July 4th Weekend

Bill R. wrote:What SEPTA has not done is to be proactive about providing assistance to those unfamiliar with using SEPTA during the upcoming weekend. There is no mention of personnel or volunteers to be placed at rail stations to direct people to their destination or to provide orientation. This will be especially crucial during the Live 8 concert.

I hope the projected one million Live 8 concert attendees all know where they are going and how to get there. At this point, I don't see them getting any help from SEPTA.

Dunno what SEPTA is doing, but my flatmate is volunteering with Live 8 to help people navigate 30th Street, so at least somebody is thinking about the problem.

SEPTA will have extra staff (ambassadors) downtown and near concert shuttle bus boarding areas to assist "customers".

I also noticed that there have been articles and ads encouraging people to buy tickets or tokens in advance. That'll help with boarding, but SEPTA has no way to handle all the people who'll need to stand in line to hand over their serious-about-change for transfers. Maybe that would be another place where they could maybe, just once, possibly, somehow change the rules in the interest of moving people more efficiently.

'course, nothing beats how N'Awlins handled transit during the Jazz & Blues Festival when I was there a couple of years ago. Somewhere upwards of 300,000 people attended and the local authority added exactly NO extra service, NO maps or brochures, NO "ambassadors", NOTHING.

I'm not surprised that SEPTA is doing very little on the Regional Rail lines. I don't think a 6 car R7 or R5 running hourly will help much. Thought I doubt it would happen, could you image at 10 or 12 car NJ Transit train arriving at Trenton packed to the gills and then all of those people trying to get on a smaller train? It's a shame really considereing PATCO and Amtrak, yes Amtrak, have greatly stepped up their schedules. Oh the traffic reports should be realy interesting this weekend.

Jazz Fest has changed. Special buses (about 200 of them) run from the French Quaters / riverside to the fair ground all day long. They use school buses (which are air conditioned) and what ever chartered bus they can get a hold of from several states. The street cars now run within a 10 minute walk of the fair grounds. Very well organized transportation system. They even tell the buses to take different routes so they don't cause traffic jams. Maybe SEPTA should have talked to them down in the big easy.

This is the report from a poster on Phillyblog. Again SEPTA falls flat on their face. Anyone else have first hand reports? I'll post mine in another post.

"If taking the train, you may as well skip the pass and bet on the very good odds the conductors won't be able to collect fares on the SRO trains. I was coming back to CC from work this morning on the R6. This was the 9:02 inbound, where I boarded at Spring Mill, and when I got on the first 4 of 6 cars were already full and there were maybe 150 people waiting there. Ivy Ridge was the last station where they allowed passengers to board and we passed a couple hundred dissappointed people at each station from Manayunk to East Falls (at Manayunk the train stopped to let a few people off and then rolled on). No fares were collected in the car I was on."

My 6AM 109 bus was more crowded today, with an estimated 15 Live 8ers on board. A group of 5 teenage girls took up all of the seating in the front. I'm surprised they didn't get berated by any of the old folks who got on the bus. There seemed to be a smaller number than normal of usual early Saturday morning workers going to their job. Perhaps some businesses in the city closed up shop for the day?

The 6:30 MFL train from 69th st was much more crowded than normal. I went to the last car as it was the least crowded and sat near a group of drunk kids (20 years old or so). They were boisterous but not what I would call rowdy. They were vigorously debating whether the train drove itself or if there was a conductor to drive the train. One girl did manage to spill her booze from her Wawa coffee cup all over the seat next to her. There were also a couple of families on the car heading to the concert. 15th St station was much more crowded than normal the streets were fairly teeming with activity. Dunkin Donuts was mobbed.

The parking lots along N. Broad do not seem to be too heavily used. The one at Broad and Callowhill is roughly only 50% full as I write this. I guess most people took SEPTA, or they don't know these lots are here.

Bob

Its not going to surprise me that SEPTA will fall flat on their face in moving crowds, as usual.

Latest from the SEPTA web page: "Due to extremely heavy post Live 8 crowds, all outbound Regional Rail trains will depart Suburban Station as frequently as possible, until the crowds thin out.
Expect up to one hour delays on all in-bound Regional Rail trains."

Sounds like a good idea, although I wonder how prepared they are/were for it.

Of course Live 8 finishes 10 minutes before my work shift ends. I'll try the MFL at 13th. This should be intersting. The 102 will probably be mobbed, as well. I'm off to fight the crowds.

Bob

Ok SEPTA dropped the ball and picked it back up all in the same event. Regoinal Rail this morning BLEW. The inbound R2 from Wilmington which was sched to depart at around 8:35 AM got mobbed with a reported 500 PASSENGERS shoved into 7 SL IVs. So of course they had to turn the train into an non stop express due to capacity issues. But the bad thing was they didn't send a rescue train to pick up the displaced travel. We were told to wait an hour for the train out of Marcus Hook.

Now on the way out of the concert we decided not to chance RRD and took the Subway Surface. Now these guys had the right idea. With the 5 trips per hour on each line, the 4 40th St Portal lines had Subway Extras shadowing the full route trips to help alleaviate the overcrowded cars.

Leave it to Elmwood to show how brains really work.

As many of you know, Live 8 had concerts around the globe. Here in Philly, lots of concert goers took heed of the advice and used transit.

From my vantage point in NJ, PATCO was PACKED with growing crowds at the NJ stations. After the trains picked up the RiverLINE crowds at Broadway, the trains were filled to the doors. To speed movements, PATCO wisely had the ticket windows open at all of the NJ stations, selling round-trip tickets. All of the trains ran were 6 cars long, and they ran every 10 minutes.

The RiverLINE ran 2 car trains all day, and they were packed as well, especially during the pre-concert rush during the morning. I got there at the tail end of the rush [thanks to my inability to get my lazy ass out of bed], but I was impressed at the sheer numbers on transit.

At Trenton, I saw a SIX-CAR SEPTA R7 train. An unusual sight on any SEPTA regional rail line.

I got to see some of the homeward-bound crowd, and it was a little less due to some people hanging around in town for other activities, but the three RiverLINE trains I saw leaving Walter Rand TC, they were moderately crowded. I guess that some of the crowd is hanging around downtown, Old City, and South St.

From Jersey, people took to the rails. Anyone in Philly riding SEPTA to the concert want to post something, please do.

I took the P&W (Rt 100) and the El in and out. I got in at about 12:30 and left at about 5:30. The P&W was running its normal 20-minute schedules but with two-car trains. There were no capacity issues on either line: there were more passengers than normal for a Saturday but there were plenty of seats for everyone.

I passed by Suburban Station after arriving at City Hal and noticed a steady stream of people coming out of the station stairways. When I was going back home, I went down to the mezzanine level and saw crowds of people waiting around the stairways to the platforms. It seems that people had to wait for their train to be called before going down there. With the construction going on in Suburban Station and the generally maze-like quality of the mezzanine level, there were many people lost down there.

I took PATCO instead of SEPTA. PATCO was well organized. They sent extra trains to pick up the departing crowds and at Woodcrest they had their police collecting the passes at the open gates to speed things up.

I heard SEPTA RRD this morning was a complete mess from several people who were complaining about them. Reports were that if you wanted to drive in, you would have with no problems as everyone was avoiding the city.

Yeah, I saw very little traffic on the Vine St Expy, and the traffic reports showed very little traffic anywhere. But it's hard to beat the price of a token and a transfer to get into the city, compared to garage parking.

The only place I've seen police collecting fare tickets at open gates is on the London tube at some of the busiest stations. The crowds I saw today were nothing compared to someplace like Covent Garden station on a busy Saturday afternoon.

I took advantage of the Live8 Pass to do a good bit of riding up on the Reading Side. The P&W inbound was, as mentioned before, heavier than normal, but not bad. The Bryn Mawr parking lot was almost entirely empty at 1215. The 1300 outbound P&W was lightly used. The R6 left Norristown on time, but due to volume of boarding passengers, was about 10 minutes late into North Broad. I was in the center door section of an SIV, so I don't have a great sense of how full the train really was. The NB R5 out of North Broad was 15-20 minutes late (~1450), presumably delayed downtown. The train was not heavily used. Detrained at Lansdale, where the return train (theoretically a different set, according to the schedule) was 10 minutes late. This train picked up some riders but wasn't too bad. A fairly empty Ridge-Spur train was empty at Fern Rock but filled reasonably up down the line, and there were lots of riders waiting to get on at 8th & Market. The Gallery was very crowded. Market East at 1730 was a disaster. Trains came in very slowly - an outbound R5 was jam packed and still stood in station for about 10 minutes. There were massive delays, but public address was pretty good, announcing by how much the delays were and when trains were at 30th and Suburban. The announcement boards did not show train times, as the schedule was that far gone. The 1743 R7 was an hour late, and lost another 10 minutes or so before arriving at CHE. It was a well-ridden train, but there were a few empty seats and no need to ride in the aisles, which was necessary on an R5 and R6 that left before the R7. After grabbing dinner, it was over to the CHW, which was due in at 1939 and scheduled to leave at 2015, it ended up arriving in the 2015 range and leaving about five minutes later. There were very few other riders from CHW, but the train picked up some riders as it headed inbound. The train had to sit and wait behind a train pulling into 30th St. on track 2, and again was stuck behind this train, probably for 10 minutes, pulling into Suburban. At this point, plans to ride through to Fox Chase were scrapped (lack of light, shaky at best bus connection) and I rode the El back to 69th St. The El was not very crowded (~2115). The 2140 outbound P&W was a single car and very crowded, there were a handful of people standing in the aisle as well as at both ends of the car. Still, not all stops were necessary, and most of the standees had gotten off or found seats by Bryn Mawr, where I got off.