SEPTA ditches social media alerts notifying riders about potential cancellations and delays

Starting Monday, SEPTA will no longer post alerts about potential delays and cancellations due to bus and trolley driver shortages on social media, the service announced this week on its website.

Alerts about delays due to weather and other issues will continue.

Driver shortage alerts originated shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, at a time when the service was operating with a significant deficit of drivers, SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch said. Now that the service has partly resolved the staffing issue and improved its notification systems, the generic alerts are no longer necessary, he said.

“It was never very precise,” Busch said. Alerts were not “giving customers a good picture of what they should expect.”

Since the pandemic, Busch said, the service has refined its tools, like its app and website, to offer customers a more accurate sense of what is happening with their route in real time, including how late a bus may be running and if it has been canceled.

The service has also gotten a better handle on staffing. During 2022 and early 2023, SEPTA was operating with about 220 fewer bus and trolley operators than its budgeted headcount, Busch said. Now that gap has shrunk to about 100 operators, which makes it easier to adjust for staffing fluctuations.

Between those two improvements, the generic delay and cancellation warnings became obsolete, Busch said.

“It just seemed like it was the right time to move on from that and to try to push customers to where they’re going to get more accurate information,” he said.

Riders who do not rely on the website, social media, or the app can get updates on their route by calling 215-580-7800.

SEPTA was at one time a trailblazer in governmental use of social media. It first started posting on Twitter, now X, in 2008, long before many municipal transit agencies had adopted social media. In 2013, it expanded its presence on Twitter with @SEPTA_Social, which was staffed by SEPTA employees.

Customers could post complaints and concerns and receive a personalized response from SEPTA staff, signed with the initials of the staff member. SEPTA shared best practices on social media interaction with transit officials in Chicago, New York, and Boston, Busch said.

SEPTA does not plan on moving away from social media any time soon, he said, even as other large organizations move away from personalized customer service with artificial intelligence. The goal for SEPTA is more tailored support, Busch said, not less.

“That’s been a very successful program and we’ll probably only grow that going forward,” he said.