No Weekend SEPTA Service? Two thoughts:

A friend of mine just thought of something: If SEPTA goes ahead with its plan to eliminate all weekend service, then there will be a route elimination by default....

Yep, the Saturday-only Route 91 (Norristown TC to Graterford Prison) would fade into history!!!

Also imagine this, if you will...

It's January, 2005. It is a cold Sunday afternoon late in the month. By a miracle, the Eagles have made it to the NFC Championship game yet again, and this time they are on their way to a win.

But there is a problem: Only 4,000 people are in attendance at the game.

Why?

Because there is 11 inches of snow on the ground, and they were the only ones who had 4-wheel drive vehicles. The rest of the fans were stuck since they had to dig out, and the others just couldn't get to the game....

....because SEPTA runs no weekend service!!!

We'd be the laughingstock of the nation on national TV again....that would be a good kick in the you-know-where for a region with an already floundering economy...

Joe

At least it won't affect the Ivy Ridge branch....

Not much has since 1986........

What about the hundereds of thousands of people who live in lower class neighborhoods and have no cars and no other ways of getting around? Will they not be able to go anywhere on weekends?

Seriously though, I doubt SEPTA would say they'd have no service on weekends. You guys maybe misunderstood; what they problably said was that there would be no regional rail service on weekends (except for maybe the airport-Glenside line), as well as no service on less popular bus routes, but I doubt they'd have no weekend service on popular bus routes, the BSS, the MFL, and othe lines.

Channel 6 specifically said no weekend service on the entire system.

Here's a link to SEPTA's website with their official press release on the matter: http://www.septa.org/news/press_releases/090904.html

As you can see, it says "elimination of all weekend service..."

Charging tokens for tha same price as tha base fare would help close tha budget gap. I mean, what were they thinking, selling tokens for $1.30, when tha base fare is $2? And they wonder why they are in a deficit up to their eyeballs.

Agreed, tokens should be at least $1.75 each, otherwise tokens end up being cheaper than monthly passes for the typical commuter.

N.Y. State Of Mind wrote:Charging tokens for tha same price as tha base fare would help close tha budget gap. I mean, what were they thinking, selling tokens for $1.30, when tha base fare is $2? And they wonder why they are in a deficit up to their eyeballs.

Lucius Kwok wrote:Agreed, tokens should be at least $1.75 each, otherwise tokens end up being cheaper than monthly passes for the typical commuter.

The original idea was that tokens should cost less than the cash fare in order to

(1) encourage prepayment so there would be some benefit from "float" and

(2) reduce fare collection costs by having more fares paid using a single coin-like instrument that could be counted mechanically rather than hand-processed like bills (yeah, the U.S. could use a functional $ coin like most other Western countries, but that's another thread...)

If you reduce the incentive to pre-pay you'll have more people who decide it's not worth the extra effort to get tokens. That'll drive up fare collection costs and increase dwell times while people fumble with dollar bills.

However, the real problem is that over the years the system has gotten so out of balance that tinkering with tokens vs. cash vs. passes is never going to fix anything. You have to scrap the current crazy-quilt and come up with something that is less complex and more efficient. (and BTW, under the current pricing structure tokens are already cheaper than passes so that distortion is an existing problem, not just a future issue.)

Now to return to the original topic...

The "no weekend service" threat is a scare tactic designed to get more of a rise out of the suburban pols. The malls, hotels, hospitals and other service industries depend on many of their workers arriving by SEPTA. The county commissioners probably couldn't care less whether someone can get to work in South Philly on a Saturday. But if, for ex., Willow Grove and K of P malls plus Lankenau and Fox Chase hospitals find themselves without weekend employees there'll be major screeching.

SEPTA does have a new fare-collection system (magnetic, smart card, or some other stored-value card) in its capital budget for the next few years. They don't give much details, such as whether it's being funded, but it's in there.

Back on topic, I do have to wonder how many more times these scare tactics will work. People today are wiser than a decade ago because they can read about it on the Internet, and learn they have more options than the "take it or leave it" approach that SEPTA is using. They might start demanding some changes at 1234 Market Street.

It's a bit of a stereotype that low-income people can't afford a car. You can get a used car for pretty cheap, and cars have become much more reliable and need less maintenance than twenty years ago. I think if SEPTA does implement this plan, there will be more car owners, even among the low-income.

I would like to see SEPTA follow through with their plan. A good portion of the people who rely on SEPTA on the weekends are low-income retail workers. They work at Best Buy, Home Depot, KOP mall, Franklin Mills, Willow Grove, etc.

While it will be a hardship on these people, the companies that rely on these workers who use SEPTA to get to these jobs will also be affected. I would like to see these companies who take advantage of cheap city labor to fork out the money to keep SEPTA running to get their cheap labor. After all, they are the ones responsible for us having to bus people to all parts of the earth to go to work or go shopping. Part of our problem is sprawl. These companies are also making record profits while paying minimum wages to full-time workers. If they want the cheap labor and want to be out in the woods, let them pay for it.

JeffK wrote: The original idea was that tokens should cost less than the cash fare in order to
(1) encourage prepayment so there would be some benefit from "float" and
(2) reduce fare collection costs by having more fares paid using a single coin-like instrument that could be counted mechanically rather than hand-processed like bills...

No. It was an artifact of a state policy that the lottery fund would reimburse SEPTA for senior citizen travel at the full base fare. SEPTA (it may have been Feather O'Connor in particular, but I'm not certain) realized they could get more money from Harrisburg by setting the base fare artificially high, then establishing a "deep discount" on tokens and passes for regular non-senior riders.

Now there are other benefits to the policy, such as encouraging pre-payment and better tailoring fares to willingness to pay (single-trip riders aren't as sensitive to fare levels as frequent riders are), so SEPTA maintained the policy even after the state changed the senior citizen reimbursement formula to base it on the average fare paid (about $1.20 these days IIRC) rather than the base fare. And other cities have followed SEPTA's example.

As for your points, the effect of float on SEPTA revenues is trivial--you're looking at an average of a week's worth of interest or less, and only a fraction of revenue being shifted from cash to pre-paid. Fare collection costs are definitely an issue, and definitely driven some SEPTA policies in the past (see the ill-considered attempt to charge penalty fares to rail passengers who had no ticket office or machine available at their boarding station).

I agree that the "float" on tokens isn't a big deal and perhaps should have downplayed it more. However, the collection costs are a major issue as illustrated by other cities, for ex. Toronto and Paris, that also use a discount on bulk-purchase fares as a way of encouraging more efficient payment methods.

The TTC's policies (at least as of a few years ago) have been remarkably similar to SEPTA's, with a high base fare and discounts for token purchases. One difference was that without a PUC to tell them what they could or couldn't do, the TTC established a sliding scale where a pair of tokens cost only slightly less than 2 cash fares, while buying 10 or 20 knocked a considerable amount off the per-trip cost. The RATP similarly sells "carnets" (*) of 10 single-trip tickets for less than the cost of 10 individual fares.

But IMHO the bottom line is still that SEPTA's current system is badly out of whack and can't be fixed by nibble-around-the-edges changes. That statement applies not just to fare collection but to the whole swamp at 1234.

(*) pronounced "kar-NAY", roughly meaning "booklet"

JeffK wrote:The TTC's policies (at least as of a few years ago) have been remarkably similar to SEPTA's, with a high base fare and discounts for token purchases. One difference was that without a PUC to tell them what they could or couldn't do, the TTC established a sliding scale where a pair of tokens cost only slightly less than 2 cash fares, while buying 10 or 20 knocked a considerable amount off the per-trip cost.

SEPTA did plan to do this a while ago, but certain groups threatened to call SEPTA "racist" if they did.

But IMHO the bottom line is still that SEPTA's current system is badly out of whack and can't be fixed by nibble-around-the-edges changes. That statement applies not just to fare collection but to the whole swamp at 1234.

Well said. There is a crying need for someone to go in there and kick over some rocks.

So what the hell am I supposed to do if SEPTA ends all weekend service? Buy a rickshaw for weekends?

It's problably just like a "scare tactic", similar to how the MTA in NYC said it was going to close down the entire Greenpoint, West Hempstead, Montauk, and Long Island City Lines, and was going to end weekend service. It's something that won't ever happen.