Throughout the last four years during SEPTA’s cost-neutral bus network redesign, members of the Philly TRU have consistently witnessed conceptual and process issues throughout each stage of the project. Awareness that a redesign was taking place was low and the mostly online outreach only reached a small fraction of riders. And even then, they lacked the resources to sufficiently serve the small group of riders they did reach. The Zoom meetings where feedback was solicited had capacity limits set lower than one car on the Broad Street Line. Riders, who wanted to give feedback on the changes, were turned away before the meeting started due to there being not enough time in the meeting for their feedback. Many comments made in the final round of in-person public hearings had never been acknowledged.
Transit Center’s analysis of the “Bus Revolution” shows that, on the whole, SEPTA’s redesigned bus network doesn’t result in a net decrease of travel times or access to schools, grocery stores, hospitals or jobs. The redesign also largely doesn’t expand the scope of the bus network, nor does it significantly add service to corridors that didn’t already have bus service.
SEPTA is voting on major changes that affect all corners of the region without sending anybody along any routes to explain the new bus network to riders. There are tables set up every day at Frankford Transportation Center every day to sell phones, yet SEPTA only sent people out to their own transit center less than five times during the entire bus revolution process.
Once the changes take effect, there will still be a lot of work involved in informing riders of the changes, and making more iterations when severe crowding issues arise. In New York, for example, the Long Island Rail Road has spent the last year since Grand Central Madison opened tweaking its schedules due to travel patterns not meeting predictions. And this was in a scenario where riders were seeing an overall increase in service. Are the costs of implementing an entirely new bus network something SEPTA wants to take on, given it’s unsure if it will have the funding from Harrisburg in the next fiscal year? And would an agency who couldn’t afford to put up signs at bus stops advertising the Bus Revolution, be able to effectively communicate the changes to riders as they take effect?
While there are a lot of inefficiencies in the current bus network, it is still a work of decades of design and iteration that takes account of stakeholders like business, schools, unions and community feedback. In a system as large and complex as SEPTA, it doesn’t make sense that an entire bus network can be redesigned from the ground up, and provide service better than the current network, in 3 years. Plans to change the spacing of bus stops, a key part of the redesign, have still yet to be released.
The Philly TRU feels that neither SEPTA nor Nelson/Nyygard have done the sufficient work to prove to riders that applying the changes they’ve proposed would significantly reverse declining ridership trends or improve SEPTA’s fiscal situation. We don’t see why an all-or-nothing, cost-neutral redesign is necessary if set against a long-term piecemeal approach that breaks the network down on a neighborhood level. A strong project would make changes that give planners the time to make fully informed decisions and gives riders the time to receive sufficient outreach.