Return to Sender: Transit Stop Blues

Dear SEPTA:

Fuck you, too.

The other day, I was trying to get a bus. I could see it coming up on the stop.

Just one problem: I was stranded on the median, unable to finish crossing the street before the light changed. I waved frantically at the bus, hoping that the driver, as many bus drivers often do, would see me and let me on, even though by the time the light changed, he'd pulled away from the bus stop.

Did he let me on? No, he didn't. The light was red and he couldn't move, but he wouldn't open the doors for me. I was maybe twenty-five feet from the actual stop. It would have been no problem for him to open the doors and let me aboard. Instead, he kept the doors shut and yelled at me through them. The light changed, and he still yelled.

It would have been much easier, and taken a lot less time, if he'd just let me get on the bus.

This wasn't the first time I've had SEPTA drivers be assholes to me. And lest you should think I'm being selfish or self-indulgent, perhaps I should mention the time when I was comfortably seated on the bus and the driver blew past a stop because she couldn't be bothered to deal with loading the old man in the wheelchair onto her near-empty bus, or the bus driver honking at the cyclist in the bicycle lane because he perceived the combined 180 pounds of man and bike to be in his way, or the driver I watched while I was on foot, who missed two green lights because her friend was standing at the bus stop waiting for another route and they had to catch up.

But it's not just your drivers (or your conductors or trolley operators), SEPTA. It's you. Good service starts with good management, and as an organization, you're strongly lacking. Take, for instance, the cover story in today's Metro (PDF). You see, usually, when organizations make the effort to do away with old technology, they replace it with something better. Not you. Over a year ago, you decided to do away with your automated ticket machines. Sure, they were outdated and wouldn't even take bills printed after about 1998, but they had one definite advantage: you didn't need people to make them work, and so tickets were available at night and on weekends when ticket windows were closed, as well as at stations that never had human-staffed windows to begin with. And for a while there, even before the ticket machines were rendered useless and removed, people who couldn't get their tickets before boarding the train weren't charged extra for the inconvenience. But they are now. When the fare increase was announced last summer, another announcement was made: people who buy tickets on board a train, whether it's their fault or not, had to pay a service charge no matter what. Which would be totally understandable if you were installing new ticket-vending machines, a la New Jersey Transit or PATCO. But no, no machines were forthcoming. They didn't even seem to be an afterthought, so you were left with a crappy, mean-spirited policy that you hoped would drive up your TransPass sales, and to a degree, it worked. According to the Metro article, 63% of your regional rail riders now have passes—but it's not enough. You know it, and so does State Representative Josh Shapiro, who's threatening to withhold your funding if you don't straighten up and fly right. (The fact that people can get a refund of their service fee in the form of a credit on their return ticket price is irrelevant. To obtain the credit, riders must visit a ticket office the same day as the original sale, meaning that if riders are traveling on the weekend or at night, and their end destinations aren't in Center City, where ticket offices remain open longer than in the suburbs, there's no way they can get the credit. SEPTA won't release their revenue from the surcharges, which leads one to believe that the refund policy is working very much in their favor, and not in any of their riders'.)

So here's the deal, SEPTA. I am hopelessly, pathetically reliant on you. I don't have a car, I can't afford to take taxis everywhere I go (especially when it's a trip to the outer areas of the city, or the suburbs), and I don't trust myself on a bicycle in traffic. I'm not the only person in this boat. But you need to stop being such an asshole, holding your passengers accountable for things that are your fault. And then once you get things straightened out on that level, perhaps you can point your employees in the direction of Monday Manners. They could stand to learn a thing or two about courtesy.

Image via Flickr user SignalPAD.