I did something unusual for a transit activist the other day. I didn’t protest SEPTA’s new fare increases for tokens and transfers. Instead, I said that while I had some doubts about whether fares needed to be increased as much as SEPTA claimed, I thought it was much better for transit agencies to have regular, small increases than to sock riders heavily every five or six years.
And I also said that along with proposing small increases in tokens and transfers, SEPTA should drop its appeal of Judge DiVito’s decision blocking their plan to eliminate transfers.
The new fare increases are meant to make up for the revenues lost due to Judge DiVito’s decision. Until the SEPTA Board Meeting last Thursday, SEPTA said that it would rescind these fare increases if the courts allow the elimination of transfers to proceed. At that meeting they adopted a proposal that brings the transfer decision back to the board if the court rules in SEPTA’s favor.
I generally try not to get angry at people or personalize disputes in politics. But I have to say that what the SEPTA Board has been doing is so stupid, short-sighted, and mean spirited that I’m not going to calm down before I write something about their decision. They deserve every drop of anger I can muster.
There NEVER was any rational basis for SEPTA’s decision to eliminate transfers. (You can tell a decision is irrational when an agency has to keep coming up with new reasons for it after the old ones are shown to be totally bogus.) It was a political decision, based on the screwy notion that it was politically easier to eliminate transfers than to raise token prices, even by a small amount. I don’t think SEPTA deliberately decided to put the burden of the fare increase on people who are mostly poor and black. But I also don’t think that they ever gave the possible unfairness of their decision any concern, as they should have. And, now that their political and moral calculations have been shown to be wrong, SEPTA won’t just say “we made a mistake and we want to repair it.” They simply don’t want to be seen bowing to any “outside” political pressure. (The outsiders are you, me and other riders…as well as the government of Philadelphia which pays 80% of the local share of SEPTA costs.) And they are angry at the city calling their decision to eliminate transfers irrational and, possibly, racist.
I have a friend who attends the private sessions of the SEPTA Board. (You know, those meetings before the meetings where, in violation of the sunshine laws, the real decisions get made at SEPTA.) He told me that the merits of the decision to eliminate transfers are simply not an issue with this board. The Board is angry at being questioned in court and wants to win in court, come what may. And if that means that some people—in particular poor African American Philadelphians—get a 55% fare increase and everyone else gets an 11% fare increase, then that is just too bad.
In the meantime, SEPTA, which is tired of working with the Street Administration and is hoping for better relations with Mayor Nutter, may be jeopardizing that as well. I have no way of knowing Michael Nutter’s thinking about SEPTA beyond the remarks I’ve heard him make on the campaign trail. But its is hard to believe that a Mayor Nutter won’t be willing to work more closely with SEPTA than Mayor Street who, starting with his decision to eliminate the Deputy Mayor for Transportation, has had contentious relationships with SEPTA. However, as Michael Nutter looks at what the SEPTA Board has been doing on the transfer issue, it is also hard to believe that he won’t find SEPTA’s initial decision and current intransigence a good indication of SEPTA’s unwillingness to treat the city fairly.
If the city and the courts did not have evidence before about the irrational and capricious nature of SEPTA’s rate making, they certainly have it now. To keep fighting for a court decision that won’t change SEPTA’s ultimate decision is nothing if not irrational and capricious.
(Is SEPTA perhaps worried about setting a bad court precedent? In a state where the courts regularly ignore precedent, what would be the point? And wouldn’t they just be better off settling after a Common Pleas decision rather than taking a chance on a loss in Commonwealth or the Supreme Court, where a stronger precedent would be set?)
SEPTA officials constantly complain in private that they are being dissed by riders and the city. They won’t go out to meet the public because they don’t want to be yelled at by their riders. They feel free to disregard the views of the city because they don’t think there is anything to do to overcome opposition from the city. SEPTA officials sit inside the bunker of 1234 Market Street wallowing in self-pity.
And that leads them to undertake utterly self-defeating behavior. There are plenty of potential allies of SEPTA who understand why fares have to go up from time to time and who recognize the limits on what SEPTA can achieve in improving service in the short run. At the SEPTA meeting last week, Janice Woodcock read a conciliatory letter from Mayor Street that sought to bring this dispute to a close And certainly SEPTA has had allies, in the city and transit activists in particular, who have gone to bat for the agency to secure dedicated funding.
But none of its recent successes has enabled SEPTA to tear down the walls of its bunker and start consulting and listening to those potential allies. SEPTA would rather keep sulking and bemoaning that “no one understands us.”
The hell with all that. Two months ago, SEPTA could have backed down from its unwarranted and unfair decision to eliminate transfers. They could have announced that they had not recognized some of the problems with the proposal to eliminate transfer and thanked the city and the transit activists who pointed those problems out. They could have raised token and transfer prices a dime with the support of the city and transit activists.
I’ve come to the conclusion, after years of seeking to work with SEPTA, that nothing good is going to come out of the agency without a change in leadership and massive pressure from riders and the city. And that pressure has to be focused not on the cyphers who sit on the board but on the state leaders who appoint the board. In addition, the city has to take the lead in forming an alliance with the counties, which are also being treated badly by SEPTA. (Did you know that riders of commuter rail have to pay a penalty for purchasing a ticket on a train, even if there is no ticket booth open at their train station?)
It is time for transit riders in this region to start building an organization that can bring this kind of massive pressure to bear on our politicians and SEPTA.