SEPTA fare increase

[Slithy_Tove]

Originally posted by sycamore
Now, let's say you live in Valley Forge, or Torresdale, or Paoli. [...] Or...you can take some of that time from the delay, pay $30 for a Zone 3 Trailpass (as I would buy) and ride into Market East or Suburban smoothly. Then walk or hop a bus to work. In the end, it just depends where you live and where you work.

And that's the problem with public transportation in general. It's built on a very narrow concept of where people live and how they work. It assumes that people live in the suburbs, commute to the city (or vice versa) and work banker's hours.

Increasingly people (like me) work in one suburb (Darby) live in another (Concord township), and some of us work very odd hours (11 pm to 7 am). Although I don't have the emotional attachment to public transportation that the politically left-of-center seem to, I would gladly use it if it got me where I needed to go, at time when I needed to go there. It doesn't.

Private cars are an American success story because they provide a flexibility that public transportation doesn't. An additional problem is that Septa has been slowly closing down lines for years. There used to be a commuter train station fairly near my house. It's no longer in service. To even get to the station, I have to drive miles and miles.

I think public transportation works better in Europe for a number of reasons. 1) The city/suburb hub/spokes structure is less broken; 2) governments there artificially keep the price of gas high, discouraging private car use; 3) Europe is denser in population than the US, and travel distances are shorter.

For Septa, the fare hike is a bad sign. After every recent strike in recent decades they've increased fares, seen ridership fall off, then shortened lines and reduced services. It's a steady downward spiral. It doesn't bode well. It may be a symptom of a city that is still losing jobs and population.