Old Route 34 trolley making its way from The Portal to the surface part of its route.
Act of 1963, which established SEPTA and other public transit agencies across the state. At first, the agency only took over the roles of two public entities: The Passenger Service Improvement Corporation and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Compact. These agencies were primarily responsible for mediating disputes between the different private operators but did not operate any services themselves. However, in 1968, after a 19-day transit strike crippled the city, the mayor pushed for SEPTA to start running public transit services. At that point, SEPTA jumped into the operating sphere by buying PTC’s lines, which became the City Transit Division (SEPTA, 2007). SEPTA’s new service comprised the Market-Frankford and Broad Street Lines, 12 trolley routes, and the city’s bus and trackless trolley routes (SEPTA, 1974). In 1970, SEPTA bought the Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company, which operated the Norristown High Speed Line, two trolley routes (101 and 102), and several bus routes in the counties surrounding Philadelphia. These services are known as the Victory Division today. In 1976, SEPTA bought the Schuylkill Valley Lines, which became the Frontier Division. Finally, in 1983, SEPTA took over the former Reading and Pennsylvania Railroads from Conrail, and these became the current Regional Rail and Railroad Division (SEPTA, 2007). Since 1983, SEPTA has controlled all of the public transit based in Philadelphia, and for the foreseeable future, this is very unlikely to change. Since consolidation, SEPTA has converted a large part of its trolley network to bus routes, reduced service, and made transfers less convenient on the City Transit Division. Although private owners started these trends before SEPTA bought them, SEPTA’s decisions have further deteriorated
the quality of public transit in Philadelphia. Once SEPTA had integrated its numerous divisions, which was its first priority, it continued down the path that PTC had forged before it was acquired: It converted trolley routes to bus routes. In the 1980s, SEPTA stopped service on Routes 6, 50, 53, and 60 and in 1992 SEPTA stopped service on Routes 15, 23, and 56, converting the routes to buses (Figure 1). Although Route 15 was restored in 2005 and Routes 23 and 56 are “temporarily” suspended, the other changes are considered permanent. The main justification of the suspension of service was that double-parked cars would block trolleys from passing on narrow streets, resulting in bunching and unpredictable timetables. Thus the city and SEPTA chose to degrade their public transit service rather than enforce parking regulations. In his analysis of ridership trends between 1954 and 2005, Christopher Zearfoss of the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities found that ridership decreased 61 percent overall for the entire City Transit Division, but that it decreased over 70 percent for the routes that SEPTA converted from trolleys to buses. The decrease was only 38 percent on Route 34 and 56 percent on Route 10, two routes that were allowed to continue as trolley routes. Additionally, Zearfoss found that ridership fell 39 percent on Route 15 between 1992 and 2000—the first eight years after it was converted from a trolley route to a bus route—which is three times the decline of the nearest parallel bus routes, 3 and 43 (Zearfoss, 2008). The steeper drop in ridership on the route that was formerly served by a trolley demonstrates that riders are not agnostic between rail and bus, and that, in fact, they prefer rail. Furthermore, Zearfoss found that while trolley
Figure 1. Map showing the trolley routes that have been removed or “temporarily substituted” by buses.
ridership increased by 1.1 percent between 2000 and 2007, bus ridership on the lines most similar to the trolley routes—Routes 21, 42, 52, and 46—actually decreased by 22.2 percent (Zearfoss, 2008). This finding further reinforces the fact of Philadelphians’ preference for rail over bus transit. Of course, those four bus routes do not follow the exact same path as the trolleys, but they are similar enough to where they would often compete for the same riders who have voted with their feet by choosing rail over bus service. According to Vukan Vuchic, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation Engineering at Penn, rail transit tends to attract more riders because it usually has a more separated right of way, it is more reliable, and it has lower headways (Vuchic, 1999). In addition to these reasons, rail is probably also more attractive to riders based on the following characteristics: Perception of permanence offered by the tracks, the ingrained idea that rail-based transit is inherently better than rubber-tire transit, and the negative perception of buses as smelly, loud, and unattractive—even if these perceptions are not representative of modern bus technology. In addition to converting trolley routes to buses, SEPTA has also reduced service on the “lowest hanging fruit”—the routes where ridership was already very low (Zearfoss, 2009). However, these reductions carry part of the blame for lower ridership overall because as service has decreased, other modes—primarily the automobile—have become more and more attractive, further luring passengers from transit. Finally, after failed attempts to implement a zone charge for transit in Philadelphia in the 1980s, SEPTA embarked on a succession of increases (1985, 1986, 1989, 2001 and 2007)
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