NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/rec/railroad/11004

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-28 | 6.7 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Sandy F. Smith, Jr.)
Newsgroups: rec.railroad
Subject: Re: Why is SEPTA so horrible?
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 27 Jan 93 21:43:53 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] writes:
>
> In article <[e-mail]>
> [e-mail] (Loren I. Petrich) writes:

> >
> >        I've seen some comments about how the Southeastern
> >Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA: the Philadelphia area)
> >is supposedly one of the worst managed systems around. How is that???
> >--
> Well, I'm not sure I'd lay the blame entirely on the management.  SEPTA's
> basic problem has been that it has no reliable long term source of funds.
> It is controlled by a Board which is dominated by the City of Philadelphia,
> which in the style of the little boy who owns the only bat, continually
> threatens to take its money and go home if the game isn't played by its rules.

Actually, it's not that simple at all.  Far from being "dominated" by the City
of Philadelphia, the SEPTA Board is an exquisite attempt to mollify numerous
historically hostile factions.  Each of the five counties that make up the
Pennsylvania part of Greater Philadelphia (Philadelphia City and County are
coterminous) gets two seats on the board, and two more board members are
appointed by the Governor for a total of twelve seats.  If the members from
the four suburban counties decide to vote as a bloc, the City of Philadelphia
could be consistently outvoted on all matters.  Given the historic distrust
that exists between Philadelphia and its suburbs, the surprise is that this
hasn't happened more.

One reason may be that during the Gunn years, everybody had a vested interest
in bringing their portion of the system (Red Arrow, City Transit, Regional
Rail, what-have-you) back from the dead, so board members could trade support
for each other's desired equipment.  But such cooperation is nonetheless rare;
it was not too long ago that the SEPTA board was in the hip pocket of the
powerful Montgomery County Republican machine.  It took the Governor himself
to loosen its grip (one of the few good things Casey's done for SEPTA without
having to be bludgeoned into acting).

> David Gunn has been a controversial factor in several cities, but IMHO he is
> a competent no-nonsense manager.  You may not agree with everything he does
> but you have to respect his forthrightness and desire to make things work.
> Unfortunately, the cards tend to be stacked against good management.
> Mostly because of the lack of independent funding that can't be pulled out by
> somebody who is unhappy with management's policies.  To run SEPTA you have to
> play politics, which doesn't make for good railroading.

Amen!  And that applies to more than just railroading.  Surface transit
operations are also thus held hostage, and some impediments to (IMO) better
metropolitan transit (such as the operational split at the city line) can
also be traced to the same source.  Nonetheless, the best testament to
David Gunn's brilliance as a transit manager is that SEPTA's rapid-transit
network today still runs, and is in fairly good repair.  The regional rail
network, sad to say, is another story -- it's still on life support.

> The lack of solid funding has led to actual or threatened service cuts, fare
> increases, deferred maintenance, etc., all of which make management look bad
> when it's not entirely under their control.  I don't know the full story
> behind abandonment of the PCC routes, but I would guess that the major factors
> prompting this decision were the age of the equipment coupled with the problems
> inherent in operating streetcars along narrow streets like the 23 route uses to
> get through Center City.  Personally I was surprised to see that the 15 line
> was shut down.  As I recall, Girard Avenue is plenty wide enough to handle
> streetcars, and the line was heavily used.  But then, I'm 300 or so miles
> away, so I probably don't know all the details.

I have heard through the grapevine that depreciation had something to do with
the decision to eliminate all PCC services, i.e., SEPTA could no longer take
depreciation on its PCC fleet, and thus opted for buses to make its bottom
line look better.  Sounds specious to me, but then I'm no economist.

>
> In summary, SEPTA probably has had some management problems, but my personal
> guess is that those pale into insignificance in contrast to the problems
> created by the political forces with which it has to deal and the lack of
> secure independent funding.

SEPTA pulled out all the stops a couple of years ago to get the Pennsylvania
legislature to pass a tax package that included dedicated taxes for mass
transit.  All 37 of Pennsylvania's public transit agencies face two major
hurdles in obtaining a sufficient source of state funds:  the state constitu-
tion prohibits use of the state gasoline tax on anything but roads, and the
rural interests wield sufficient power in the legislature that any move to
amend this provision would surely be shot down.  As it was, the farmboys
had to be convinced that stable funding for mass transit of any kind was in
their interest as well.  Add the animosity that many Pennsylvanians feel for
anything advanced by/on behalf of Philadelphia, and SEPTA's obtaining secure
state funding becomes little short of a miracle.

> The net result of all of these has been a system
> that from the point of view of the rider is unreliable, unpredictable (in the
> long term) and unattractive.  It's really a shame because the basic infra-
> structure that SEPTA inherited from its predecessors was arguably the best
> transit network in the U.S.
>

We in Philadelphia are fortunate indeed that our rail transit facilities
(Market Street Subway/Market Street Elevated aside) were built to such high
standards to begin with, or else they'd have been long since shut down.  But
getting less than we deserve is the norm around here:  the system we have
is only a shadow of the system a city agency suggested we should have *in
1913*.  But that is a subject for another post.

_________________________________________________________________________
Sandy F. Smith [e-mail]________(215) 898-4940
Administrative Assistant, Graduate Division, School of Arts and Sciences,
University of Pennsylvania, 16 College Hall, Philadelphia, PA  19104-6378
 (Opinions mine, not Penn's.  If they want 'em, they gotta pay for 'em.)