jfrey40535 wrote:Stop printing schedules for bus routes every 4 months.Uhh, the cost of printing timetables is pretty trivial in a budget close to a billion dollars.
The cost of top management is pretty small too, to name another area that people who haven't done any thinking will say is the source of SEPTA's budget problems. Put all the GM and AGM level staff together and you're not even close to one percent of the budget, or even ten percent of the structural deficit.
Increase headways on everything. [snip]From the context, I assume you meant _decrease_ headways by increasing service. Much as we wish it were true, SEPTA is not at the point where it is making money on the margins (though I suspect there are some small exceptions).
SEPTA fails to grasp the concept that the system has fixed costs, and those costs increase when the fleet's idle time increases, so all of those Silverliners at Penn Coach yard, or Roberts Ave are generating zero revenue while sucking down volts as they bake in the sun.Wait a minute: you're talking about _fixed_ costs, and then saying those costs _increase_ if the trains aren't running. Then they'd not only not be fixed, they'd run counter to basic principles of economics.
SEPTA does in fact grasp the idea of fixed and variable costs, and they report them in their FTA reports every year. Now the fact is that variable costs dwarf the fixed costs, especially in the operating budget which is where SEPTA is in trouble (capital budgets are driven more by fixed expenses).
Furthermore, traction power is a lot smaller component of the budget than labor is. If you want to run that train, you've gotta pay for at least two crew members: their wages, fringe benefits, and RRTA taxes. It ain't cheap.
Now let's get to the bottom line: the assumption that SEPTA could reduce its deficit by running more off-peak service on the railroad. In order for that to be true, the incremental fares you get from running that service have to exceed the incremental dollars you pay for crews, power, maintenance of equipment (part of which is a fixed cost and part variable), maintenance of way (ditto), trackage rights payments to Amtrak if necessary, the cost of selling and accounting tickets, dispatching, and managerial overhead (I probably left stuff out). Crew costs alone are going to add up to a hundred dollars a trip or more.
Last I looked, SEPTA charged something like 300 bucks an hour for charter service, which is supposed to cover its incremental cost. That means you gotta bring in about 300 bucks _additional_ revenue per trip just to break even, let alone close the budget gap. At an average per passenger of two dollars and change, that's well over a hundred _new_ passengers, not just passengers taking the 12:30 who would have taken the 12:00 if that 12:30 hadn't been added. I don't think you can draw that even on Paoli.
Off-peak service loses money. Period. It's a good idea to run it for the benefit of the public as well as because it helps increase your peak ridership, but it isn't magic bullet to solve SEPTA's problems.
There is no easy, pain-free way to close a budget gap of this magnitude. You could get perhaps 20 million of the 70 million by making employees contribute to health care costs at the level typical private-sector workers do (it's now a small minority of people whose employers still pay 100% of the cost, according to a recent JAMA article), and another 10 or 20 from a moderate fare increase. We know there are still inefficiencies that need to be wrung out of the system (like shortening turnaround times as SEPTA finally did in Warminster at DVARP's suggestion, and making sure employees aren't sleeping on the job like the electrician with the IR device that caused that security scare a month or two ago, but those aren't gonna be solved overnight, even if you fire Faye Moore and Pat Nowakowski, and hire David Gunn in their place. And they aren't going to amount to more than tens of millions of dollars. Most of SEPTA's budget goes to providing service, and to cut it by any substantial amount necessitates cutting service.
