City council and concerned commuters pepper SEPTA with criticism and questions over bus route changes

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City council members and state lawmakers have quizzed SEPTA officials and dozens of Philadelphians have expressed displeasure with transit agencies’ proposed overhaul of bus routes on Monday, with numerous tweaks suggesting granular details.

The five-hour virtual hearing by the council’s transport committee showed how the planned overhaul has upended much of the city and how it is becoming a political issue months after the mayor’s primary in May .

You have to be culturally competent in this process, said board member Katherine Gilmore-Richardson. She noted a lack of diversity on the SEPTA team hosting a community open house at a church in Overbrook Farms and no chairs at the start for the many seniors who attended.

I know it wasn’t intentional, but it’s because there are people in the team and/or in the consulting team who don’t understand all the diversity of cultures represented in this city, a said Gilmore-Richardson.

READ MORE: SEPTA bus riders want faster service, but many hate how their routes might change

SEPTA promises better range

SEPTA officials acknowledged they could do better in raising public awareness, including coordinating with Council members on the best places for meetings and how people prefer to get their information.

But they also said the bus system needs to become faster and more reliable to attract more passengers.

The simple fact is that the bus network as configured is not sustainable, said Leslie S. Richards, CEO and General Manager of SEPTA. We can make targeted changes, together, on our own terms, now. Or we can face the certainty years from now that we will have to make service cuts.

That calculation could start as early as 2025, when federal COVID aid is expected to run out, she said.

READ MORE: Roxborough is epicenter of dissent for SEPTA bus overhaul

SEPTA is conducting the first comprehensive review of its bus routes since 1964, the year the transit authority was founded. Over six decades, land use patterns have changed, traffic has increased, and the ways people use public transport have expanded beyond the daily commute, but the bus network has changed little, Richards said.

It was designed in a different era and hasn’t kept pace, she said.

Dan Nemiroff, the bus redesign project manager for SEPTA, who fielded questions alongside Richards, said he found the criticisms and questions constructive.

SEPTA is making revisions to its draft plan, released in October, and is planning another round of public meetings when the next version is released in March. Route changes would not be implemented until fall 2024.

We adopted a standard open house format, and it didn’t quite work out, Nemiroff said in an interview. We want to be more flexible and less formal.

Council member Kenyatta Johnson, chairman of the transport committee, scheduled the hearing after he and his colleagues heard a torrent of complaints and questions from constituents since the first draft was published.

I know we have one of the best transportation systems here in the country,” Johnson said. However, we just want to make sure that the issues and concerns of the public as well as the issues and concerns of board members are taken into account.

Fewer and faster bus lines

SEPTA rolled out the proposed changes in October, with 99 bus routes, up from 125 currently.

Routes have been drawn to use fewer streets and keep buses on arteries as much as possible, and many routes have been straightened. There would be shorter wait times to take a bus on routes with high traffic and likely to attract new users. The plan envisages relying on more transfers between bus lines and on metros.

In the project, there are 44 high-frequency routes, defined as having scheduled times between buses of 15 minutes or less. Currently, there are 33. The most frequent buses would run from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week.

Bus driver Lisa Hastings testified that SEPTA continues to relegate the general public to a purely reactive role, rather than including them in the planning process so that their ideas [were] included from the start.

She said the bus lines in the city may be old but not outdated. They are the backbone of transportation in the city, she said.

Although the majority of the discussion was critical, there was a vein of support for what SEPTA aims to achieve and demands that the city government do more itself to help improve public transit by fighting against the abuse of street parking, by establishing more lanes reserved for buses, and the construction of bus shelters, for example.

SEPTA cannot modify the layout of the streets; they can’t enforce parking, said Alexander Milone of Point Breeze. Cities like New York and Chicago do not tolerate parking chaos in Philadelphia and we need to be aware of that, he added.

When cars park illegally at intersections, buses cannot turn, Milone said. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been on a bus that literally stops in the middle of a route because someone parks in the middle of the intersection.

Nick Zuwiala-Rogers, director of transportation programs for the Clean Air Council, spoke in support of SEPTA’s efforts. He also said the city should inject more money for SEPTA operations.

Currently, the City of Philadelphia provides one of the lowest local funding contributions for public transit, said Zuwiala-Rogers, who is also a board member of Transit Forward Philadelphia. Although we are among the top 10 cities in the United States by revenue generated, we provide less local support than our peer cities.

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