(The following article by Christine Schiavo was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on September 12.)
PHILADELPHIA — She doesn’t own a car and she can’t afford cab fare. Like many other public transportation riders, Tanya Hunter doesn’t merely use SEPTA, she depends on it.
“If they take off the service on the weekends, people will suffer,” said Hunter, 36, of North Philadelphia. “Especially low-income people.”
SEPTA gave riders a shudder last week when it announced it would raise fares, lay off workers, and eliminate weekend service unless the state helps the agency erase a $62 million deficit.
SEPTA board chairman Pasquale T. Deon Sr. said at a news conference Thursday that SEPTA was in a financial crisis and that it wasn’t bluffing about the drastic cuts.
Alice Carr, who has been using SEPTA for 18 years to get from her home in Southwest Philadelphia to her job with a catering company near the Philadelphia International Airport, said yesterday that she believes him.
“They’re the only bus company in town,” said Carr, 48. “When they say they’re going on strike, they go. When they say they’re going to raise fares, they do.”
Last year, SEPTA proposed and then reconsidered drastic cost-cutting measures that included eliminating four Regional Rail lines. This year, the agency contends it has no option but to increase fares by 25 percent, reduce service by 20 percent and fire 16 percent – or 1,400 – of its employees. Unless the state acts by next month, the measures would go into effect Jan. 1.
The state should help, said Annie Chandler, 45, who uses a bus and train to get to work in South Philadelphia on the weekends.
“They should give SEPTA the money because the state is going to lose if people can’t get to work and they have to go on welfare,” she said.
Irving Briddell said his job would be in jeopardy.
“Without SEPTA, I don’t know what I’d do,” Briddell, 52, of Germantown, said yesterday as he boarded the G bus at Broad and Oregon Streets on the last leg of his three-bus ride to work in Southwest Philadelphia. “I’ve been at my job for six years and I rely on SEPTA to get there.”
Hunter, a single mother of nine children, said SEPTA enabled her to go from welfare to work.
“People are trying to get off welfare,” she said. “They’re getting jobs. But now, how are they going to get there?”