[PRCo] Re: PAT's cuts

[Fred Schneider]

On Dec 3, 2010, at 4:04 AM, Joshua Dunfield wrote:

> 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?
> 
The Maryland Public Service Commission held this very argument about 1950 when Baltimore Transit wanted to convert through service from Ellicott City to Baltimore to a shuttle operation.    BTC argued that it was a weak route into the country.  The PUC held that some routes would be weak at their outer ends.

I think what has happened in the half century since the PAT take over of the independent bus lines our life styles have changed sufficiently that we need to admit we cannot afford to run those routes.  In 1950 we had one car per family and dad took it to work with him.   In the early 1960s mom was buying a second car.   It went with the women's liberation movement.   Since then every licensed driver in the American suburban family has come to feel they need their own car.  Remember the point I made earlier, Joshua, the people are no longer going to destinations downtown or on transit routes most of the time.  They are going from suburb to suburb.   

I know you are using my own arguments from 1960 against me but it isn't 1960 any longer.   I wish it were.  

Wo wohen Sie in Deutschland nun?   

The difference between German and U. S. cities that I observed even a half century ago was that those European cities had twice the population in the same size foot print that ours would have.   I was stationed (a military term) in the city of Pirmasens, which had a land area which might accommodate about 25,000 Americans but it contained about 50,000 Germans.   Therefore the streetcar line that vanished in 1943 was replaced by an oberleitungs bus (trolley bus).   

Why did the little city of Innsbruck, Austria buy new streetcars several years ago?   Hell, it's no bigger than Johnstown.   Might have something to do with Johnstown has shrunk from 60,000 to 23,000.   Innsbruck has something like 100,000 packed inside its city boundaries.  

I remember walking through one German city with Christopf Grimm one Saturday.   I'm having trouble remembering where because Chris worked for German Rail and he's a friend that we have dinner with every year ... somewhere ... Suttgart or Baltimore or Munich or Newark or Nurnburg.   But he was just observing the crowds downtown on a Saturday.   The street vendors.   The Turkish restaurants ... at that point I think we both had sprung for Döner kebabs to ease the noontime hunger pangs.   I think it was that one Saturday a month when all the department stores were open.   Finally Chris just smiled, spread out his arms at whole of the landscape and said, "It's a German thing isn't it?"   

Yes, it is.   It cannot be moved to the United States because we don't comprehend.   We attempted to make pedestrian malls but they fail because the public wants to put their car where they always did.   Remember how East Liberty failed when they tried to change people's habits back in the 1970s.   Or Biloxi or some other cities.      

> 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.
> 
>