I attended the meeting at the Elkins park Station on Wednesday, held between SEPTA officials and neighborhood residents.
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local ... blems.html
The tone was cordial, but people were upset with the implementation of the badly needed schedule change.
First off, I support the changes made to the Airport line resulting in less direct service from the Reading main line north of Temple. It needs to be done to improve service to the airport from Center City. I say this, even though my wife will be inconvenienced next week getting to the airport for a business trip. I also enjoyed, over the years, the direct service for my travels. Even with the conditions of the cars, and the lack of enforcement of rules by some conductors, I encouraged people to make use of this service. The service worked for me. Now, it will not be as convenient as it once was, but we are still fortunate to have a good way to avoid driving to the airport.
The roll-out of the new schedules was much more of a problem. I called SEPTA service several times, pointing out issues with the new schedules. For example, which is the correct schedule? The printed Glenside schedules were wrong, the SEPTA app was wrong, the schedule on SEPTA's website was wrong. It turns out that the only correct schedule was the PDF version on the website. The problem was: How are we suppose to know this? I was even told by a ticket agent that they were told to keep the incorrect printed schedules available. How does that help us? An incorrect schedule is just as bad as no schedule.
People at the meeting complained about this and other issues concerning the station. The SEPTA representatives did a good job of recording the issues and promised to fix them. More importantly, they said that they had messed up this roll-out and will learn from it before the next schedule change.
I believe that the meeting was beneficial to both sides. The only way for SEPTA to know that there is a problem is to report it when it happens. When it receives many reports over the same issue, they may react more quickly.