It is my recollection (although please correct me if I am wrong) that regional rail is a larger source of revenue for SEPTA than the lines within the city. If this is true, then it would make sense that SEPTA would try to keep their "more important" riders by not hiking up the fares too much.

I am a college student in Philadelphia who lives in suburbia and uses SEPTA frequently to go home. Since I am very used to SEPTA, I often suggest taking regional rail into the city during winter or summer breaks so we don't have to deal with parking (a pain to find & expensive). However, my friends from home would rather drive in because the time difference (train vs. car) is marginal, the schedule is not always convenient, and the ticket price is not viewed as particularly cheap (roundtrip $8.50 offpeak, $10 peak). I think these issues similarly weigh in for those who are deciding how to get to work. I think that SEPTA fears if they increase the fare too much, they will lose a large contingent of commuters and some occasional riders who have the option of driving.

It's also important to note that SEPTA is also getting rid of regional rail zone 4. This means that while some riders will be shifted into the cheaper zone 3, others will be paying the higher cost of zone 5. I think this is also the area where a lot of people are borderline taking SEPTA vs. driving, whereas the zone 5 people are so much farther outside the city it is a better deal for them.

Although I agree that SEPTA is going easier on the suburbanites, I can understand why.

This is something I've wondered about for a while, for both city residents and the suburbs. Chaka Fattah's congestion tax was a flawed idea, but there is something to be said for creating incentives for people to use mass transit (and eliminating incentives for people to avoid it.) Insurance rates in the city are high, but there are plenty of ways to avoid paying Philadelphia insurance. Even if you live in a permit parking zone, the fee for a permit is only $35 annually, $20 for a renewal. I've heard people complain mightily about this additional cost, but really -- it's nothing.

In Chicago, every car in the city requires a city parking sticker, which costs $70 annually. If you don't have a sticker, and park on a city street, you can get ticketed. You don't have to show Illinois plates, registration, or insurance, but you do have to show a lease or a utility bill.

If you live in a high-congestion residential permit parking zone, the cost is only marginally higher -- eight dollars and change, if I remember correctly. You need to have a traffic study that shows that something like half of the cars parked on the street are non-residents, but the low cost removes some of the resistance to having the street zoned for permit parking.

The effect of a sticker-permit program is manifold: it raises revenue for transit, streets, and services, it creates an incentive for city residents to ditch their cars and use mass transit, and it indirectly raises the cost of car commuting into the city for nonresidents, since you can't archive your car on a neighborhood street. This in turn makes parking for city residents easier, since they don't have to compete with the commuters.

Could Philadelphia do something similar -- starting small, perhaps with a $20 annual sticker for every car in the city? (I'm talking purely as a matter of policy -- I know control of the Parking Authority is screwy right now.) If not, what else can we do to reduce the incentive for commuters to ditch SEPTA?

I think that problem isn’t that it is too easy to have a Car in Philly, but the fact is that people like me HAVE TO have a car if they want to live in Philly, because most of the jobs are in the suburbs. Also, because SEPTA is so inconvenient. It’s funny how I hear my friends from NYC bitch about the MTA. They don’t hold a candle to the retardation known as SEPTA.

I’d love to not have to have a car, but that just isn’t in the cards.

I think characterizing eliminating transfers as needlessly targeting the city misses the point. I seem to remember the stated goal as being to encourage more riders to buy weekly or monthly passes, thus saving the system money. I'm not dirt poor, so I can't speak from experience, but it seems to me that anyone who is buying tokens and transfers twice a day, five days a week can scrape together the $18.75 to buy a weekly pass. $3.80 x 5 is $19.00.

New York, Boston, and Chicago, the three largest transit systems in the country, have all gone to pass-only systems. For those who do not go for the monthly pass option you can put a certain amount of value on a card, which is then rechargeable at any subway station. It is convenient and much less expensive than mass-producing tokens.

On a related note, while I live in the city, many of my friends live in the suburbs and commute via SEPTA. They report to me that many of the regional rail trains are so crowded that many fares are never collected. I think most people are generally honest, at least honest enough not to take a chance on spending more money. Why can't SEPTA put ticket machines in every regional rail station? If the cost of buying a ticket from a conductor is $5 more and ticket machines are widely available we may see an unexpected rise in income for SEPTA>

On the subject of SEPTA foo, I have an interesting suggestion. As most of you probably know, SEPTA as we know it today was cobbled together from the late '60s- when it was created to take over from the privately-owned Philadelphia Transportation Company- plus the former Reading Railroad + Penn Central (nee Pennsylvania) Railroad lines. Part of the aim of SEPTA was to create a strike-proof quasi-public authority. Clearly, the strike-proof goal was not met. And, due to the structure of the board effectively giving Philadelphia County equal representation w/every suburban county, the interests of city riders- the large majority of riders, I believe- are often over-ruled by suburban votes.

My suggestion: either re-organize SEPTA'a board so that representation on its board is proportional to ridership, or reorganize the system itself. I suggest dividing SEPTA into two:

Given that the City of Philadelphia owns the Broad Street Subway + Market-Frankford Subway-Elevated, and pays SEPTA to run them, an argument might be made that the City would get more for its money if it owned and operated these lines + all city buses on its own, via a new City Transportation Authority.

The Regional Rail lines, obviously, are not owned by the City- I believe that some combination of SEPTA + Amtrak owns the trackage, while SEPTA or the city own the cars. Plus, SEPTA itself owns all of the buses in its fleet (please correct me if this is not so). But perhaps a solution could be worked out w/the suburban counties where SEPTA could be reorganized to consist of Regional Rail + suburban buses, leaving purely City operations in the hand of the new City Transit Authority (clearly, the City would have to purchase SEPTA's bus fleet). In this way, the regional SEPTA board would have responsibility for only those routes which are truly regional; the new City Transportation Authority would run those routes which are within the City limits.

Ownership + operation of bus routes which run from the City to suburbs, could be divided up between the two organizations.

Thoughts? I'm hardly saying that I recommend this solution as the perfect one. But it could hardly be much worse than SEPTA is today. SEPTA's usefulness appears to be despite SEPTA management's best efforts to make it useless and/or infuriating.

Comments? I know you've got 'em,
-Z