It was Philadelphia's fault

Last May 25th, I was waiting for the inbound R5 local train at Merion Station when I pieced together that something was amiss. The outbound R5, which generally arrives a few minutes before the inbound, was motionless on the tracks, just short of the station platform. A service announcement informed the crowd of passengers that trains are running approximately fifteen minutes behind schedule. No problem, I remember thinking to myself, that still counts as "on time" by most SEPTA riders' standards. However, after twenty minutes of waiting, the announcements were now simply saying that trains were delayed, with an implied duration of "indefinitely."

It turns out that there was a system-wide blackout on the NorthEast Corridor, immobilizing Amtrak trains from Washington to New York, as well as trains running on any of the former Pennsylvania Railroad suburban lines on the same grid--in Philadelphia, this means the R1 Airport, R2 Newark, R3 Media, R5 Paoli, R6 Cynwyd, R7 Trenton, and R8 Chestnut Hill lines. While it quickly became clear that a domino effect of power failures had crippled the system, whose last-generation power infrastructure dates back as many as 80 years, the specific cause was unknown... until now. Naturally, it was all Philadelphia's fault.

To be precise, a very up-do-date computer (that happened to be in Philadelphia) missed a routine command and was apparently not programmed to let anybody know. However, let's not tack all the blame onto the oft-maligned home of the Billy Penn Curse--after all, once the power did fail across the entire system, Amtrak was not in any position to deal with it anywhere: being accustomed to fixing isolated problems at their leisure, their technicians had to be deployed from a distance rather than being on-site already, and then there's the issue of rescue engines not being able to function because Amtrak and New Jersey Transit personnel, for example, didn't know how to operate each other's controls (whether or not they were stuck inside the Hudson River tunnels at the time). Since then, or so the article would have us believe, many of these organizational errors have been addressed. Certainly, it's common courtesy to show that they have learned from their mistakes, but I think there's a somewhat more obscure meaning to these new measures: if the newest equipment can screw up this big, it's bound to happen again.

More bad news (Philadelphia edition)

According to a recent article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "SEPTA must increase fares by at least 11 percent and perhaps as much as 31 percent, the agency's general manager said yesterday, and she warned of service cuts and employee layoffs unless more money comes from the state. " On top of that, New Jersey Transit has proposed some fare hikes of their own, though not quite so severely (see table below).

Under the most likely of circumstances, "Plan A," a round-trip regional rail fare from Philadelphia to New York will cost at least $39. And then there's the matter of service cuts. I might as well be blunt: there is no more room for service cuts in the SEPTA system. I'm not the first to say it, and I won't be the last, since threatening to cut service is an annual event as old as the Transportation Authority itself. Service is already cut back so far, I can't imagine how revenue can't be suffering as a direct result. At any rate, as per tradition, they'll probably come after my dinky little R6 Cynwyd local, which only runs about dozen round trips a day (and only on weekdays) through Cynwyd, Bala, Wynnefield, 30th Street, and Suburban stations. This is where the newly re-elected Rendell Administration gets to reaffirm its stance on the importance of public transit--as it has in the past--or perhaps reinvent it. For better or for worse, we won't know for a little while, but if you see me walking the 7 miles of right-of-way downtown come summertime, you'll have your answer.

Cost Overruns Claim First Victim in Manhattan

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