How SEPTA expands bus routes
Businesses and customers along the growing Hunting Park Avenue corridor in North Philadelphia have been clamoring for bus service. But before the wheels on the bus could start going round and round on a longer route for the 53 bus, SEPTA officials had to put in plenty of planning, research and budgeting to ensure the route was worth the investment.
The problem was this: Four bus routes intersect with Hunting Park Avenue, but none traversed the length of it. The Route 53 bus was nearby but also didn't go along the corridor. The service had never really been needed before. Hunting Park Avenue was home to industrial warehouses, and many of those had long been vacant. Recently, though, that began to change.
Requests from the community for adjustments to bus service can come to SEPTA through the process of approving the annual service plan, but in this case the first official request for additional bus service to Hunting Park Avenue came from Temple University Physicians, which has an office in the La Fortaleza Complex on that road, in a 2011 letter saying the lack of easy bus access was making it difficult for patients to get to appointments. The limited bus service in the area meant passengers getting off at intersections had to walk down relatively long blocks on a busy road to get to their destination.
SEPTA representatives looked into the possibility of adding bus service, but felt there weren't enough potential riders to warrant a change in routes. Among the information they received then, though, was a survey filled out by patients identifying where they were traveling from to get to the doctors' offices.
In the subsequent years requests for more attention to the corridor kept coming in. Among those seeking better bus service were city council member Maria Quiñones-Sánchez and Luis Hincapie, who owns La Fortaleza and provided customer counts from several of the businesses along the corridor.
"I think having good data is very important," said Rich Burnfield, SEPTA's deputy general manager. "The more data that we have and the more data that we can use to analyze a proposal, it can help make our job easier."
SEPTA does its own research as well. It looks at demographic and population data, and send observers to busy commercial areas. In this case, attention focused on the Hunting Park Plaza, which is home to 12 stores and 155,000 square feet of retail space in use. In the four years since SEPTA first got requests to look at the route, a lot had changed. Those old warehouses had become homes to businesses, social service agencies ands schools.
"I think a lot of people were surprised at how much development has occurred on Hunting Park," said Steve D'Antonio, SEPTA's manager of city service planning.
An area that's grown so fast isn't going to be accurately represented in Census data, so simply observing became a key tool.
"A lot of educated guessing goes on," he said. "There's no model out there that could estimate ridership at this small scale at this level."
The proposal to extend the bus route by 2.5 miles, to cover an area of Hunting Park Avenue roughly from 9th Street to G Street, doesn't sound like much, but the cost of getting the route to cover a distance comparable to the stretch of Broad Street from City Hall to Oregon Avenue was estimated at about $283,000 a year, D'Antonio said.
The research showed the Route 53 bus would see an additional 90,000 trips a year, about 300 a day, SEPTA is estimating the longer route will bring in about $140,000 in fare money, which is more than 45 percent of the expense. That's actually an improvement on what the route earns now, about 28 percent of its expense.
Last year, SEPTA finally agreed Hunting Park Avenue warranted additional bus service. The bus extension that went into effect Sunday was the first significant addition to a route in two years, since the Route 56 bus was extended to Bakers Centre near East Falls. Among the remaining challenges, determining how to add length to the route without affecting service for the existing stops. The solution, and a major part of the expense, was to add two buses to the route and offer service on the extended route with every second trip. The wait time for a bus on the new portion of the route should be about 25 minutes from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and then hourly from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
The response from the community was immediately positive, SEPTA said.
"I think good transit service is critical to the economic vitality of a community," Burnfield said. "I think there's been so many studies that have been done over the years to talk about how transit really adds to the economic vitality, the vibrancy of the city."