Try sitting in an R5 Paoli train, bound for Center City.

On a Friday.

And you forgot to wait at work to go pee before you left for the train station.

Then the caternary loses power just before the platforms at 30th Street Station, rendering all inbound PRR-line trains immobile once they pass Overbrook Station.

And this outage lasts 2 hours, after already spending 50 minutes on the ride to begin with.

And you really have to pee.

Bad*.

At least when you wait for the 15 you can just unzip your fly and pee on Girard much like many folks do when near SEPTA property.






*Yes, this is a true story, experienced by Yours Truly.

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Buh-bye.

Well mechanical things in San Fran and CA in general tend to be of better health than their east coast brethren due to differing climates. (Think of all the still sweet condition classic cars out west.) But the true reason for San Frans seriously spiffy trolly fleet is that that are in themselves a serious tourist attraction. When you think of San Fran you tend to think of the trolly, sourdough and the markets... or hippies! So the city spends a lot of cash keeping them in tip top condition, but if you google enough you can find examples of them breaking or of serious accidents there.

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"i live my life in the city"

hahahahahahaha pee on girard...amazing
but yeah...true...whenever youre dealing with mass transit in general (wether youre waiting for the el, the trolley, a bus, a train or sitting in traffic) there are gonna be setbacks...and...when the 15 was a bus, i remember waiting a ridiculous amount of time for it on a number of occassions, only to have the bus pull up, and it be packed, and have the bus driver tell us it had broken down and that there were two more behind it
so you cant totally blame the trolleys

Ah Philadelphia only you could take a tourist attraction and crap all over it. These trolleys are the same ones that ply the streets of San Fransisco -- yet what do we do with them?

Nothing.

Yes but a Bus can go around a bus and pick up its passangers and continue on (If Septa cared about city riders at all) w/o tooo much of a delay, you cant do that with the trolleys. I thought the purpose of bringing them back was as a tourist attraction, therefore they would be better served on the 23, No-one comes to Philly to go all the way up to Girard to ride a trolley that breaksdown more then Brittney Spears.

Dont get me wrong, I like the trolleys as well, but they are dinosaurs and too unreliable, this is happening every week for gawd sakes.

Actually the 15 trolleys are not that old, they are the old bodies modified to fit on new chassis... the so called new trolleys that run in West Philly are old by comparison which is odd but there ya have it. The problems on the 15 have a lot to do with SEPTA not really trying to hard to maintain the infrastructure I have a feeling. They certainly did not want to bring back the trolleys, and the 23 can no longer run trolleys as SEPTA removed infrastructure for it against the cities wishes.

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"i live my life in the city"

Shame how those buses aren't running on electricity now, like they should be. More quiet and less noxious for all.

And I'm not talking about overhead wires.

Oh to dream....

I often feel badly when I knock SEPTA, since their mgmt is just so pathetic. They cannot figure out how to get themselves out of their hole: with breath-taking ineptness (dirty stations, poor communication with riders, surly staff), they alienate their customers who could be their greatest advocates for more funding from the state. With embarassing mismanagement (the El reconstruction), they anger folks who don't use transit, and cement their perception that it is a waste of tax dollars.

They really need someone with a combination of vision and smarts. No doubt that Ms. Moore is a great accountant, but she has proven that she is not capable of energizing this key public asset. It is a really difficult job, maybe an impossible job, but it is time to give the task to someone else.

Anyway, the trolleys on Rt 15 are indeed new guts in old skin that has been facelifted. SEPTA really has no desire to operate in an environmentally friendly manner, or they would have ordered trackless trolleys for the South Philadelphia lines that have the infrastructure in place, that the community wanted!

Whew, I'm a crank today.

e

SEPTA short services the city riders. A majority of the board represent the suburban counties and really seem to thumb their noses at improving city transit.

I'm a sick and tired of the friggin token and exact-change-for-a-transfer system in place here. SEPTA ignores the potential of a transit pass system like NYCs Metrocard. NYC allows free transfers within a two or three hour window, encouraging, rather than discouraging, more people to use the system.

I hate the system of transfers too. You can only avoid an extra charge with a weekly pass...and the pricing of those passes are ridiculous. As someone who simply goes to and from work on Septa (which I imagine is most people) and doesn't use it 3 or 4 times a day including weekends, it's cheaper to buy tokens. It doesn't encourage people to ride Septa more often and it doesn't make it easy to do so.

It's sort of like the parking meter "Smartcard." It's so "smart" that you can't refill it--you have to buy another each time you want one. It also takes about 200 times longer to have it fill a meter for 2 hours than putting in change. You'll be so happy to find a spot and then realize the cardreader in that machine isn't working and you have to dig to find change. This happens to me about 1 in 3 times. So it doesn't allow me to stop saving all my change...it simply allows me a backup if I run out of change. It's really a bad system.

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Resident of Fishtown, Moderator of Fish/No. Libs/Kenzo forum, Real Estate Agent-Prudential Fox & Roach