thus passes the city of brotherly love
Since SEPTA’s service plan for the Papal Visit came out, transportation experts and casual riders alike have been picking apart what seem to be obvious flaws. As suggestions for improvement are met with uncharacteristic silence from 1234 Market Street, the picture has become much clearer: it’s not SEPTA’s transportation plan, it’s the transit component of …
Continue reading “The Secret Service Is Not a Transportation Agency”
The violent thunderstorm that swept over Greater Philadelphia Tuesday evening, disrupting all modes of travel during the evening rush, has apparently let the magic smoke out of at least six area rail lines. The most serious outage is PATCO, which is entirely without electric power and does not expect restoration until after the morning rush. …
Continue reading “Wednesday morning service disrupted on PATCO and SEPTA after storm”
UPDATE 5/14: As of Thursday morning, SEPTA and NJT are co-ordinating detour service via the West Trenton Line. SEPTA will be running a new weekday schedule with about twice as many trains as normal. NJT will be providing free shuttle buses between West Trenton station and Trenton Transit Center. SEPTA is also providing extra parking …
I’d like to write an enormous longform piece on how, in the first five weeks of this year, SEPTA and PATCO have been handling the disruptions of winter weather, for better and for worse. In lieu of the time to crank out the 10,000+ words the subject could take, let me take some time this …
Continue reading “Twitter helpdesks are too valuable to be turned off so early”
In the last night of the year, five things we’ll remember from 2014: The year of citizen action. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much when Conrad Benner launched a change.org petition to get SEPTA to run the subways overnight. But it worked, and now another petition has sparked progress on a second front, in …
Continue reading “Looking back, looking ahead: New Year’s roundup 2015”
Originally posted on Itinerant Urbanist:
Apologies for the long periods between posts. I’ve been caught up with school, work, and the Jewish holidays, so time for blogging has been infrequent. That being said, here’s a short post on something that caught my eye as I was doing research for a paper. Anyone interested in planning,…
Engineers and electricians hit picket lines at the close of the service day last night, marking the first strike against SEPTA Regional Rail since the first year SEPTA operated the service. Governor Corbett is publicly stating that he will ask President Obama to compel workers back to the negotiating table and back to work, under …
Continue reading “SEPTA Regional Rail on strike for first time since 1983”
Devin Turner, Friend of the Blog, is up with an article on this old city about the promise of transit-oriented development (TOD) along the Haddon Avenue corridor in South Jersey, and why DRPA should be looking to redevelop its massive parking lots along the PATCO line. But something Devin glossed over (because it’s old hat …
…that when I wrote this post describing how to carve up DRPA and its bridge revenues in such a way that it could never rise from the dead again, I was intending to include actual budget numbers from DRPA’s own documents, to show that there was enough revenue to go around to SEPTA, NJT, the …
I hate kicking someone while they’re down (unless the someone is the Dallas Cowboys or the Atlanta Braves) but man, PATCO is having a rough time of it, and it strengthens the argument that it needs to be killed and its corpse fed to SEPTA. Since January 18th, they’ve been running a limited schedule from …
Sic Transit Philadelphia 