[PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts

[Joshua Dunfield]

On 3 December 2010 04:06, John Swindler <j_swindler at hotmail.com> wrote:
> As for the SEPTA transfer fee, that was just an increase in the existing transfer fee.  I thought the racist charge was when SEPTA tried to do away with transfers.  SEPTA went to discounted transpasses which are swiped across a reader on top of fareboxes.  Transfers, tokens and dollar bills have seemed to almost disappeared in Philadelphia - I've been surprised at how universal the transpasses have become.   Pittsburgh still has transit vehicles sitting at a transit stop while boarding passengers struggle to feed dollar bills into the GFI fare boxes.

That wasn't my experience.  Most people on Pittsburgh buses don't pay
cash; they just flash their pass (e.g. university ID).  Since there's
no electronics, it seems much faster than SEPTA.  You can take a PAT
bus from near-empty to nearly full at one stop (which happened
routinely at Forbes & Murray when the universities were in session) at
very close to the speed it would take if no one had to pay at all.
Even the occasional cash rider tends not to hold up the line, because
everyone else squeezes around them.

The only advantage SEPTA has here, in terms of time, is that paying
with a token is much faster than paying with $1 bills.  And SEPTA
thinks tokens are the problem...

In Montreal, they switched (last year) from Pittsburgh-style
pass-flashing to contactless "smart" cards, which might be slightly
faster than swipe cards but much slower otherwise.  The métro fare
control became a little faster (you had to swipe before) but the bus
fare control became much worse.  I don't buy the rationale that it
needs to be harder to forge passes; is there enough fraud to make up
for the revenue you lose from jacking up all your dwell times?

On Fred's statement about rural routes and how they "need to go"
because they're from "a different era": Any real transit *system* is
going to have "low-performing" routes.  We can't all be above average.
 Imagine that you want to be "efficient" (funny how being "efficient",
in the context of a government service, so often means screwing over
the people who most need the service) so you cut the
"lowest-performing" route.  Of course that's never enough, so you cut
the *new* "lowest-performing" route.  Eventually you will accomplish
the goal of having no transit service at all, because if you keep
cutting routes that way, ridership will eventually be close to zero
(if there is only one remaining bus route, no one will ride it).

I didn't think that was our goal.

(I now live in a rather small city in Germany, and while the transit
system is much less developed in absolute terms than, say,
Pittsburgh's, it's far more developed than you'd expect for a North
American city of 100,000.  There aren't many buses on Sundays—there's
not much to do in Germany on Sundays, nearly all the stores are
closed—and most of them could reasonably be considered
"low-performing".  But those "low-performing" routes make it possible,
if not very convenient, to live anywhere in the city and the outlying
villages without driving a car.  If that's "left over from a different
era", so be it.)

-j.