(The following article by Jere Downs was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on December 22.)
PHILADELPHIA — SEPTA’s Regional Rail system has been called many things in recent months by its riders. “Punctual” is not one of them.
Since April, trains on the 13 lines have kept to their schedules 83 percent of the time on average, making the transit network one of the tardiest in any metropolitan area in the nation.
While that might not come as a surprise to many of the 100,000 daily passengers, it apparently has to SEPTA.
Officials said they had been unaware that so many trains were chronically late until a new computerized control system enabled them to monitor each weekday’s 843 runs – a term to be used loosely, judging from the data.
“There is a belief we don’t care,” said Richard J. Hanratty, SEPTA’s Regional Rail chief. “The truth is, we have always cared, but we were reacting to trains on a day-to-day basis. We didn’t know how bad it was.”
They do now. They know, for instance, that only 35 trains never once let their riders down between May and September – the latest data released by SEPTA. Worse, they know that hundreds more routinely did.
By SEPTA’s own definition, “late” exceeds six or more minutes, and being late more than 9 percent of the time is, by the agency’s standards, unacceptable. That category swelled with 352 trains – a poor showing even though statisticians gave them the benefit of the doubt and dropped all of storm-plagued September from the equation.
SEPTA tagged 62 of those trains as the worst of the laggards, pulling in late as much as half the time. They alone are the bane of 10,000 passengers daily on 10 rail lines that crosscut the region, including such major people-movers as the R5 along the Main Line, the R2 south to Wilmington and Newark, and the R8 to Chestnut Hill. Approximately half are rush-hour trains.
Among the top 10 pokes is the optimistically named “Great Valley Flyer,” an R5 train that takes off from Suburban Station at 5:41 p.m., typically packed with 400 commuters. The chances that it will reach Thorndale, Chester County, within five minutes of its 6:32 scheduled arrival: about 50/50.
To bring the repeat offenders up to speed, SEPTA must first figure out what is going wrong. Every weekday morning at 9 since early fall, about a dozen Regional Rail managers – the On Time Task Force – have met at the agency’s Center City headquarters to dissect the dilatory, one at a time.
The room looks out on the $190 million nerve center that directs the entire rail system and that, since becoming fully operational in April, has made it possible to track on-time performance to the minute. On a wall screen 56 feet long and four feet high is a computerized map with blinking dashes that show the real-time movement of every train on every line.
Is a train habitually late through one particular stretch of its run? Is it commonly stuck behind another train? Is it sitting unusually long at a station?
“This is the first time we have really sat down and had a process,” said Hanratty, who has worked for the Regional Rail system since SEPTA took it over from Conrail in 1982.
One day this month, the group critiqued the No. 4367, an R3 Media train whose on-time performance has been only 65 percent. Could it be, the group wondered, that the passengers at the University City station – about 60 on average – are taking too long to board?
“Let’s put somebody at University City,” Hanratty directed. “See if we can spread [the passengers] out. Don’t open the door we normally use. It’s tough, but we have to get them on the train faster.”
So far, the task force has reviewed about one-third of the 62 worst offenders – and raised the on-time performance of eight of them to 100 percent. Among the reformed are some R1 Airport and R8 Chestnut Hill West trains; in those cases, the group’s solution was to pad the schedules with extra time.
Tom Doricott, a spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, questions the long-term wisdom of tinkering with timetables: “They fix one thing, and it messes up another part of the schedule.”
Adding a few minutes here and there, however, will not fix what ails most late trains.
Amtrak owns the track on three of SEPTA’s 13 lines and portions of three more. This year, extensive Amtrak repair work slowed many SEPTA trains – while lack of repair work slowed even more.
On the aged R5 Paoli line, which Amtrak owns, the old bolted rails have heaved in places and ties have rotted; left untrimmed, trees become entangled in wires. Those poor conditions, SEPTA officials say, have helped pull down the R5’s overall on-time performance to its current 65 percent.
David Gunn, Amtrak’s chief executive officer, recently acknowledged that “there hasn’t been adequate maintenance” on the Paoli line. Fiscally troubled Amtrak, he said, is seeking a partnership with SEPTA or PennDot to upgrade it. But SEPTA has woes of its own: a $26 million hole in its 2004 budget.
So Dale Mays waits. The 42-year-old lawyer catches an R5 train out of Malvern at 2:30 p.m. for the 29-mile run into Philadelphia – just to make a 6 p.m. class in Center City.
“I know this train is late a lot,” Mays said. “I don’t base my expectations on what is reasonable. I base my expectations on my experience. You do what you can so you do not explode.”
Derrell Gamble, a cook at a Paoli KFC, takes the 10:04 p.m. city-bound R5 train, which – in theory – should allow him to catch the last SEPTA bus from 69th Street Terminal to his home in Chester at 11:12 p.m. At least three nights a week, he misses the connection.
“That train is always late,” said Gamble, 42. “I end up sleeping on the couch at my sister’s house in West Philly.”
Passengers are not yet voting with their feet, or their wheels. The number of rail riders has held relatively steady over the last two years, according to SEPTA records.
Some experts fear, however, that if the railroad’s reliability continues to slip, ridership will not be far behind. Historically, commuters have switched to other modes of transportation when the on-time percentage dips below 70 percent, said Martin E. Robins, a former executive of New Jersey Transit who now is director of the Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers University.