd" I appreciate having a little grammatical snack once in a while!

I posted before about how the Key Card system sounded ridiculous and Rube Goldbergian (incredibly complicated) to me. Yesterday, I had my first in-person contact with it, and it's worse than I had anticipated.

Some background on me: I grew up in Delco and spent the first part of my adult life in Philly itself. Moved to NYC and have been here ever since. In the course of my work, I often use commuter trains of NJ Transit, Metro North and Long Island Rail Road. On all three, paying your fare is very simple: either use a ticket machine at the station -- almost all stations have machines -- or buy your ticket on the app. I Prefer the app: buy my ticket before leaving home, activate it as the train is pulling in, and show it to the conductor.

Usually I use a Zipcar to visit family, but yesterday I took Amtrak to Philly. First question I have is: Why should I buy a Key Card when it's unlikely I'll use it for another few years? But then I saw a ticket booth at 30th St. So I went up and asked for a round-trip ticket, only to be told they don't sell round trip tickets. So I buy a one-way ticket.

Then I walk over to ... turnstiles??? Couldn't figure out how to use the ticket with the turnstile, but an attendant did it for me. (BTW, some family members from Philly visited me in NYC, and they loved how they could so easily just use their phone wallets to pay fares at NYC subway turnstiles and on buses.) Finally the conductor on the train treated my ticket the same way they did when I lived there.

On my way back, I was waiting for the conductor to charge me for my fare...but he never did. I had read they had an onboard fare, so I was mystified as to why he didn't ask me or other boarding passengers for their fare. And then at 30th Street, I was faced with how to use those turnstiles again, so I gestured to one of the attendants and he just let me out of the turnstile without ever paying a fare. Sure I got a free ride, but this system is beyond ridiculous, especially if you're a visitor to Philly or not a regular rider.

mbm537 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 25, 2024 11:19 am I posted before about how the Key Card system sounded ridiculous and Rube Goldbergian (incredibly complicated) to me. Yesterday, I had my first in-person contact with it, and it's worse than I had anticipated.

As someone who spent most of his career building large IT systems, I watched creation of the Key Card system with a combination of frustration and anger. I was as if SEPTA took a book on how to develop such a system ... and wherever possible did the opposite. Just a few things:

• They fell into the "not invented here" swamp by generally ignoring lessons learned - both positive and negative - by other transit operators.
• They also got caught in the same "rebuild in kind" trap that afflicted previous projects such as Railworks. Instead of clearing the table, setting global goals for what the Key would offer, and then designing for those goals they instead tried to make the Key a digital copy of the spiderweb of legacy fare systems SEPTA inherited from its predecessors. That led to maintaining transfer charges (at least initially) on the transit side, the cumbersome "tap on, tap off" policy on the RRD division, and so on.
• They saddled the Key with debit-card functionality instead making it a simple fare card. As things turned out only about 2K people have used the debit feature but it locks the card into policies of the supporting bank such as having regular expiration dates.
• They imposed narrow guardrails around the Key due to an almost-palpable fear at 1234 that it might bring in less revenue than the legacy system did. E.g. that's why you have to fuss with turnstiles at RRD stations.

... and more ...