Requisite SEPTA Rant

My one complaint about Philadelphia as compared to New York is the public transit system.* There's already an entire blog about how much SEPTA sucks, but my frustration with it goes much deeper than the occasional off-schedule train or inept employee (although I've certainly experienced more of those in the past month than I did in my two years in NYC combined). SEPTA doesn't just suck anecdotally, it sucks  fundamentally. 

First of all, there's this:

A real subway system

Philly's subway system

Just looking at the Philly map makes me sad.

Second of all, there's the fare system. First, it still uses tokens,  which are more of an antique than an acceptable method of paying subway fare. But worse than the archaic existence of the tokens themselves is the fact that you can only buy them at certain stations. Unlike New York, Boston, DC, and every other subway system I've ever been in, every station does not have a fare vending machine.

I discovered this the first day I commuted to my new job - I knew the tokens were $2 each, and made sure to have a $20 with me so I could buy a bunch at the machine and use them for the rest of the week. Except, there was no machine. "No matter," I thought, "I can buy some from the station attendant!" I was thinking of my freshman year of college in Boston, when the MBTA was still transitioning to fare cards and you could buy tokens from the guys who sat in the station booths all day. Wrong! Here, the person who sits in the booth all day can't sell you tokens. They just sit in the booth. You can give them $2 and they will buzz open the gate for you, but that's it - they can't even give you change if you don't have exactly $2. I'm guessing that the lack of token machines in all stations is a union issue - who would want to give up a such a sweet job?

SEPTA does have weekly/monthly passes, but once again, unlike in NYC and every other civilized city, you can't just walk up to a machine in any station and buy one. You can only get them at certain stations, and during certain times of day on top of that.** And then they are only for specific time intervals - unlike in NYC, where when you buy a weekly pass it is good for one week from the time you buy it, here you can only buy a pass that is good for one specific week. So if you were going to be in town for a week starting on a Thursday, you would have the choice of buying two weekly passes (one for the week including that Thursday and one for the week after) or attempting to track down an elusive token machine.

There are all kinds of other poorly-designed elements of the system that contribute to its overall terribleness. Often the station layouts are ridiculously bad - at the station near my work, you come down the stairs to enter the station only to run smack into a giant supporting beam thing that you have to squeeze around. And despite the fact that there are only two subway lines and they only intersect once, it is quite possibly the most confusing subway transfer you will ever experience. The station where you transfer is an unlabeled maze of tunnels, and it has a different name on each subway line - instead of it being called something informative like "SEPTA Center" or "Transfer Terminal" or "THE ONLY PLACE WHERE YOU CAN SWITCH LINES," it's "15th Street" on the blue line and "City Hall" on the orange. So if, like me, the first time you transfer from blue to orange you make a mental note to transfer at 15th Street when you reverse your path on your way back, you will obliviously ride right past City Hall (and your only transfer opportunity) all the way to the end of the orange line, the whole time wondering why it's taking so long to get to 15th Street. Oh, and when you finally get off and try to turn around and ride the orange line back to the transfer point, you can't change the direction you are traveling without exiting the station to the street, crossing the street, and re-entering (and re-paying) on the other side of the tracks. And no, there is no token machine there. And no, the attendant can't give you a transfer or let you in, even though he saw you get off the train and knows you already paid, and is laughing at you from his union-secured spot in the booth.

I am counting down the days until we move into our new condo, and I can walk to work


* My other complaint is that the street grid is rotated 90 degrees to the left of how it should be.

** To be fair, you can also order them a month ahead of time online. You know, because when you are going to visit a new city, your first thought is to go to their transit department's website a month in advance to order a pass that there is no reason you shouldn't be able to buy from a vending machine.