Would Califoria-style solution work for SEPTA?

Hi All,

I need your feedback on a proposal that has been submitted to the Pennsylvania Senate after I wrote an op-ed article (not yet published) about dedicated funding and increasing accountability with transit, presented from the perspective of Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania. I am wondering whether you think it might also help with SEPTA. I've put it online at:

http://unsprawl.org/articles/transporta ... ding1.html

Printable pdf file:
http://unsprawl.org/articles/transporta ... nding1.pdf

After first writing an earlier draft, I sent a copy to Senator Jane Orie who said she was going to give it to the Senate Leadership and Transporation Committee. I've printed enough copies of the final article for the entire legislature, so it should be seen.

I also submitted the article to the Philly Inquirer which was interested and thought it made good sense but felt they needed something more specifically addressing the southeastern corner. I'm open to co-authoring an article incorporating this proposal for the Philly market, if anybody is interested in teaming up.

My only experience with SEPTA was a decade ago when I was organizing a couple court cases to stop egregious waste and abuses in southwestern PA. I was impressed with the variety and amount of rail transit available in Philly, but I was also nonplussed when I spoke to some low level management who said that SEPTA had just sent a group to Pittsburgh to copy PAT's methods. It was clear to me at that point that somebody somewhere in SEPTA was clueless, given how deliberately inefficient, ineffective, and extravagant PAT's rail operations are. I'm sorry to now see that it is as bad as it seems to be at SEPTA, but I can't say I'm surprised.

Thanks for your comments.

David Tessitor

While it's true that commuter rail systems in California are operated by different authorities than bus and rail transit systems, it's not a California thing. It's the normal way of doing things everywhere but with SEPTA. Nobody else in the nation has commuter rail under the same management as urban transit. Here's a rundown:

Boston: Same authority (MBTA), but commuter rail management is contracted out.

Connecticut (Shore Line East): separate operating company under state agency, contracted out.

New York (LIRR, MNRR): same authority (MTA), different operating companies--this is also the "California" plan you describe.

New Jersey: separate operating company (NJ Transit Rail Operations)--commuter rail and transit share the same name, but the only common management is the Executive Director (George Warrington)

Philadelphia (SEPTA): same management runs city transit, suburban transit, and commuter rail

Maryland (MARC): separate operating company under state agency (Maryland Transit Administration), contracted out.

Virginia (VRE): completely separate authority, contracted out

Miami (Tri-Rail): completely separate authority, contracted out

Indiana (South Shore): completely separate authority

Chicago (Metra): separate board (Metra) under umbrella board (RTA), partly contracted out

Dallas (TRE): separate operating company under Dallas DART and Fort Worth TA boards, contracted out

Seattle (Sounder): same board as suburban transit, separate from city transit, contracted out

San Francisco (CalTrain): completely separate authority, contracted out

San Jose (ACE): completely separate authority, contracted out

LA (Metrolink): completely separate authority, contracted out

San Diego (Coaster): same board as suburban transit, separate from city transit, contracted out

I think that covers everyone.[/code]

It would help even more if neither of the new seperate organizations had anything to do with the old SEPTA.

Matt, my only clarification to that list is that the MBTA is not as different from SEPTA as it may seem. The railroad operating employees (train crews, MOW, shops, and direct railroad supervisors) are MBCR employees, but all planning, management, and oversight rests with the MBTA itself. Railroad operations is just another unit of the MBTA, under the same management, just like Bus Operations or Subway Operations, just the operating employees are the contractor's, not the T's own.

I'd say that the MBTA nd SEPTA commuter rail systems are far more alike than different. In fact, your old GM, Jack Leary, probably feels right at home at MBCR, our contractor!

Is the commuter rail line in Syracuse separate from their bus system? There were plans to extend the rail line a while back.

It looks like Ontrack is run by the NYS&W railroad. This service consists of local Budd RDC service in and around Syracuse, NY.

You're right--I left out ONtrack (is it still running) in my old home town of Syracuse. (note the name is derived from Onondaga County).

It is indeed operated by NYSW, under the governance of Centro, which runs the local bus service in the Syracuse area (I was an occasional 10D/10E rider).

I don't know the whole story, but I suspect the passenger service was created as a means for NYSW and Onondaga County to get access to federal capital dollars for the tracks in Syracuse.

Matt Mitchell
(lived near the Jamesville Quarry [Allied Chemical], which loaded a lot of rail cars)

Yes, most of the managerial functions for commuter rail in Boston are handled by MBTA, but their contracting out operations has a critical effect on institutional accountability. Case in point: on-time performance for the Worcester line has gone down on account (at least in part) of freight congestion and weather-related equipment problems. The T will be penalizing MBCR something like a thousand dollars a day as long as the unsatisfactory performance continues.

Compare that to SEPTA, where on-time performance was worse than all SEPTA's peers, worse than goal, and below 90% for a year and a half, and management did nothing until DVARP made a stink about it at a SEPTA Board meeting and it got in the newspapers.

Looking even further afield... I had an internship in northern Germany in 1998. The state of Schleswig Holstein had its own MPO-type organization set up for coordination of disparate transportation providers - city buses in several big cities (if you can count Kiel, Lübeck and Flensburg as big! ), plus privately run longer-distance buses that received operating assistance from the state, as well as the local train service across the state. It was quite a mix... German Rail (DB), which was undergoing the shift to a private company, provided the majority of local service including the S-Bahn rapid transit lines in the northern suburbs of Hamburg. But there were also independent players like the AKN railway and startup companies that bid for services that DB had traditionally provided (sort of a less-chaotic, better-managed version of what happened in Britain). The organization I worked for, the LVS, was basically in charge of working with all these entities to integrate schedules, streamline and unify fare structures across the state (with one fare instrument good on any mode of public transportation), do long-range planning, and not coincidentally, come up with a unified umbrella PR and marketing campaign. It was all quite ambitious and they seem to have done pretty well, reactivating a few segments of line that had been dormant and generally working for better public transportation. So in answer to the poll, I think we need PennDOT or at least some large regional authority to do this kind of thing, if not SEPTA itself with two separate operations companies. Let each division concentrate on doing its own tactical thing and have a bigger, overarching organization worry about the bigger strategic stuff. Oh, and did I mention that the most recent newsletter that LVS sent me from Germany decried the lack of a stable and predictable source of funding for public transportation? What they do receive is definitely proportionately more generous and perhaps better managed, but it seems some issues are universal these days. LVS' website is http://www.lvs-sh.de. One of the new train operating companies is online at http://www.nord-ostsee-bahn.de. Unfortunately neither site has much in English (although the Webmeisterin, Ingrid Lödding, has helpfully included tongue-in-cheek links to pages in Danish and several Frisian dialects!) but they give you an overall impression of the level of service and quality.

octr202 wrote:

The railroad operating employees (train crews, MOW, shops, and direct railroad supervisors) are MBCR employees, but all planning, management, and oversight rests with the MBTA itself.

Taking this one step further, this is similar to the Passenger Transport Executives in the UK. The main difference is that all modes are privately operated, sometimes by mutiple contractors. The transport planning goals are the responsibility of the PTE, but the individual contractors must meet the goals.

Most importantly, the appearance of a unified public transport network is acheived by through the use of fare implements (I.E. the Oyster Card). In London, every mode of transport has the ability to handle the fare implement, and (because the network is zone based) transfer charges don't exist, per se. At Stratford, in N.E. London, you can cross platform transfer between both LU and the National Rail service to Liverpool Street without any barrier. The same is true in the outbound direction as well. Thus, even though there are sperate operations, there is no inconvenience to the passenger as a result.

The point to be made is that dividing SEPTA into individual components that would be more focused (theoretically) on a specific mission is not inherrently a bad thing.

What is inherently a bad thing is that the hypothetical process of dividing SEPTA would be conducted under the shadow of the current political class in S.E. Pennsylvania. This reason alone is enough to make me have cause for pause.