Tag Archives: #SEPTA

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Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the rectum here] to do things right Aren't the left at least somewhat aware that they still depend upon a civilized society for their lives, property, safety, and professions?

I have previously mused that Philadelphia Inquirer main editorial writer Daniel Pearson could actually be a conservative, though ‘moderate Democrat’ would probably be far closer to the truth. Though Mr Pearson is not the Editorial Page Editor, I would guess that he has some influence. And I have noted how the newspaper has granted outside OpEd space to people who seem to share their general editorial positions.

That seems to have led to this:

Why Pa. should deploy the National Guard to SEPTA right now

Unless conditions improve, SEPTA’s survival is at stake. Deploying the National Guard can bring riders back and make SEPTA safe for everyone.

by Brian Pollitt, for the Inquirer | Wednesday, April 3, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

When a bus shows signs of a mechanical problem, you call a mechanic. The goal is to do preventive maintenance, rather than waiting for a complete failure. But if buses and stations are plagued by a breakdown of civil society, who do you call?

I’ll admit it: upon that last, the movie there, “Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters!” ran through my head. 🙂 Continue reading →

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Once again, an otherwise detailed article in The Philadelphia Inquirer omits a pertinent fact. The newspaper just doesn't want to mention the crime angle

Perhaps it’s wrong of me to expect more in-depth coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, and my $285.48 annual subscription, but this one jumped out at me:

These Philadelphians got rid of their cars in the past year. They haven’t looked back.

“Now that I’m forced to walk, I’m seeing the city more than I did before,” said one newly car-less resident. She used to pay about $400 a month on her car payment and insurance.

by Erin McCarthy | Friday, February 9, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

Dajé Walker’s Hyundai Elantra was stolen from a Brewerytown parking lot in July, only to be found a week later on the side of a local highway.

The car that Walker had driven for three years was “in shambles,” Walker said, and the insurance company deemed it a total loss.

“I had that existential crisis moment where I was like, ‘Do I need a car or do I want a car?” she said.

Around the same time, Walker, 28, got a new, completely remote job as a project manager. The news sealed her decision: She took the insurance payout of about $15,000, putting some of the money in savings and using the rest to move from Brewerytown to Old City, and never looked back.

She no longer has to set aside $300 a month for her car payment and another $100 for insurance. When she recently moved to Old City, she didn’t have to worry about securing a convenient and safe parking spot, which can cost at least $250 a month at private lots.

There’s a nice photo of Miss Walker, with her dog, on the narrow, brick streets, streets wide enough for a horse-and-buggy back in 1776, in the historic Old City, a really nice area in Philly, if you can afford it.

But while Miss Walker was able to get a new, 100% work from home job, published at the very same time was the article “IBX’s (Independence Blue Cross) new in-person office policy has some workers feeling betrayed. Others are job-hunting. Senior employees say they are worried that their teams will quit to find more flexible or better-paying positions at other companies,” which was a follow on to the Groundhog Day article, “Independence Blue Cross changes its work-from-home policy, the latest big Philly employer to require more in-office days: The insurance company had been allowing most employees to work remote as much as they liked. Now, they’ll be required onsite a majority of the work week.”

So, more and more employees are being expected to do something really radical and actually come to work in Philly; won’t those workers need a way to get to work?

More people are back in the office, but commuters say SEPTA service isn’t back to pre-pandemic norms

SEPTA service isn’t back to 100%, but it’s still outpacing ridership, even as employers push more in-office time. Would workers be more willing to commute if transportation schedules bulked up?

by Lizzy McLellan Ravitch | Friday, October 6, 2023 | 9:18 AM EDT

On Wednesday morning, SEPTA sent 39 notifications of Regional Rail trains running at least 10 minutes late and warned of potential delays or cancellations on 18 bus and trolley lines “due to operator unavailability.”

“It’s a gamble” trying to catch the bus, said a Pennsylvania state employee from West Philadelphia, who asked to remain nameless out of concern for their job. “There were times I would wake up earlier to get an earlier bus, and that wouldn’t show up.”

SEPTA’s mismanagement by CEO Leslie Richards is famed far and wide in Philly.

They have taken a rideshare to work on multiple occasions because their bus route options were canceled or late. Walking to a further bus stop isn’t an option because they have a disability. A lifelong bus rider, they said the system was more dependable before COVID-19.

[Sigh!] In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, meaning that the singular masculine pronouns are used to refer to one person, even when that person’s sex is not known or specified. Anything else is sloppy writing.

“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” the West Philly bus rider said. “People could lose their jobs” if they’re late for work.

Septa’s ridership is down 39% from 2019, the year prior to the panicdemic, though the bus service alone was back up to 75% last October.

Back to the first cited article:

After a surge in car-buying statewide at the height of the pandemic, there are signs that some Philadelphians like Walker have made the decision to do away with their cars in recent years, bucking larger trends.

In 2022, more than 638,000 passenger vehicles were registered in the city, about 24,000 fewer cars than were registered here a year prior, according to the most recent state data. That represents a 3.6% decline in registered vehicles over a period when the city’s population decreased 1.4%, the largest one year drop in 45 years.

Do all of these things make sense together? Car ownership is down significantly from the population decrease, public transportation ridership has significantly decreased, and more people are being required to return to their employers’ offices? We reported, just two days ago, that the newspaper did not report politically inconvenient facts about vehicle ownership, that while the Inquirer reported on the surge in automobile insurance rates, completely ignored was the possibility the city’s huge auto theft and carjacking rates had anything to do with that surge.

Well, here they go again. The newspaper has previously reported:

Philadelphia has seen a surge in plateless vehicles. Some are abandoned, but others are the result of drivers attempting to evade law enforcement, parking tickets, or toll-by-plate systems.

There was also this:

How rampant phony license plates are being used to get away with crimes in Philadelphia

Fraudulent temporary tags have flooded into Philadelphia from states with looser rules — like Delaware.

by Ryan W. Briggs and Dylan Purcell | November 18, 2022 | 5:00 AM EST | Updated: 12:11 PM EST

(F)ake license plates are an old tool of criminal trades, what’s new is the flood of fraudulent temporary tags into Philadelphia from states with looser issuance rules — like Texas and Delaware. These phony plates have shown up increasingly in police investigations into shootings, carjackings, hit-and-runs, and car thefts. (In addition to counterfeit plates, thefts of auto tags this year to date were 2,378, a more than 60% increase over the same period in 2018.)

How, I have to ask, is it good and reliable reporting to tell the newspaper’s readers that fewer people own cars without mentioning that the city has seen a surge in vehicles on the street which some people possess, though “own” might not be the proper word? There was not the first word in Erin McCarthy’s article to even hint that, Heaven forfend!, there might be more cars on the road possessed by scofflaws and criminals.

Miss McCarthy’s article was entirely upbeat, telling readers that there are good and reasonable ways to live in the City of Brotherly Love, that Philly “is known for being one of the best cities to live in without a car (though historically not all neighborhoods have the same access to public transit),” which, I would guess, will be something referenced in yet another article telling us that we must give up cars to save Mother Gaia.

William Teach reported, just this morning, that we are being told by Our Betters that the behavior of the public as a whole must be changed to fight global warming climate change, but at least Miss McCarthy’s article is trying to be persuasive rather than authoritarian.

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There is a two word phrase to accurately describe the electric buses sold to transit agencies, and the first of those two words is “cluster”.

The Biden Administration and the global warming climate change activists want to force all new vehicles sold in the United States to be zero-emission come 2035, because they believe that our personal choices don’t matter, but even now they are pushing plug-in electrics, seemingly unconcerned with the possible drawbacks. From Fox Business:

Electric buses are sitting unused in cities across the US; here’s why

Cities coast-to-coast grappling with broken-down e-buses that cannot be fixed

Continue reading →

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SEPTA wants more tax dollars, but just a $1.00 fare increase would wipe out their deficit Shouldn't SEPTA's expenses be paid by SEPTA's riders?

1 dead, 13 injured after 2 SEPTA buses collide at Shelmire Avenue in Philadelphia, July 22, 2023.

The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, in an effort to persuade the state government to provide more money for the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, undermined their own argument with just two sentences:

And for many Pennsylvanians, public transit is simply not part of their daily life. Nor is it for about 45% of Americans, who have no access to public transportation at all.

The obvious question is: why should people who don’t use SEPTA, and don’t even have a chance to use public transportation, see more of the tax dollars they pay go to SEPTA? Continue reading →

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Run her out of town on a rail! Rather than the $425,000 to which her $75,000 raise boosted her, Leslie Richards needs a $425,000 pay cut, and a SEPTA train ticket out of town.

If you were apprehended after shooting at a crowd of people in a Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority station, would you expect to simply be let go, even if you had missed everyone? I wouldn’t, but, then again, I’m not a 16-year-old girl.

A 16-year-old girl is facing arrest for a SEPTA subway shooting at the 15th and Market station

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office issued a warrant in the Nov. 19 shooting at the 15th and Market Street station.

by Rodrigo Torrejón | Monday, November 27, 2023 | 1:00 PM EST

A 16-year-old girl who police say shot at a group of juveniles inside the SEPTA station at 15th and Market Street earlier this month — but struck no one — will be arrested for that crime, authorities said Monday.

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office said an arrest warrant had been issued for the teen in connection with the Nov. 19 shooting on the station concourse. The girl, whom authorities did not identify because she is a juvenile, is expected to face charges of aggravated assault and firearms violations.

The teen had been detained at the 11th Street station on the day of the shooting because she was wanted on a family court bench warrant for theft, the district attorney’s office said.

She is expected to be arrested for the shooting by the end of the week, authorities said.

The language on this story is unclear, to say no more. Was she already locked up on the bench warrant? Will she be arrested while already behind bars, or is she out on the streets? Normally, one would expect an apprehended shooter to have been arrested on the assault and firearms charges right away. Were the police waiting to see if uber-permissive District Attorney Larry Krasner would want to take any action since the shooter was a 16-year-old girl?

The teen girl opened fire on a group of juveniles who were following her out of the station and up the exit stairs, the district attorney’s office said in a statement. Video obtained by investigators shows the teen shooting from the steps, fleeing, and then throwing a backpack into a trash can in the concourse, the statement said.

A handgun was recovered from the trash can and matched the live rounds and shell casings found at the scene of the shooting, the district attorney’s office said. When the teen was detained on the bench warrant, authorities said, she was wearing clothing that matched what the shooter was seen wearing on surveillance footage.

There’s more at the original, but it’s about SEPTA’s negotiations with the Fraternal Order of Transit Police Lodge 109, who have been working without a contract since March 31st. The union postponed a strike date of November 20th, until a decision on December 13th:

The transit police officers are asking for a pay increase amid a staffing shortage and a rise in antisocial behaviors — like smoking and turnstile jumping — but not violent crimes.

Is shooting up a subway station not a violent crime if the shooter never hit anyone?

But I have to laugh at that last quoted paragraph for other reasons: reporter Rodrigo Torrejón listed “smoking and turnstile jumping” as the antisocial behaviors, but for some reason declined to mention the biggest “antisocial behavior” plaguing not just SEPTA stations but the city itself: drug addicts littering the stations and the tracks with used needles, and junkies passed out on the streets and in the stations and even the train cars.

The (supposed) marathon bargaining session scheduled to begin on October 23rd obviously didn’t solve anything, and SEPTA has only been surviving on federal deficit spending aid due to the COVID-19 panicdemic.[1]No, that’s not a typographical error, but exactly how I see the government response to the virus. Now CEO Leslie Richards, who has presided over worsening service yet got a $75,000 raise earlier in the year, a plethora of bus and trolley accidents, and train stations littered with the homeless and drug needles, with the transit service plagued by delayed service and accidents, with chronic shortfalls in essential staff wants more money from the taxpayers to subsidize SEPTA passengers. Just yesterday, a day in which SEPTA had a whopping forty routes cancelled or delayed due to ‘operator shortages,’ a man on the system stabbed three people at the Walnut Locust station before being shot by a SEPTA police officer.

But, things have improved today: only 21 routes cancelled or delayed due to ‘operator unavailability.’

The Philadelphia Inquirer, not exactly an evil reich-wing site, described the SEPTA trains:

The Market-Frankford Line has its own incense: a combination of cigarette, weed, or K2 smoke. People in the throes of opioid addiction are sometimes frozen in a forward lean in train cars and on platforms. People experiencing homelessness might use a couple of seats or a station to seek rest away from the cold and the heat.

To me, that’s a bit more serious than “smoking and turnstile jumping,” but yeah, I’m an evil reich-wing Republican! I’m the kind of man who would have used the word “junkies” rather than “people in the throes of opioid addiction,” and “vagrants” rather than “people experiencing homelessness.”

Miss Richards will have to somehow hammer out a contract with the SEPTA police officers, and will have to do it in the face of reduced revenues, from a lower number of riders and the loss of Federal dollars as the Covidiocy spending ends.

At a time when the left want to push people out of their cars and onto public transportation, Miss Richards has overseen a real decrease in the quality and service of one of our nations larger public transportation systems. Rather than the $425,000 to which her $75,000 raise boosted her, she needs to get a $425,000 pay cut, and a SEPTA train ticket out of town.

References

References
↑1 No, that’s not a typographical error, but exactly how I see the government response to the virus.
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2 + 2 ≠ 5

Why should the taxpayers be on the hook to pay for other people’s transportation?

The money lines are far down in the story:

The authority projects an annual operating deficit of $240 million beginning next July 1 as the last of its federal pandemic aid is spent, a situation dubbed the “fiscal cliff” that afflicts most transit systems in the United States.

SEPTA and the state’s other public transit agencies are pushing for the legislature to adopt a measure that would give them a greater share of the sales tax to support operations.

Continue reading →

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SEPTA should be paid for by the people who use it, not people who can’t use its service

Our house in Jim Thorpe.

I used to live in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, fifty miles north of foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, did not have a bus or train service up into Carbon County; I commuted every day. Why, then, I asked myself, was I taxed to support and subsidize the people who did have SEPTA service in Philadelphia and its collar counties. I no longer live in the Keystone State, so this story doesn’t affect me, but the question still remains: why should my old neighbors and friends in Pennsylvania, many of whom are out of reach of SEPTA’s service area, be taxed to support a system they cannot use?

SEPTA wants more state sales-tax revenue to avoid ‘draconian’ service cuts next spring

A change in the law would give SEPTA an additional $190 million from the state sales tax each year to run its buses, trolleys and subways.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Thursday, August 24, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

In an effort to secure desperately needed funding, SEPTA officials are lobbying for a proposal in Harrisburg that would increase by about 45% the annual share of state sales-tax revenue devoted to paying for public transportation.

If their efforts are successful, the state’s Public Transportation Trust Fund would receive 6.4% of the money generated by the sales tax, up from 4.4%, generating an additional $295 million annually for public transit operations across the state. The sales tax itself would not increase.

SEPTA estimates that it would get an additional $190 million annually, with a $65.6 million increase for Pittsburgh Regional Transit and $38.8 million more for other systems, based on the state’s funding formula, which allocates dollars to transit agencies.

“We’ll really be able to prevent a draconian service reduction and extraordinary fare increases,” SEPTA CEO Leslie S. Richards said Wednesday when asked about the proposal. “That is what we will be left with when we get to next spring, if we don’t see a way out of this looming fiscal cliff.”

Part of that “looming fiscal cliff” would be from the $75,000 per year raise that the SEPTA Board gave CEO Leslie Richards just last May:

A panel of three board members reviewed publicly available salaries for the leaders of other large transit systems to help determine Richards’ salary, SEPTA said in a statement announcing the reappointment.

Perhaps, but shouldn’t that also be based on whether Mrs Richards was actually doing her job well?

SEPTA has been plagued by delayed service and accidents, with chronic shortfalls in essential staff:

One in six budgeted engineer positions is unfilled, per SEPTA figures, and the total number of train operators and trainees is 12% lower than it was in January 2019. Funding isn’t the problem, although overall the agency is generally worried about its fiscal future.

Billy Penn also reported that workers are leaving faster than positions can be filled. If Mrs Richards cannot keep these, to use the Democrats’ mantra, “good, well-paying, union jobs” filled, what does that say about her job performance?

Early Monday morning (June 12, 2023), a Trenton train was delayed because of “manpower issues.” A park and ride service at one station on the line was repeatedly canceled last week “due to operator unavailability.” On Friday (June 9, 2023), trips on the Market-Frankford and Broad Street subway lines were canceled for lack of workers. “Operator unavailability” is frequently given as the reason for delays and cancellations, especially on certain bus lines.

The unreliable service has sparked doubts SEPTA can step in to provide a needed workaround to the highway collapse.

“SEPTA better commit to quick and significant improvements of service or the city is going to see a major exodus from any northern suburb employees,” rider Kristen McCabe of Media wrote on Sunday.

Yet, despite all of that, despite SEPTA’s inability to manage the assets and service it currently has, there’s significant political pressure to build the Roosevelt Boulevard subway line, guesstimated to cost between $2.5 and 3.4 billion, in year 2000 dollars. We have previously noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story in which the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, admitted that they had “lost control of the train cars.”

The Biden Administration and the global warming climate change activists want us to all leave our cars behind — if we would even be allowed to own them — and depend on public transportation as much as possible. The Philadelphia Tribune reported that 42% of Black households and 50% of impoverished households in Philly don’t own a car, yet SEPTA has been hit with decreased ridership:

Ridership remains well below pre-pandemic levels, and SEPTA needs those passengers back, officials say. Federal pandemic aid will run out by April 2024, and the agency depends on rider fares to make enough money to operate.

Really, who would want to depend on SEPTA? The trains are filthy, crime on board the buses and trains, and at the train and subway stations, has been increasing, and too many of the stations have become de facto homeless shelters, littered with trash and used hypodermic needles left by junkies.

That decreased ridership? It has been politically correct to lay the blame for that on the panicdemic — spelled exactly the way I see it, as a huge overreaction — and the fact that some Center City office workers who were able to work remotely during the COVID-19 shutdowns have found that pretty good, and are still doing so. But the crime and the filth are also to blame. It seems that the good Democrats in Philly, who gave 81.44% of their votes to Joe Biden, the President who wants them to use public transportation, aren’t quite so eager to ride SEPTA’s buses and trains.

And so we have Leslie Richards, $425,000 a year Leslie Richards, wanting to make the people in Jim Thorpe and Summit Hill and Mahanoy City have more of the sales taxes they pay go to help SEPTA, rather than those dollars coming back to their communities, even though Mrs Richards has proven that she cannot manage the system she oversees. SEPTA should be paid for not by the citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but by the people who use the service, and fares should be increased to support that service.

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A SEPTA security guard is shot

It was just eight days ago that we noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story in which the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, admitted that they had “lost control of the train cars.”

Then, just Wednesday, we heard that the City Council was going to have hearings on the proposed, $3+ billion Roosevelt Boulevard subway extension, driven in part by the collapsed bridge on Interstate 95 in the city. A lot of people support that, though it seems to me that adding more subway lines when SEPTA has lost control would be premature, to say no more.

And now we get this!

A SEPTA security guard was shot on a train in Frankford, police say

The shooting happened just after 3:10 p.m. at the Arrott Transportation Center, which is located on Frankford Avenue at Margaret Street.

by Robert Moran | Thursday, June 15, 2023 | 6:35 PM EDT

A SEPTA security guard was shot on a Market-Frankford Line train Thursday afternoon in the city’s Frankford section, police said.

The shooting happened just after 3:10 p.m. at the Arrott Transportation Center, which is located on Frankford Avenue at Margaret Street.

The Arrott Transportation Center on the Market Street-Frankford line is just four stops away from the infamous Allegheny Station in the heart of Kensington.

The 27-year-old security guard was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition with a gunshot wound to his right leg.

The victim works for SEPTA through a contract the transit agency has with the security firm Scotlandyard, said SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch.

A person answering the phone at Scotlandyard said the company had no comment.

Police reported no arrests but said a gun was recovered.

There’s more at the original, and at least so far, it’s not a subscribers’ only protected story.

As we’ve noted previously, the global warming climate change activists want more people to move into densely-populated urban areas, where they can use privately-owned automobiles less frequently and take public transportation. But when even the security guards on SEPTA are getting shot, perhaps a lot of people won’t see using SEPTA as a good or wise idea.

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As cities lose control of crime, how can anyone view public transportation as a solution to anything?

The Philadelphia Inquirer likes to use Twitter to pimp its articles online, but hey, so do all of my blogging friends. Thing is, this article from the Inky is restricted to paid subscribers only. Fortunately, I do subscribe, so you don’t have to! [Update: Saturday, June 10: Robert Stacy McCain linked a free, archived version of the article, so you can read the whole thing.]

‘We lost control of the train cars’

With ridership down and antisocial behavior up, SEPTA is grappling with how to make Philly transit feel safer.

By Thomas Fitzgerald, Ryan W. Briggs, and Rodrigo Torrejón | Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The Market-Frankford Line has its own incense: a combination of cigarette, weed, or K2 smoke. People in the throes of opioid addiction are sometimes frozen in a forward lean in train cars and on platforms. People experiencing homelessness might use a couple of seats or a station to seek rest away from the cold and the heat.

One of the stops on the Market-Frankford line is Allegheny Station, at the infamous Kensington and Allegheny Avenues. The fastest way to clean up the Market-Frankford line? Eliminate the stop in Kensington!

Recent high-profile shootings in and around SEPTA stations in Philadelphia reflect an alarming increase in violence following 2022, when crime on the transit system was trending down. In May, two teens were killed on SEPTA in separate shootings.

However, the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter on SEPTA are smoking, turnstile-jumping, public urination, and other unruly acts. SEPTA is struggling to manage the incidents.

I’ve got to ask: is ridership down because of “the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter,” or the fact that people are getting shot and sometimes killed?

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain, ‘Other Unruly Acts in Killadelphia

SEPTA, the newspaper tells us, “is struggling to manage the incidents,” and, from the way the paragraph is structured, I believe that the “incidents” referred to are “the types of crime passengers are most likely to encounter.” That’s actually a good thing, a form of ‘broken windows policing,’ trying to stamp out the less important crimes in the belief that such will lead to the worse crimes dropping.

These are not violent crimes but antisocial behaviors that make many people feel unsafe on the subway and El lines, according to interviews with multiple riders. Some avoid the trains, a potential catastrophe for a transit agency that must grow ridership to financially survive.

“It’s filthier than I’ve ever seen it. More dangerous than I’ve ever seen it,” said David Corliss Jr., 40, as he waited for an El train at 34th Street Station on a recent afternoon. He said his family worries about his safety when he rides public transit.

SEPTA, like all of the other municipal organizations, is understaffed, and yes, that means that cleaning up after the junkies gets delayed.

There’s a lot more, but I want to point out five paragraphs from further down the Inquirer’ article:

While repeat offenders are being caught and banned, the court-diversion part of the program has not been carried out, Transit Police say.

“We were finding that most of our misdemeanor [trespassing] cases were being withdrawn,” Nestel said. “The folks we were putting into the criminal justice system weren’t going to diversionary courts and weren’t getting the help they needed.”

Michael Mellon, a lawyer from the Defenders Association of Philadelphia, attributed that to concern among public defenders that SEPTA was using the ban policy to track and arrest people experiencing homelessness.

“Regardless of what SEPTA claims about the purpose of the [citation] program, in reality it criminalized poverty, homelessness, and mental illness,” Mellon said. “Some of the people they targeted languished in jail because they did not have the means or the traditional support to get released.”

In 2020, the Defenders Association and attorneys from the Homeless Advocacy Project contacted the District Attorney’s Office to express their concerns. Trespassing arrests dwindled soon afterward, Mellon said.

The Defenders Association of Philadelphia is the group which provides legal assistance for indigent defendants. And they got what they wanted:

Arrests by SEPTA police plummeted after the agency downgraded penalties for the most minor offenses, but arrests for other, more serious crime also plummeted as the agency has grappled with officer shortages and other issues. Data from the District Attorney’s Office showed annual arrests by SEPTA police for any offense — including misdemeanor and felony crimes — fell by 85% from 2019 to 2022.

The oh-so-sympathetic claimed that it “criminalized poverty, homelessness, and mental illness,” but regardless of the reason for criminal behavior, it was still criminal behavior. In their zeal to defend the drug addicts poor and downtrodden, they are nevertheless defending the people who have caused a serious downturn in SEPTA ridership.

One picture, it has been said, is worth a thousand words, and this screen capture from the newspaper’s article illustrates it perfectly. SEPTA police officers Kevin Newton, left, Anthony Capaldi, center, and Martin Zitter, the caption tells us, ask a person with whom they are familiar — ever heard the description of a suspect as someone ‘known to the police’? — to not block the entrance to the 13th street El station. A man, very probably an addict, chose to lay down with his food and water bottle in a manner which blocked the station entrance, even though, if he just had to lay down in the sidewalk, there was obvious room just to the right of the stairs, against the metal bars, where he could have settled which did not block the entrance.

The Inquirer has published several articles on the proposed Roosevelt Boulevard subway, a $3+ billion for which SEPTA simply doesn’t have the money. A lot of people believe it would be a great idea, but the obvious question arises: if SEPTA can’t really handle and maintain the system it already has, how does it make any sense to add more system?

The left want to push more and more Americans into public transportation, to reduce CO2 emissions to fight global warming climate change, and that is something into which Philly’s political leadership has fully bought.

Ridership remains well below pre-pandemic levels, and SEPTA needs those passengers back, officials say. Federal pandemic aid will run out by April 2024, and the agency depends on rider fares to make enough money to operate.

As the Democrats in a very Democratic city want to push SEPTA ridership, the public have been far less willing to actually use the service; Philadelphians and residents in the collar counties have, in effect, voted with their wallets. Some of it may be attributable to an increase in the number of people able to work from home some days, but when even the transit agency admits that it has lost control of the system, when the stories of serious crime on the buses and trains increase — the lesser crimes are no longer a story — how can anyone seriously contemplate public transportation as a solution to anything?