SEPTA ridership up, despite fare increases
When SEPTA hiked fares 12 percent last summer, transit-agency officials said they expected ridership to decline, as it had after prior fare increases.
When SEPTA hiked fares 12 percent last summer, transit-agency officials said they expected ridership to decline, as it had after prior fare increases.
But when gasoline prices jumped sky-high and stayed there, SEPTA ridership escalated by 30,000 daily trips (4 percent) from July 1 to Jan. 1 over the same period in 2006.
Regional Rail ridership rose 12 percent, or 13,000 daily trips, while city transit (trains and buses) increased by 17,000 daily trips or 2.6 percent.
The ridership renaissance continued last month, up 51,000 daily trips or 6 percent over the previous January - up 32,000 daily trips on city transit; up 19,000 daily trips on Regional Rail.
"As fuel prices rise and congestion on the highways worsens, SEPTA's reasonable price and reliability cause people to take the train instead of their cars," said John McGee, the agency's chief revenue officer.
"You might wait one to two minutes if a train is running late, but at least you're not sitting somewhere on the highway for a half-hour, not knowing when traffic will start moving again."
McGee smiled - something he never did during all the nerve-racking years of inadequate state funding and SEPTA "doomsday" threats of hiking fares while slashing service.
Secure in a steady state-funding stream at last, SEPTA's new general manager, Joseph M. Casey, was upbeat about upgrades.
"Our Regional Rail cars are 34 to 40 years old and they aren't getting any younger," Casey said, citing plans to start replacing 130 of the 360 rail cars in two years.
As part of its new campaign to go green environmentally, which kicked off yesterday, SEPTA will roll out 400 new, fuel-efficient, carbon-emissions-reducing, diesel-electric hybrid buses between now and 2011.
They will join the 32 hybrids already on the streets of Philadelphia.
Meanwhile, Casey said, SEPTA maintenance people have become "scavengers," pulling train cars from off-peak routes to add them for rush-hour "crush time," 7:30 to 8:30 a.m., on jammed routes such as R2 (south), R3, R5, R6 and R7.
The intensity of the rush-hour bus crush on routes such as 14, 17 and 47 is so acute, Casey said, that "we run Route 14 buses every two minutes on Roosevelt Boulevard" and riders are still standing there watching jam-packed buses pass them by.
The new hybrid buses, which begin arriving in the fall, can't get here fast enough, Casey said. *