Guest Columnist | SEPTA's far from being saved

On its billboard and subway ads, SEPTA upbeat slogan promised that it was "Serious About Change."

Like the stereotypical loser boyfriend promising to clean up his act, get a job, and start washing his jeans, the transit agency tried to keep us focused on a rosy vision of the future. If only we'd stick around - if we'd just give it another chance - SEPTA could really make this thing work.

Quianna Lee, a 25-year-old nursing home attendant from Northeast Philadelphia, has had about enough of these promises.

On a Friday morning in July, she was standing in a sweltering bus shelter at 40th and Market streets, waiting for the 8:00 a.m. Route 30 bus, which, at about 8:25, had yet to appear.

The news of SEPTA's fare hikes didn't sit well with Lee.

The demise of transfers, the 60-cent slips of paper that allow riders to switch from bus to train or subway to trolley, will mean that she has to pay almost 50 percent more to get back and forth to work each day.

"I'm from New York," she said. "You just pay one fare and ride wherever you need to go."

Fortunately for riders, the worst of the crisis has largely been averted.

The state legislature seems likely to approve an additional $150 million in funding for the transit authority, which would save board members from having to enact a Plan B "doomsday" scenario that would have would have crippled the region's economy.

Now that the threat of financial doom has receded, SEPTA needs to think long and hard about its decision to keep the Plan A hikes, which are raising total fares by 11 percent.

Any financial benefits of raising fares could easily be offset by riders defecting in droves, congesting city streets with their cars and further damaging SEPTA's bottom line so the increases have to be incremental.

However, Plan A contains a misguided assortment of "fare simplifications" that attempt to disguise the hike by concentrating it only on certain groups of riders.

Instead of raising base fares across the board or creating a declining-balance card system like the New York Metrocard, they've decided on a plan that the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers says will "increase the inequality in the fare structure, inconvenience the passengers, . reduce economic efficiency, . and may even increase SEPTA's operating costs."

As Benina Jordan put it as she rode the Route 100 trolley home to the suburbs, "they're screwing the little guy again. The poor people just can't win."

The Regional Rail lines, at up to eight dollars a pop, serve white-collar professionals commuting from the suburbs, while blue-collar and service sector workers rely more on the subways and buses.

Many white-collar commuters buy weekly or monthly passes and will pay two dollars more each week under the new plan.

But the SEPTA underclasses who rely on tokens and transfers to get where they're going will pay $1.40 more per trip.

What's more, this will likely discourage occasional riders like Penn students from using SEPTA for leisure trips around the city.

Those of us who live in the suburbs have often weighed the hassle of taking the bus against the ease of cruising downtown in the family sedan. Without cheap transfers, there's a lot less incentive to leave the car in the garage.

Whiny teenager complaints aside, the demise of the transfer strikes particularly hard at a group known as "reverse commuters."

These are the people, like Quianna Lee, who schlep from the far Northeast at 6 a.m. to staff suburban service jobs.

Some ride for over an hour and transfer multiple times. They often use tokens for the simple reason that they can't afford to plop down a lump sum at the beginning of the week.

They're stuck with SEPTA either because there's no four-door sedan in their garage or because the price of gas and parking render their cars useless.

"We're damned if we do, and we're damned if we don't," said Benina Jordan, who jingled her car keys as she kept an eye out for her stop on the Route 100.

"I'd like to show them how pissed I am, but there's no other way to go."

At 40th Street, Quianna Lee sighed with relief as her 8:00 bus pulled up to the curb. It was 8:27.

"No one else seems to think this is their problem," she said of the budget crisis. "But I have to deal with it, at least 'till I have a car." She's been saving for a year.

By August 1, when the underappreciated little transfer slip goes extinct, Quianna hopes to be done with SEPTA for good.

She'll be one of an estimated 20,000 riders abandoning a transit system that, despite the best efforts of the state government, could still be running out of steam.

Alicia Puglionesi is a College junior from Havertown, Pa. Her e-mail address is apuglionesi@sas.upenn.edu.

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