OK, PATCO’s kind of fucked

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 midday Fridays to late Monday nights, so that they could take out an entire track over the Ben Franklin Bridge for heavy maintenance work.

The effort to only impact three out of ten rush hours a week is noble, but the extent to which schedules are fucked during those three is very high (don’t even think about anything involving reverse-commuting), and the implementation is falling well short of what the schedules promised. Yesterday’s version was a particular nightmare, starting with a westbound train breaking down on the approach to the bridge during the AM rush, and having to be backed into City Hall station and evacuated, meanwhile stoppering the entire system with backed up, crush-loaded trains. After that, PATCO riders could hardly be faulted for wanting their evening to go better, but instead they were treated to an eastbound train having a traction motor die and catch fire, filling two train cars with smoke and leading to a frantic evacuation into the dark and shuttered Franklin Square Station.

While we’re in the part of winter where the cold degrades the reliability of every mechanical device known to man, it is also true that PATCO plans to be even more aggressive with its track closure schedule after the spring thaw. Bad news for everyday riders. People with actual jobs they need to get to, can’t be at the mercy of what PATCO is putting them for even one weekday per week, much less a full seven day week as the spring has in store. Also, I’m told that some people work on weekends, or during nontraditional hours, or in the suburbs. And FSM knows, PATCO riders certainly can’t put up with this nonsense for the next two years (the expected length of the bridge reconstruction) without putting their employment at grave risk.

Now, it should be pointed out that, even in light of the advanced age of the PATCO fleet, we should not dismiss the real possibility that this is just a run of terrible luck on PATCO’s part. Things happen, and they tend to happen in bunches, not well spread out. I could possibly be piling onto an agency that has done nothing wrong. Be that as it may, PATCO needs to be able to cope with misfortune like anyone else in this broken world, and they are not showing strong competence in doing so. The bad luck scenario is possible, but increasingly unlikely as failure mounts on failure. The anecdotes of communication failure coming out of the smoke-filled train under Franklin Square are harrowing.

PATCO needs to step up with a plan to restore transit reliability across the Delaware River, whether that’s its own constricted train service, or contracting with someone (or someones) else for a bus bridge. (If PATCO was repatriated to SEPTA, SEPTA would be capable of arranging bustitution internally!) In light of the continuing ignorance of transit issues in Drumthwacket, I’m not hopeful that anyone who matters is going to hold DRPA’s feet to the fire. So in the meantime, PATCO riders are going to have to take measures to protect themselves from PATCO’s unreliability. For as many as possible, I hope that some combination of NJ Transit buses, the Atlantic City Line, and other conventional common carriers will be a dominant strategy, and that people won’t resort to (shudder) driving over a DRPA bridge into or out of Philadelphia. But I’m a blogger, not dictator. I can only write things, and hope that the things I write help people.

By Thursday night, I hope to have as comprehensive a guide to non-PATCO transit across the river written up as I can. I would encourage anyone with information on, ah, less conventional alternatives that I may have failed to mention, to leave them in the comments of this post.

After all, we may be getting ~6 more inches of snow here in the city by Thursday, and people going home during the next single-tracking period Friday evening, might want to actually get home before Saturday.

No, really, I don’t know, and I need one now

The winter of 2013-2014 is shaping up to be the “Winter of the Sneckdown”. The urban-space nerd’s portmanteau of “snowy neckdown” has suddenly become ubiquitous, with Friend of the Blog Jon Geeting’s photoessay on sneckdowns on East Passyunk Ave on This Old City going viral nationally. As the awareness (and buzz) has grown around unplowed snow next to curbs in intersections, the next step was clearly to expand the genre to unplowed islands of snow in the middle of streets: a potential pedestrian plowza. (This from the same twisted mind that gave us honku.)

But I find myself without a snappy, wintry, portmanteau hashtag for the snowy mess that is a Philadelphia bus (or trolley) boarding zone after a snowstorm. And I think I really need one, because there’s as many (or more) of them as there are sneckdowns, at least in my part of North Philly. Any clever wordsmiths out there with a word to spare?

Fuck the State

Jon Geeting brings the truth at Keystone Politics:

…Philadelphia and Pittsburgh’s transit funding is excessively dependent on both state funding and fares.

For political-geographic reasons, our transit authorities will never receive generous funding from the state. No, this is not a coordination problem between state reps. There just aren’t enough transit riders to make growing transit ridership a political priority for a sufficient number of people at the state level. So for as long as we continue to depend on the state, we’re going to have mediocre transit…

Where should most of the money come from then? We need a local option tax, to raise more of the money from local sources. And that local source should be the land values around transit stations.

State lawmakers need to give us the option to choose to tax ourselves, via ballot initiative, by assessing a tax on land within the walkable half-mile radius around transit stations. Everybody in the 5-county SEPTA region, and in the Allegheny County region, would vote on this, and the majority decision would prevail. We would use this tax to finance operations, and network expansions, and fare cuts.

We need lawmakers to give us this power. We need them to give it to us right now.

Now, he and I differ on the exact minutiae of how we should tax our own land, but he’s absolutely right that as long as we are at the mercy of Harrisburg, we’ll always be a crayon shortage away from disaster. This is no way for a proud people to live. SEPTA provides a lot of real economic value to this region, which we would miss if it went away. Harrisburg should let us put our own money up as an investment on our own future.

The subject line comes from The Stranger’s take on an ongoing transit-funding standoff between Seattle and the Washington State Legislature, where the dynamics are very different than what you find in Philadelphia, because Seattle and King County have local taxation power to keep King County Metro afloat in the face of a suicidally hostile state.

The ultimate in pervious “paving”!

It’s winters like this one, where I wonder if it would be worth it to run a pilot program replacing the asphalt pavement on some trinity streets with gravel. I’m speaking specifically of cartways of 15 feet or less in width (i.e. too narrow for parking), the ones that aren’t already done in brick or Belgian block. It’s a step backwards, until you realize that gravel is a lot less hazardous than the potholes that are frickin’ everywhere right now. PWD would love it, for the reason of the title.

This is not an advocacy post, just thinking out loud.

How do you solve a problem like DRPA? Kill it.

(OK, the scansion needs a lot of work.)

The idea of a transportation authority is very simple. By isolating an important public function from direct interference (and oversight) from elected officials, you can create an atmosphere of continuity and stability that allows the authority to issue bonds without undue distress (in the form of higher interest rates) on the part of the bond vigilantes on Wall Street.

That, at least, is the theory. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen repeatedly in the unfolding drama of Bridgegate, just because there’s not a direct chain of command that runs to elected officials doesn’t mean there’s not ways for them to wield power over these nominally independent entities. Not only does Governor Christie stand accused of placing personally loyal associates in the hierarchy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ) to do his bidding, but also of conducting multibillion dollar raids on the Port Authority’s treasury for New Jersey state transportation projects outside its purview. So much for independence from political interference, not to mention the supposed checks and balances of PANYNJ being a bistate agency. Even when the PANYNJ is functioning as designed, it tends towards spending money like a drunken sailor, without the slightest hint of cost control. While real transportation needs go unaddressed, the Port Authority sees fit to build a $225 million hallway and a $1.5 billion (budgeted) redundant PATH extension to Newark Airport Raillink Station. Observers of the Port Authority are in nearly universal dismay at the prospect of it being reformed; Stephen J. Smith and Matt Yglesias have both written eloquent and well-reasoned arguments for breaking it up into component parts. And last week, the New Jersey Assembly’s transit consolidation bill clearly called out the Port Authority’s PATH rapid transit system as a target for merger.

So it seems clear to me, if we can call for the rightful destruction of the larger and, frankly, slightly more useful PANYNJ, then our own local patronage-and-graft mill, the Delaware River Port Authority (DRPA), needs to die. And it needs to die now.
Continue reading “How do you solve a problem like DRPA? Kill it.”

Hold this thought

New Jersey Senate committee approves transit agency consolidation:

Should SEPTA and PATCO combine their commuter rail operations? Would North Jersey commuters be better served if PATH trains were run by NJ Transit or New York City’s MTA?

A plan to consider such mergers cleared a New Jersey Senate panel this week.

…

The resolution proposes the six commission members (two each appointed by the governor, Senate president, and Assembly speaker) would have 18 months to report their findings to the Legislature.

“We would question who is merging with whom. NJT/PATH? NJT/PATCO? PATCO/SEPTA? NJT/MTA?” Les Wolff, director of the New Jersey Association of Rail Passengers, said in an e-mail.

If the lawmakers want to expand rail service in the state, Wolff said, there are already a number of proposals, including one to restore commuter rail service between Camden and Glassboro. But a lack of money has kept all the expansion proposals on the shelf, he said.

This is the third time such consolidation legislation has been introduced in the state Senate; in each of the last two biennial legislative sessions, the measure was unanimously approved by the Senate but died in the Assembly.

I have 20+ posts in my draft folder, but this is something that’s in the news now that I want to come back to.

So, yes. Hang on to this one.

Support better writing than you find here

Inga Saffron wants your stories:

I’m doing some thinking about Septa buses in Philly. Are there places where we should change routes to accommodate growing/shrinking population? Which routes need more frequent service? Anyone with #17 bus horror stories out there (or other bus routes)? Email me: isaffron@phillynews.com

Oh, the 17. My 17 story is that I’ve boarded northbound 17s at 20th and Federal at 5:00 AM. And not gotten a seat. The easiest time of day to put an extra bus in the schedule, but no. My working theory is that the 17 is practically useless for anyone north of Fitzwater Street, just from the crowding. (That 17 was the easiest connection from my old place to the first train out of Suburban Station in the morning.)

Second verse, same as the first

Unfortunately a day after the storm is not enough to bring Philadelphia out of its persisting transport woes. The winter storm that dropped a foot of snow on the Delaware Valley yesterday has left the city in the throes of bitter cold, and fine, powdery, blowing, drifting snow; both of those conditions are strongly counterindicated for mechanical objects of all sorts, and the dry powdery snow is a particular problem for electric motors, because it gets in them and then melts, shorting them out. SEPTA buses and Regional Rail have once again been running with the kind of delays that make schedules completely meaningless. Downed overhead wires brought a halt to 101 and 102 trolley service, and the 15 stacked up 7 trolleys deep on Girard Avenue after a derailment.

This is the sort of situation where, since schedules are useless even as approximations, better real-time tracking of transit vehicles becomes a killep app. If people can see that trolleys aren’t running, or that the next bus is still 20 minutes away, they can start walking to an alternate route, or at least get inside out of the bitter wind chill. SEPTA’s Transitview APIs aren’t quite good enough for really mission-critical applications, but they were cheap to develop in-house, and provide a very good base for future development.

In the land of the unmoving, a limping transit system is king

Philadelphia had a rough day today, as up to a foot of snow fell on most of the region in a storm that arrived faster and lingered longer than initial forecasts had predicted. As the deep Arctic freeze settles in for the night, it’s worth commending SEPTA and PATCO, while they took considerable lumps, for staying mobile while the city and region ground to a halt around them.

Google Traffic layer, midday, 21 January 2014. Source: Philareddit
You wanted no part of this shit today.

As the snow approached whiteout conditions near noon, area employers quickly saw reason (or at least the threat of liability), and started sending workers home en masse around midday; this included the State of Delaware, which shut down at noon, and the City of Philadelphia, which locked up at 12:30. Area roads quickly filled with cars restricted to 45 mph on highways, and 25 mph on DRPA’s four bridges.

Sadly, this early rush hour meant that large numbers of Regional Rail traincars were left sitting fallow in yards and storage tracks across the region, waiting for a traditional rush hour — and traditional rush hour staffing levels — that was still four hours away. Still, trains managed to get people out of Center City, packed like sardines on trains that bypassed Temple and UCity riders for hours. Much better stories were told on the Subway, El, PATCO, NHSL, and trolleys, as each of those lines operated with rock-solid reliability. PATCO suffered speed restrictions on the bridge and 10-minute snow schedule headways, but that was the worst of it. Again, if you were leaving from 30th Street, Suburban, or Market East Stations, you got to your home station safely in no more than an hour extra time today, even if you were standing or otherwise discomfited.

It bears pointing out, if the storm hasn’t driven the point home enough already, that higher frequency of transit service doesn’t just mean higher quality of service in normal circumstances, but also greater resiliency in abnormal situations. SEPTA Regional Rail could have cleared crowds out of Center City much faster if its standard midday headway were 30 minutes or better, as opposed to the once-hourly trains that run on the majority of its lines today.

One local transit agency managed to cover itself in lack of glory, though not for success or failure of people-moving: njtransit.com went offline at the height of the storm, as people tried to look up information on unfamiliar trains and schedules. With NJT being the host transit agency of Super Bowl XLVIII in 12 days, it’s good to know that those tens of thousands of out-of-town visitors won’t be able to rely on NJT’s IT infrastructure on game day, either. Also, Jim Weinstein still hasn’t been fired for gross incompetence yet.

Tonight, the city and suburbs remain under a snow emergency. Cars parked on snow emergency routes will be summarily towed. PPA’s Center City garages are, in a rare twist, properly discounted. Owl bus routes will not run, but the Subway and El will run all night, every 20 minutes. A handful of suburban bus routes, and the 35 Loop, are suspended. School District of Philadelphia, Philadelphia Archdiocese, and the vast majority of suburban schools have already announced closures. Snow will continue to fall, and blow, and drift, overnight. And while PennDOT and the Streets Department will probably have major arteries cleared, the capillaries of the street system are probably boned for the next foreseeable hours. In the morning, the safest most reliable methods of transportation will be exactly what you should have expected they’d be from the beginning: transit, and a pair of good boots.

Stay warm, Philadelphia. We’ll shovel out in the morning. And the trains will run.

Mister Gorbachev, open this gate!

Commenter Noah asks the following:

Do you know more about this, from Wikipedia?

“SEPTA’s Market-Frankford Line (also known as the “El”) and all of SEPTA’s Subway-Surface Lines stop at the 30th Street subway station, less than 1/2 block (< 1/10 mile) from the southwest entrance to 30th Street Station. A tunnel connecting the underground subway station and 30th Street Station was closed due to crime and vagrancy concerns."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30th_Street_Station

Whose decision would it be to re-open this tunnel? I've always been surprised they're not connected underground.

I’m not quite sure if SEPTA or Amtrak owns that tunnel, but the portal on the Amtrak station side now has Bridgewater’s Bar on top of it, so it would be a significant disruption to reopen the tunnel to the public. On the SEPTA side, you can see the stairs down to the passageway underneath the stairs up to street level at the Northwest corner of 30th and Market.

Photo of tunnel portal from SEPTA subway station
The tunnel to the Amtrak station is through the gate on the right — you can see the handrail going down.

Honestly, the decision to close the tunnel was correct at the time. It’s too far from SEPTA-side cashiers and Amtrak-side shopkeepers, and there’s no good sightlines into the tunnel, for it to have eyes-on-the-street security. Today, the option of cheap cameras supplementing occasional foot patrols exists, to possibly provide a middle ground between 24/7 patrolling and closure. I would recommend separate cameras, controlled by Amtrak PD, SEPTA PD, and PPD, for operational clarity and redundancy.

There is one very good side benefit of the closure, although I will be the first to admit it doesn’t look like a benefit when you’re there: because all connecting passengers have to cross 30th Street on the surface, it creates a large flow of foot traffic across that intersection, which helps calm traffic coming in from I-76 and re-acclimates drivers to the city street grid. That’s a hard benefit to quantify, but it’s there. It also tends to create a lot of delays for vehicles coming off of 30th Street, thanks to aggressive mass jaywalking, which I approve of, because jaywalking is the sign of a civilized society. Unfortunately, buses also get caught in those delays. Can’t win ’em all…