SEPTA has big plans to attract more customers and improve riders’ traveling experience — but an ongoing impasse over a proposed hike in state funding threatens to scuttle those ambitions.
That was one of the takeaways from a wide-ranging discussion of transit, parking, and mobility on Wednesday that included a top SEPTA executive and officials from the city and the Philadelphia Parking Authority.
“There’s really nothing else I can talk about until we fix the funding crisis,” said Jody Holton, SEPTA’s chief planning and strategy officer. “For years, we have been underfunded. We have already cut. There’s nothing left to cut.”
That means that without aid from the state to close a $240 million annual deficit, “we need to cut service,” she said. “We need to raise fares.”
Pa. Senate Republicans have declined to take up Gov. Josh Shapiro’s proposal to spend an additional $283 million a year on mass transit, including $161 million for SEPTA. If the state legislature doesn’t come up with a solution by January, SEPTA will have to start the process of increasing fares 30% and reducing service 20%, officials say.
For now, however, SEPTA, the city and other partners are still moving ahead with several projects meant to improve the system and attract more riders, Holton and other panelists said.
Those include streamlining bus routes and having more frequent buses, overhauling route names and signage, and reducing bus lane blockages that slow down daily commutes.
Expanding beyond the 9-to-5 crowd
As of August, total SEPTA ridership rose to 76% of pre-pandemic numbers, or about 673,000 daily trips. Holton said the figure is twice the number who travel on I-95 or I-76.
At the same time, she said there’s still a lot of “pent-up demand” for rides that the transit authority is missing out on providing because of the 20% to 30% of commuters who work nontraditional hours.
“We’re not serving a ton of commuters,” she said during a panel discussion held by the Central Philadelphia Development Corporation. “The folks that are staffing our retail environments, they don’t commute 9 to 5. The folks that are going to the Amazon warehouses, they don’t commute 9 to 5. So we need to provide more frequent transit throughout the day and evening and into the weekend.”
The agency is trying to reach more of those people through its Bus Revolution network design, which is meant to make bus routes more efficient without increasing costs. More routes will become high-frequency, with a bus coming at least every 15 minutes, routes will be straightened so they aren’t slowed as much by traffic, and bus stops will be spaced further apart, among other changes.
The redesign is expected to improve access to transit for 200,000 people, Holton said. Following years of outreach to affected communities and adjustments to the plan, most of the changes will go into effect next June and September. A final phase will happen after FIFA World Cup games being held in Philly conclude in July 2026.
SEPTA is also gradually rolling out a wayfinding overhaul that will simplify station and route names and put up new signage throughout the system, she said. The Market-Frankford line will be labeled the L, the Broad-Street line the B, and trolley lines the T.
Kelley Yemen, Philadelphia’s director of multimodal planning, said the city has helped improve bus service over the last three years by creating transit priority lanes on roads such as Market Street and JFK Boulevard downtown, where the lanes are painted red, and the Boulevard Direct service in Northeast Philly. Car blockages in the downtown lanes have dropped 85% and buses are moving up to 15% faster, she said.
The city and SEPTA have 30 bus priority lane projects that are completed, being built, or being planned. Discussions are under way to create such lanes on Lehigh and Erie avenues, Yemen said.
The Terminator, but for illegally parked cars
To further improve bus speeds, rider safety, and enforcement of loading zone rules, the Philadelphia Parking Authority is working with SEPTA and the city to put parking enforcement cameras on the front of buses, PPA executive director Rich Lazer said.
“We have probably close to 300 parking enforcement officers citywide, and people may think we’re everywhere, but we’re not,” he said. “Enforcement using camera technology will help us manage that better.”
The new system will operate similarly to the red light and speed cameras already installed on some roads, he said. It will use the bus-mounted cameras and artificial intelligence to identify cars that are double-parked, or illegally parked in transit priority lanes or in front of bus stops, and issue tickets by mail.
The PPA is taking bids on the project and hopes to have the system operating next year, Lazer said.
He noted that, as part of the PPA’s efforts to make better use of technology, it’s also working to use data from parking apps like ParkMobile and Flowbird to create a “real-time parking data map” to show where spots are available.
“If you’re looking to go to 12th and Walnut, and it’s all red on our map because the data shows, on the payments that are coming in, that there’s no spots, maybe you’ll go to 8th and Walnut and walk a few blocks,” he said.
Less work-from-home “is a good thing”
Despite SEPTA’s struggles, the rise of ride-sharing services, and other challenges, Philadelphia still ranks high for the percentage of people who commute by modes other than cars, according to Clint Randall, who moderated Wednesday’s discussion. Randall is a planner and CCD’s vice president of economic development.
Twenty-eight percent of commuters do not use cars, the same percentage as Chicago. Philly’s in fifth place after San Francisco (36%), Washington (38%), Boston (41%), and New York (59%), Randall said, citing the U.S. Census’s 2023 American Community Survey.
Increasing that ranking is key to stimulating the city’s economy, he said.
“If we want downtown to thrive and to attract even more jobs and more people, the only way we can do that is through maximizing multimodal mobility,” Randall said.
While Boston proper has less than half of Philadelphia’s population, he said similarities in the cities’ infrastructure, transit system, and economy suggested Philly could aim to emulate its northern counterpart’s success with alternate commuting methods.
“If we were able to achieve the shares of transit, riding and walking and biking that Boston has proportionately, that would basically take about 100,000 cars off of the road,” he said.
Citywide, Philly ranks fifth for people who walk to work, at 9.4%, while Boston is in first place at 13.9%.
One area where Philly ranked relatively low was in the percentage of people who work from home. As of last fall it was at 16%, or 11th place, close behind Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Pittsburgh. The top WFH cities were Seattle and Austin at 28%. New York was at the bottom with 13%.
Mayor Cherelle Parker’s edict that city employees must work from their offices five days a week has been highly controversial. Comcast’s four-days-a-week mandate has also stoked complaints.
But Randall argued, of the low overall WFH rate, “I think we can all agree that’s a good thing … because it means people are remaining engaged with downtown.” Like Parker, Center City District CEO Prema Katari Gupta has defended return-to-work policies, telling Philly Mag that “people are better off when they’re together.”
Uber eats SEPTA’s lunch
Looking just at central Philadelphia, 28% of people walk to work, putting it in third place nationally after the east and west sides of midtown Manhattan, which are counted as distinct statistical areas, Randall said.
About 4% bike to work, while in South Philly the figure is 5.1%, making it one of the nation’s top bicycle commuting areas.
The cycling figure is “sort of shocking when you think about what it can be like to bike through South Philadelphia to get to Center City,” he said. “Of course, we’ve made a lot of headway in making that a more comfortable experience.”
In the city overall, close to 2% of people bike to work, which he called “astonishingly high” by American standards.
City officials have proposed making popular bike lanes on Spruce and Pine streets safer by putting in concrete barriers, banning cars from stopping in the lanes, and other measures, although questions remain about how they will pay for installation and maintenance of the new infrastructure.
Randall also discussed how travel trends changed from 2019 to 2023, based on data from a cellphone tracking service that he got from SEPTA. Total trips in and out of Center City on a typical weekday were up 7% as of fall 2023, with walking up 24%. Cycling soared 67%, to more than 18,000 trips in and out of Center City daily.
But the standout increase was in Uber, Lyft, and taxi rides, which nearly doubled over four years to more than 16,000 daily weekday trips. In addition, the number of trips by private car or carpool increased 24% and now make up nearly half of all trips into Center Center.
Compared to transit, “Uber is eating our lunch,” SEPTA’s Holton said, in particular with regard to those nontraditional commuters who go to work early in the morning or late at night.
