For the longtime Philly rider, the 56-page document on SEPTA’s website may look for all the world like a WALL-E sequel.
In February 2021, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority approved a plan to review and refresh Philadelphia’s public transit for the first time since its inception in the mid-1960s.
Sleek light-rail machines would bring the nation’s most extensive streetcar system into the 21st century, giving it a facelift dramatic enough to turn a Florida bodybuilder green with envy. Regional Rail — SEPTA’s sprawling, white-collar commuter rail system — would become a DMV-style Metro system. And a team of urban planners got the directive to redraw Greater Philadelphia’s entire bus network in a program dubbed, astonishingly, the Bus Revolution.
That was very nearly four years ago. SEPTA has, according to spokesman Andrew Busch, moved ahead with a plan to at last bring its subway stations into line with the Americans with Disabilities Act. A $317 million federal grant kickstarted the push to modernize the Market-Frankford Line’s cars, with the trolleys due to follow in 2027 or 2028.
And the city’s modes of public transportation are breaking in new names — coded not according to where they go or what they are, but by a signature letter and color. The Norristown High-Speed Line is the purple “M,” for example. The Frankford subway, colloquially known as the El, is now a powder-blue “L.”
But WALL-E never got a sequel: Parts of what’s known as SEPTA Forward now lie between the proverbial refrigerator and the cutting-room floor.
A direct metro line to King of Prussia, initially the marquee item on Regional Rail’s transformation, fizzled after federal benefactors questioned its ability to weather cost overruns.
“There weren’t any projects in our capital budget that we could look at and say, ‘If we have a cost overrun on KOP Rail, we’ll cut from here,’” said SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch. “Everything is pretty tight.”
Much of the remaining funding for streetcar modernizations has yet to arrive, though SEPTA has put some of its historic, green-and-cream trolleys back on the streets.
Bus Revolution was never a hit with the public, anyway. In the years since its announcement, officials have repeatedly pushed back a start date. But the Revolution has neither been televised nor implemented. Instead, it’s been indefinitely suspended. Busch believes the moniker “Revolution” might have been a little upsetting to longtime passengers.
“I think we’re gonna call it something more like ‘the new bus network,’” he quipped.
Delays and cancellations, demons never fully cast from a transit system’s timetable, have now come to haunt SEPTA’s administrative calendar. But darker devilry awaits.
Regional Rail’s vast reach — from the exurbs of Swarthmore and Pottstown, Pennsylvania to the neighboring metropolises of Wilmington, Delaware and Trenton, New Jersey — has long quenched SEPTA’s operational thirst with streams of laptop-class cash.
When the COVID-19 pandemic sparked the Zoom-i-fication of office work, the commuters stayed home. When the plague lifted, they didn’t return.
Students at Temple still use SEPTA a great deal: Main Campus covers three stops on the Broad Street Line — Cecil B. Moore, Girard and Susquehanna-Dauphin.
Some ride Regional Rail to get to class. Many use buses and subways to grocery shop the Fresh Grocer; to get to off-campus jobs; or just wander around downtown. And aspiring doctors on the Health Sciences Campus have easy access to the sub, too, via Allegheny Station across the street from the Kornberg dentistry school.
Not all Temple students have to use SEPTA. But Bryce Forys would prefer they did.
“Using SEPTA versus a single occupancy vehicle is way more environmentally friendly; it’s better for the environment,” said Forys, Temple’s sustainability coordinator. “From a health perspective in the city, it helps prevent car strikes, congestion, things like that.”
Yet the pandemic’s aftermath opened a $240 million hole in SEPTA’s operating budget. Talk of an apocalyptic “fiscal cliff,” of steep price hikes and circulation-slicing cutbacks, became a staple of the state legislature’s year-end conversations.
And the pandemic took more than SEPTA’s money: When the laptop class moved out, the housing crisis’ victims moved in — often fighting losing battles against drug addiction, mental illness or both while their governments razored the plague-era safety net.
Very, very public antisocial episodes became bog-standard parts of city shuttling. Public transit became a political football, a symbol of Democratic governance’s shortcomings in the eyes of voters. And “the loss of a peaceful commons,” as Elizabeth Bruenig put it in The Atlantic, spurred SEPTA workers to threaten a strike if the Authority didn’t deliver stronger protections against violence.
Officials averted a stoppage by committing more resources to safety. But Busch said those funds leave the authority less financial wiggle room.
For junior information science and technology student Marcus Sides, the Authority’s financial woes have already brought one unwelcome change: Charges resumed for parking at Regional Rail stations earlier this year. The change didn’t go unnoticed, Sides said. But it wasn’t enough to move him off the rails. Yet.
“I would say they’re small inconveniences,” Sides said. “If I were to drive out, that’s, like, 40 minutes to drive up and that’d be really expensive.”
Small inconveniences, piling up, would be a hallmark of SEPTA’s “death spiral”: The phrase wormed its way into the local lexicon and now routinely falls from the lips of the Authority’s own officials. And it doesn’t refer to something quick and painless.
In what Busch and other SEPTA officials call the “worst-case scenario,” rides become more expensive as service becomes less reliable. Unable to afford the new, higher rates, riders simply stop using public transit unless absolutely necessary.
Local transit, in this nightmare, begins bleeding public confidence: The school district, for example, stops buying SEPTA passes for its students and instead hires its own fleet of buses.
“To put it bluntly, people can’t count on you,” Busch said.
Last year, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and a divided state legislature united to keep SEPTA as-is for much of 2024. Lawmakers again dodged the dawn of the “death spiral” this November after the Authority raised rates by 21%.
Transit officials now back a Shapiro proposal to send larger shares of the state’s tax revenues to transit, Busch said — and anyway, SEPTA finances improvement projects like the Forward initiatives separately from its day-to-day workings; a single dip in revenue isn’t supposed to impact the Authority’s future projects. But a prolonged era of fiscal crisis, he warned, could doom efforts to modernize public transit.
The Sustainability Office, among other groups, says it intends to do its part for SEPTA — educating students on how to make use of its services and press state lawmakers for more funds.
“It feels like it’s on a level of state government,” Forys said. “And, yes, that is where the funding exists. But there’s a lot that you can do as students to really advocate for it.”
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