(Philadelphia television station WPVI posted the following Associated Press article on its website on May 14.)
PHILADELPHIA — A recent survey by SEPTA police found that nearly one of every four subway and elevated stations on the Broad Street Line and the Market-Frankford El in Philadelphia has an emergency call box that doesn’t work.
The Philadelphia Daily News reports that the transit authority’s police force checked the emergency call boxes in the subway system’s 50 stations over the last two weeks.
Twelve of the stations had at least one emergency call box that was not working 24 percent of the system. The paper says eight stations with bad boxes are located in what police consider high crime areas.
About four years ago the entire Broad Street Line and Market-Frankford Line were outfitted with new, computerized emergency call boxes.
But the $3.9-million system still hasn’t been put into service.
Don Nigro, the president of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers, a SEPTA commuter watchdog group, says he thinks people are uneasy about using the subway stations as it is.
He says, “This certainly isn’t going to give them a warm and fuzzy feeling.”