SEPTA is POLITICS

Regional planners and railfans agree -- the Philadelphia region needs more rail service. SEPTA is not meeting this need.

I ask the members of the forum, setting aside the issue of dedicated transit funding (which is necessary for long term planning), what structural and political changes would make SEPTA a better company overall?

I'll start with some ideas for discussion:

1. A board elected by districts, where districts are drawn by population and geographic common interests, with some at large reps. Elected districts work in some parts of the country to provide a better link between governance and the people, though they require more vigilance on the part of the transit-supportive community to support good candidates.

2. An ISO-style public reporting system -- detailed data and technical analysis should be available in an annual report via the web. Benchmark metric indicators would be set by an independent board of industry experts, not SEPTA. For instance, monthly on-time statistics, route commercial speed analysis going back for 20 years, cost structure analysis, status of stations, effectiveness of spending projects (was the money a good investment?) etc.

3. A strategic plan for service improvement and expansion.

4. Ex-officio positions on the Board for the Unions, where the members are elected from the ranks -- this is the German model of marrying the goals of management and labor.

5. Several citizen panels with monthly, public reports to the board.

6. A PR plan to inform the public about project status and planning. For example, there is not set date for when the signal system in the trolley tunnel will be completed -- trolleys will be diverted until "sometime in 2005." This is not good outreach.


Other ideas?

7. A regional transit "federation" with NJT and PATCO to establish a common fare system and marketing and long-range planning.

the Philadelphia region needs more rail service. SEPTA is not meeting this need

Where's the money going? It's all about money to pay for it. If Harrisburg isn't giving enough, then Harrisburg isn't meeting said need...and we all know about Washington nowadays

A regional transit "federation" with NJT and PATCO to establish a common fare system and marketing and long-range planning

Good luck getting NJT to go along with something like that. I am sure they would prefer to keep their own bureaucracy within state lines as much as possible. Don't forget, NJT also connects to the MTA up in New York City, and neither of those agencies (including PATH) have bothered to work out some kind of common fares or "smart-card" technology (except where PATH will be accepting MTA's "Metrocard")...

The biggest thing SEPTA must do is get rid of what I call the "PTC mentality"--- this is basically an attitude and philosophy of operation which SEPTA inherited from its city transit predecessor, the Philadelphia Transportation Company. It's too bad that SEPTA didn't adopt the Red Arrow Lines philosophies, rather than the PTC version, but the same complaints were made about the PTC as are being made about SEPTA.

adamkrom wrote:7. A regional transit "federation" with NJT and PATCO to establish a common fare system and marketing and long-range planning.

Well you don't need some new agency or the like--this could be done through the DVRPC, if someone there would like to take the initiative.

adamkrom wrote:1. A board elected by districts, where districts are drawn by population and geographic common interests, with some at large reps. Elected districts work in some parts of the country to provide a better link between governance and the people, though they require more vigilance on the part of the transit-supportive community to support good candidates.

An elected board is a mixed blessing. While it can produce members who have a genuine interest in fixing the system and making it more effective, it also can exacerbate parochialism (i.e. thinking more of the interests of one's own district more than that of the region as a whole) and it opens the door to having transit opponents on the board.

Chances of having such a system here are slim if they exist at all. Such a system would diminish the power of the legislature and of the county commissioners, as well as risk havoc (constructive or destructive) on the SEPTA board. Then there's the somewhat intractible problem of allocating board seats. Philadelphia has a minority of the population and of tax revenue in the region, but a majority of the riders. Would they get a majority of the seats on the new board?

yeah, the ridership versus population difference seems to the be the main drawback. As for parochialism:

My experience relates to Denver. There, the RTD board receives only a fairly small stipend, and being a board-member is a part-time occupation. For a while, no one paid attention to the election of the board, and a couple of, shall we say, not transit-supportive members were elected, because they were practically the only the candidates in certain districts. After being elected, these members then worked to torpedo a very important transit expansion vote in 1997.

After that debacle, the business and grass roots community was galvanized -- never again! So, they carefully work to find a qualified and responsible slate of candidates, and then they direct campaign funding to them. Since, in Denver, this is a very small, non-partisan race, it doesn't take that much to win (before, the "top line" candidate had the advantage). The support of local officials, the business community, and the environmentalists is usually more than enough to elect a candidate.

Now the board is a model of decorum and relative solidarity. Denver is again facing a major transit election for a massive expansion -- 100 miles of rail service. We'll see what happens.

In Philadelphia, I think it would be better to not have SEPTA report to County Commissioners and the like, who have their own interests. It might be better to have these people work to contact SEPTA rather than the other way around. The city-suburb split is a problem, but it is important to remember that boards are supposed to provide policy guidance and oversight, not daily management. The staff should provide service according to need and usage, not politics, whenever possible. It isn't a perfect world, but insulating management from the board to a degree can help.

For funding, I think the solution is just to establish a regional taxation system and write it as state law. Once established, I imagine it would work well.

Matthew Mitchell wrote:An elected board is a mixed blessing. While it can produce members who have a genuine interest in fixing the system and making it more effective, it also can exacerbate parochialism (i.e. thinking more of the interests of one's own district more than that of the region as a whole) and it opens the door to having transit opponents on the board.

The first problem can be ameliorated by having an elected board be composed of strictly at-large seats, instead of individual districts or counties. This would require the Commonwealth to establish a special electoral district, but would be no more or less difficult than any other form of elected board. Stipulations to protect the representation of various areas would probably need to be added; for instance, to prevent a board consisting entirely of members from the City of Philadelphia, or conversely entirely from the suburbs.

The second problem is one that requires an alert and active electorate with the intelligence and wisdom to prevent such an occurrence. Whether Philadelphia voters meet this qualification is left as an exercise for the reader.

I was wondering if Walt could explain the difference between the PTC mentality versus the Red Arrow philosophy. Was one more corporatist or what?

EugeneV.Debs wrote:I was wondering if Walt could explain the difference between the PTC mentality versus the Red Arrow philosophy. Was one more corporatist or what?

"PTC Mentality" was primarily an "I don't care" attitude toward its ridership which was characterized by poorly maintained equipment, frequent service reductions, less than cordial operating employees, etc. The Red Arrow Lines, on the other hand was always well maintained( even when it ran equipment that was older than comprable PTC equipment) with decent schedules ( though often not as frequent as the schedules on heaviliy travelled PTC city routes--- more a result of the suburban nature of its territory than anything else), and especially very friendly and cordial employees. It is interesting to note that up until 1963, there had never been a Red Arrow strike, while during the same period ( roughly 1900- 1963) the PTC and its predecessors had suffered through 18 strikes.

The Red Arrow was the first to acquire air- conditioned buses ( in 1959) while the first of the GM fishbowl type buses acquired by the PTC were not air-conditioned. It is especially noteworthy that during the Depression years, the Red Arrow, instead of cutting service and raising fares, actually increased service and reduced fares ( and purchased the 1932 80 series Brill Lightweight Interurban Cars--- and the 1949 Red Arrow St Louis cars were the newest cars in the Philadelphia area until 1981) and, though the banks and other financial institutions were agast at this, the Red Arrow avoided the bankruptcy which was so common during that era. ( The PTC predecessor PRT went bankrupt in 1940 and was reorganized as the PTC at that time)
And, right up to its 1970 acqusition by SEPTA, the Red Arrow was looking at and making proposals to expand its service. The PTC did none of this.

Some of this difference might be attributed to the fact that the Red Arrow, and its predecessor Philadelphia & West Chester Traction Company, was, after 1899, essentially a family business, headed by three generations of men named Merritt Taylor. ( A. Merritt Taylor, Merritt H. Taylor and Merritt H. Taylor, Jr.--- this succession was broken only by the Presidency of John R. McCain in the 1950's while Merritt, Jr. was working his way up the ladder in the company, which his father had required him to do.) PTC managment was much more anonymous.
From what I have seen, and read on this board, the SEPTA attitude toward these kinds of things is much more like the PTC than the Red Arrow, hence my term "PTC mentality".

CComMack wrote:

Matthew Mitchell wrote:An elected board is a mixed blessing. While it can produce members who have a genuine interest in fixing the system and making it more effective, it also can exacerbate parochialism (i.e. thinking more of the interests of one's own district more than that of the region as a whole) and it opens the door to having transit opponents on the board.

The first problem can be ameliorated by having an elected board be composed of strictly at-large seats, instead of individual districts or counties. This would require the Commonwealth to establish a special electoral district, but would be no more or less difficult than any other form of elected board. Stipulations to protect the representation of various areas would probably need to be added; for instance, to prevent a board consisting entirely of members from the City of Philadelphia, or conversely entirely from the suburbs.

I think you see the catch--solving one problem often causes another.
This might also have contributed to the current governance problems at SEPTA: when the legislature wanted more say as part of the deal bringing dedicated funding to the authority, they took the easy way out and added seats to the board rather than reallocating the seats already there. Now SEPTA's board has 15 members appointed by 10 different sponsors--which is more than most other authorities have.

Here are the numbers of boards of directors of a few major transit agencies:

SEPTA: 15 appointed members, 5 from State, 2 from each county
NYC MTA: 17 members nominated by Governor, Mayor, and county executives, with NYS Senate approval
NJT: 7 voting members appointed by Governor
BART: 9 elected officials from 9 districts w/ 4-year terms
MBTA: 7 officials appointed by Governor
CTA: 7 members appointed by Mayor and Governor

I got this information from the agencies' own web sites. For the SF Muni, it seems they're a part of the city government instead of an independent agency, and therefore doesn't have a board.

It seems to me that those boards which are appointed by and answer to a single government unit work much better than those split between various local and State interests. Who is their master, when there are several masters?

Lucius Kwok wrote:Here are the numbers of boards of directors of a few major transit agencies:

SEPTA: 15 appointed members, 5 from State, 2 from each county

Those five state representatives are appointed by five different officials, so SEPTA's board is the most fragmented.

NYC MTA: 17 members nominated by Governor, Mayor, and county executives, with NYS Senate approval

The governor and the mayor appoint most of the members (6 and 4 respectively), and the four from the outer suburban counties share a single vote, so there's a total of 14 votes. The MTA also has non-voting representatives from labor unions and the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee.

CTA: 7 members appointed by Mayor and Governor

There's more to it than that. Chicago has one overarching board, the RTA, which handles major policy questions and has to approve the budgets of all three subsidiaries (CTA, PACE, and Metra). Those three subsidiaries each have their own boards too. Right now there's controversy in Chicago over attempts to pack the RTA with more city representation and change the funding formula so as to take away from Metra and give to CTA. One of the things that works there is that a supermajority is required for some actions like approving the budget, so it forces regional consensus.

It seems to me that those boards which are appointed by and answer to a single government unit work much better than those split between various local and State interests. Who is their master, when there are several masters?

It's not quite so simple, as there are some effective boards that answer to a variety of sponsors, such as Metra's. We researched this recently as part of an investigation of governance alternatives, and I'll see about posting some tables somewhere. Some of the other structures are interesting too.