by Matthew Mitchell
Lucius Kwok wrote:It's sort of an interesting technical exercise to ask yourself, if you ran the railroad, what would you do?Well, you start by taking the padding out of the schedules. According to SEPTA's own analysis, there's 2-1/2 to 3 minutes wasted time in the current schedules through the tunnel. And given the way trains loaf along between Fern Rock and Temple, there's more padding elsewhere too.
Second, reintroduce the concept of hustle to railroad crews. Some of the [stuff] I see is [blasphemy] astounding--now I am not making this up: one day while boarding at Jenkintown, I saw an employee leave the train, go over to the row of newspaper boxes on the other side of the stairway to the underpass, and buy a paper. And to top it off, the guy paid for one paper and took three or four! And the less outrageous stuff is frustratingly frequent, like unauthorized employee stops and crew members standing around talking about the Eagles or an upcoming picking while they're supposed to be making relief and the train is late. Where the [bowa] is any discipline???
And if I might be allowed into the realm of wishful thinking, go to 2-2 seating systemwide. In a lot of cases, particularly where there's a relatively large number of people boarding, getting the passengers into their seats (think middle-seat shuffle) is more of a bottleneck than the big step from the platform onto the train. John Pawson collected data on this some years ago, and found that the loading time difference between high platforms and low platforms wasn't as great as one would think.