(The following article by Dan Geringer was posted on the Philadelphia Daily News website on July 6.)
PHILADELPHIA — Before Live 8, SEPTA officials said that buying roundtrip fares in advance would prevent a repeat of the NFC Championship post-game mess in January, when thousands of tokenless fans overwhelmed the fare booths, causing massive human gridlock.
But when 60,000 Live 8 concertgoers, return tickets in hand, showed up together at Suburban Station for the Regional Rail ride home, the wall-to-wall crush of stranded humanity was much worse than the football fiasco.
Despite reports of riders’ waiting an hour or more Saturday night at Suburban Station, SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney said, “This was our best day in SEPTA rail history.”
He said that the Regional Rail carried 133,000 passenger trips on Live 8 Saturday – far more than its normal-workday 106,000 passenger trips, when evening rush hours are shared by Market East, 30th Street and Suburban stations.
“This was the first time in our history when we dealt with an event where vehicular traffic was blocked off in one full quarter of Center City,” Maloney said. “That message got to the public in advance. So people took SEPTA.”
Transit officials realized the enormity of the Regional Rail crowd when trains were still arriving 80 percent full in mid-afternoon, hours after Live 8 started.
“We massed as many trains as we possibly could in our Center City storage yards,” Maloney said. “Between 5 and 7:30 p.m., we ran about 60 [outbound] trains through the commuter tunnel as fast as we could.
“We had every available car running on the system. One of our oldtimers told [General Manager] Faye Moore that in all his years, he had never seen our 30th Street storage yard with no cars in it.”
Maloney said that 100 SEPTA personnel from transit police to the general manager herself, donned bright emergency vests and spent hours “busting their butts” to keep riders safe.
“When huge crowds mass on platforms, there is always a danger of people falling into the track area,” Maloney said. “So we required riders to queue up in the concourse area. As trains pulled up, we directed riders down the stairs and directly into trains.
“This made for very large crowds on the Suburban Station concourse, but it was much safer than crowded platforms.”
Maloney said he understood why homebound concertgoers were unhappy after “spending hours standing in the sun on the Parkway. They were sweaty and tired. Their feet ached. They came to Suburban Station expecting to get right on a train. I’m sure the wait felt interminable.”
But given the overwhelming number of riders who showed up at the same time, he said, “the system worked flawlessly at ultimate capacity with no breakdowns. It was one of the proudest days SEPTA has ever had.”