Token promises
With rockets that can return to Earth and cars that threaten to drive themselves, human transportation has hurtled into 2016. But the SEPTA token - the ancient Sumerian coin of American transit - abides.
With rockets that can return to Earth and cars that threaten to drive themselves, human transportation has hurtled into 2016. But the SEPTA token - the ancient Sumerian coin of American transit - abides.
Will the Philadelphia region's transit agency rid us of this artifact anytime soon? Don't bet your remaining subway scrip on it.
SEPTA has just blown yet another deadline to begin rolling out the notoriously tardy "smart card" system designed, as a SEPTA official reiterated to The Inquirer last week, to take the agency's payment system from "worst to first." But in the meantime - the endless meantime - all we have is worst.
SEPTA's tokens, along with paper tickets and transfers, rolls of quarters, and other antiquated payment technologies, are not just a symbolic embarrassment to the city, though they are certainly that. They're also notoriously scarce in places where people are likely to need them - such as, say, SEPTA stations. When they are distributed, it's often by moody machines along with unlikely quantities of change, or in tiny plastic bags that make them seem like an illicit substance. In short, they embody an insistent inconvenience bordering on contempt for the commuting public.
The $220 million "SEPTA Key" system, promised since 2007 and commissioned in 2011, is supposed to rectify all that, making fares payable across the system with easily replenished smart cards, smartphones, and some credit and debit cards. The mythic quality of this promise has only been reinforced by the agency's repeated failures to fulfill it. Having set and missed launch dates in each of the past three years, SEPTA recently rescheduled the kickoff, rather unconvincingly, for next spring.
Officials have noted that the job facing the agency and contractor ACS Transportation Systems, a Xerox subsidiary, is complicated, which it is. They have also pointed out that SEPTA is woefully underfunded, which it was before major transportation legislation was passed in Harrisburg two years ago. And it probably didn't help that the executive in charge of smart-card development retired in 2014 - and took a job with a longtime consultant on the project.
Getting the new fare system right is the top priority, SEPTA officials say, hence their striving to work out all the bugs before it debuts. That's an appropriate aspiration given the potential for chaos if mass transit doesn't function. After two years of delays and $11 million in cost overruns, they had better get it right.
Amid improvements in ridership, service, funding, and infrastructure in recent years, SEPTA's payment problem has been an anomalous failure but not a token one. No transportation agency worth its fares should be perpetually behind schedule.
