OTHER SEPTA NOTES...

There are a couple other things happening at SEPTA other than the El shuttle...

The first interesting observation is that SEPTA "Transit Police" are putting new patrol cars on the street. The new cars are Chevy Impala's, which are (1) less expensive than the current fleet of Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor models and (2) get better fuel mileage (approx. 3 mpg) than the Ford CVPI. I guess all those years imploring SEPTA to become more fuel efficient are slowly starting to pay off. Now, if they could start to phase out those SUV's for the white-shirts and replace them with vehicles that don't guzzle as much gas, then I'd believe there's a committment to cutting costs.

Meanwhile, on the operations front, there's talk that all Southern's portion of the 108 could be moved to Red Arrow by the fall picking. Whether or not that means that all 108 trips would originate and terminate at 69 St instead of seeing buses deadhead from Upper Darby to the Airport or Southwest Philadelphia remains to be seen. There's also no word on how this will affect the school trippers that operate to and from the Pepper Middle School or Bartram High that are based off of the 108.

EL SHUTTLE COMMENTS

Once again, SEPTA attempted to run a resonable facsimile of the El during one of it's 10-day shutdowns. The good news is this time, the service was restored when it was supposed to be. The bad news is that SEPTA seems to take pleasure in sticking it to riders trying (sometimes in vain) to connect to Red Arrow buses at 69 St. Would it really have been that difficult to designate at least 1/3 of the 40+ buses used on the shuttle to run non-stop between 40 St and 69 St to at least give suburban bus riders at least a sliver of hope of making connections in a reasonable amount of time? At least when the Frankford side of the El underwent major shutdowns on weekends, riders connecting from buses at Bridge-Pratt were able to get a close to non-stop ride to Center City (with a stop at Bridge and Torresdale) via I-95.

Of course, there's no limited access highway connecting West Philly with Upper Darby, but traffic flow during most hours along Walnut and Chestnut isn't too bad, so there's no reason why non-stop service couldn't be implemented.

And, of course, SEPTA's Minister of Mis-Information Richard Maloney made an appearance on Monday. After a stop at 69 St, Maloney made his way over to 40 St to "assist" with the operation of the shuttle. So, of course, being a good SEPTA hack, Maloney did ride with the people on the shuttle buses from 69 St to 40 St, right? Ummm, no...

Apparently using status that would nominally be reserved for Fearless Leader or some other high ranking Rotating Resume, Maloney and an unidentified female Hack were given a non-stop ride from 69 St to 40 St ... in the back of a SEPTA "Transit Police" cruiser driven by a high ranking "Transit Police" Lieutenant.

Well, at least someone was able to secure a SEPTA-operated non-stop ride between the two endpoints...

The running of the shuttles also allowed for the largest gathering of SEPTA "Transit Police" seen in Upper Darby since ... well, let me get back to you on that. No fewer than 8 "Transit Police" officers were observed going what they tend to do best - stand around, do very little, and wait for the next call to come in. Now, if only SEPTA's "Transit Police" were only half as vigilant at NJ Transit Police, then perhaps the quote marks around "Transit Police" will be removed. Until then, nothing's going to change...