Posts Tagged ‘SEPTA’

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Reasons American Public Transit Embarrasses Me.

August 5, 2012

An entrance to a Philadelphia subway station on the Avenue of the Arts.

Last week, Philadelphia got some shocking news. The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) declared that the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, known around here as SEPTA, was the “best of the best” in American public transit. This fall, SEPTA will receive APTA’s coveted Outstanding Public Transportation System Achievement Award.

Many SEPTA riders are speechless with surprise.

According to a press release on the SEPTA website, APTA President and CEO Michael Melaniphy received a tour of SEPTA’s control center and called it “amazing”.

“SEPTA and its many accomplishments and achievements are models for the rest of the public transit industry,” he said.

Whether or not Melaniphy visited any of SEPTA’s subways, trolleys, buses or trains remains unclear.

People say that Philadelphians love to hate their transit system. But SEPTA’s not all bad.

Philadelphia’s Suburban Station, in the heart of Center City.

The three major city stations, Market East (next to the famous Reading Terminal Market), Suburban (next to City Hall) and 30th Street (of Witness fame), aren’t bad.

Another view of Suburban Station.

But starting just a block or two away from these central stations, it’s a different world. I can’t tell it better than these pictures can. I took all of these within about two hours, passing through a couple transit stations in the course of a normal evening on the job.

After brief rainstorm, water puddles everywhere in a subway station one stop south of City Hall.

On the way up to the street:

Roaches may be able to survive a nuclear disaster, but a thunderstorm over the SEPTA subway apparently does this one in.

Here’s the ceiling of the main concourse between Suburban Station and the north-south subway line.

The Broad Street Line subway.

Here is the ceiling of a Suburban Station entrance one block from City Hall.

Don’t look up.

I usually just hustle through, but when I take the time to look, it reminds me of an abandoned building.

Forget a trip to the caverns. SEPTA has all the stalactites you could want.

There are smooth, white lumps on the floor where the lime has dripped for decades.

Here’s the whole picture of that entrance.

If you come down into the subway, here’s how you can pay for your ride.

Get some change.

Buy your tokens. No, there are no smart cards and you can’t use a credit card.

Need help? Don’t have cash? Go to the ticket booth. Or not.

Informational signage.

Renovations are under way at the 15th Street trolley stop; here is an example of the signage to help riders find their way.

There are a lot of things to be proud of in my home city. But I’m embarrassed by the state of its public transit. Now, I can’t even say what I feel upon learning that these pictures show North America’s best public transit system.

Do you live in Philadelphia? Do you think SEPTA deserves the award? If you’re not from Philly, what is public transit like in your city?

 

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Posted in Challenges of the Modern World, Journeys | 6 Comments »

From the Only Girl on the Whole East Coast Who Missed the Damned Earthquake

August 24, 2011

When I got home at about 2:15pm on the afternoon of August 23rd and looked at the sprawling, breathless hive of life’s leftovers on the internet, I felt as if everyone else in the state had had a huge party without inviting me.

Later I read that Northwest Philadelphia, due to its solidly rocky geological foundation, experienced less shaking than other areas. Apparently some people in their cars also missed the trembling. From my SEPTA bus in Manayunk, I didn’t have a chance.

Curse you, SEPTA, for robbing me of this experience. Usually life’s tumult is inside the bus, as overheated riders scream obscenities at each other and the cheeky children of low-income families turn the seats into a jungle gym. I never thought public transit would shield me from a wildly unusual and unsettling event.

The earthquake had entered the Facebook feed tentatively. “Um, anyone else feel what seemed to be a small earthquake in Philly?” “Did anyone else feel that little earthquake?” “Um…house shaking??? Why?”

There were some unnecessary judgments on others’ states: “Pentagon evacuating?? Pansies.”

Exalted or frightened realizations set in.

Philadelphia: “Time to scratch ‘survive earthquake’ off the ol’ bucket list…”
Pittsburgh: “never thought i would feel an earthquake on the east coast!”
New York: “Holy earthquake NYC”.
Philadelphia: “The green fingers of sweet wasabi death” (ok, maybe I wasn’t the only one who missed it).
Virginia: THAT WAS SCARY! Wrong time to move to Virginia. 5.8 earthquake. I’ve never felt anything like that before. Whole apartment building vacated to the streets. Now I’m picking up everything that fell over. Man.”
Maryland: “I grabbed the dog and ran outside and watched the truck sway back and forth and looked at the water in the pool slosh back and forth. Pictures crooked, boxes fell off the shelves in garage, and the back door doesn’t close easily – weird.”
North Carolina: “In a school of 1400 kids, it feels like the earth is shaking every day! Didn’t notice anything unusual…but I’m sure it was followed by ‘Ya’ll need to quit bouncing around and be still’!!!!”
Washington, DC: “Earthquake cocktails!”

Apparently downtown Philadelphia had a similar response to my friend in DC. After flocking out of their office buildings to exclaim over the quake, everyone forgot about work and streamed into the bars to get down to the business of discussing Where They Were When It Happened.

Except for me. I had a deadline on the news story that took me to Manayunk. As soon as my cell phone would work again, I began making calls to get an interview I wanted.

I wanted to talk about construction on a new community center. He wanted to talk about the earthquake.

I felt more left out than ever.

But perhaps it’s for the best. I have a low tolerance for natural disasters. At least, I’m pretty sure I would if I lived in a part of the world that had natural disasters. In fact, I don’t know why everyone doesn’t live on the United States’ mid-Atlantic coast.

In Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, a foot or two of snow brings panic to supermarkets everywhere. Five days of temperatures above 98 puts the fear of death in us. Earthquakes are mild and almost unheard of, tsunamis unknown. By the time hurricanes reach us, they’re nothing but windy, depressing rainstorms. One time a small tornado hit my parents’ hometown outside of Philadelphia. My grandparents lost a gutter and my mom spent the next ten years pointing out a few trees that had been scarred to anyone who would look.

When the terrible tornado hit Joplin, MO earlier this year, I made the mistake of watching a YouTube video someone had made from inside a gas station when the tornado hit. I shivered and wept.  A long string of nightmares began in which howling columns of wind bore down upon me while I tried to take shelter in skyscrapers.

On Facebook, the lucky, plucky ones who felt the earthquake tried to comfort those who napped right through with the possibility of aftershocks. I am of two minds about this – one mind out on the sunny streets, and one mind in a dark bedroom on the third floor of the house where I am staying all by myself except for one poodle. It’s like watching a heinously scary movie: sounds like fun during the day, but is a terrible idea when you need a drink of water at 2:30 am and all the lights are off.

I am craven enough to say that I’m glad I live in Philadelphia, a city not built on a tectonic fault-line, where two feet of snow is the apocalypse and people shrug at tornado watches.

“Earthquakes strike suddenly, without warning, and they can occur at any time of the year, day or night. Forty-five states and territories in the U.S. are at moderate to very high risk of earthquakes, and they are located in every region of the country,” the Red Cross told me yesterday in a breathless e-mail. I’m going to hazard a guess that, at worst, Pennsylvania is at the “moderate” end of things. I’ll continue to make donations for earthquake relief in Asia or Haiti, and thank the fates that I live here.

So for now, I guess I can make my peace with missing the Great Earthquake of 2011.

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Posted in Journeys, My Worst Fears | 10 Comments »

Judgment Day!

May 12, 2011

“Judgment Day, Judgment Day, ten days to Judgment day,” the woman said, clutching a stack of brochures. Everyone else sitting on the train station benches hunched down and ignored her.

“Judgment Day? Really?” I said. “I had no idea. Please, tell me more!”

Walk around Market East in a fluorescent yellow shirt that says “Judgment Day!” telling everyone that they have ten days to turn to Jesus, and I just can’t help myself.

The woman looked at me warily. “If you read the Bible, it be right there in it. God is coming to destroy the world in fire. 200,000 will be taken up and billions and billions will burn in torment.”

“Why would God do that?” I wondered.

“It is in the Bible,” she said. “200,000 are taken up by Jesus. The earth will open in fire and earthquakes. God is going to destroy the world because of all its sins.”

“200,000, wow, that’s not very many,” I said.

“The world has six billion people,” the man on the bench next to me roused himself. “And the rest are all just going to die?”

“It is the judgment,” she said. “God is going to smite the world in torture and fire. You read the Bible, you see it there.”

“Me, I’m a humanist,” said the man. “All you need is love. But boy, I guess you hope you’re one of the 200,000.”

She raised a palm to the ceiling. “I pray, I pray.”

“How did we get this 200,000 figure?” I asked.

A train pulled up to the platform. The man got up. “Nope, I’ve got time for this,” he declared, and sat back down.

“God says in the Bible that the Judgment is coming in ten days, and the 200,000 will be taken up,” she replied. “It is because of his anger because of all the man trying to marry man and woman trying to marry woman.”

“Here we go,” the man said.

“I see.” I said.  “Is it just all those bad homosexuals who are going to burn in the rapture, or are some of the good heterosexual people going to be sucked into the earthquakes with them, just because God’s so pissed?”

“There is still time to turn to Jesus,” she answered. “Pray, pray to Jesus. It is in the Bible that the great rapture is in ten days. Seven billion people will burn, they will all burn.”

“Six billion,” the man corrected.

“Please tell me – so, are all these earthquakes and tsunamis, like in Japan, are they just like a little free sample from God about what he’s going to do to us after next week?”

“Now you be mocking the word of the Bible,” she said.

“Well, I just want to know, how are you preparing?” I asked. “I guess you’re not worried about the June rent?”

She walked away, declining to give me the pamphlet which I assume held some tips on joining God’s chosen. I wanted one, but I lost her in the crowd until I saw her boarding the very same train that the man and I were boarding. She was silent.

“Have a great night,” the man called to me as he entered another car.

When I got home, I Googled “May 21st, 2011” and was soon engrossed in a website titled “Judgment Day!” and featuring a giant hourglass trickling its last grains of sand.

The opening quote was a riveting one: “And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man.”

I caught up on the real history of world. “The Bible’s calendar of history is completely accurate and trustworthy,” I learned.  How do we know the world is ending next Saturday?  “It was in the year 4990 BC that God revealed to Noah that there would be yet 7 days until the flood of waters would be upon the earth.  Now, if we substitute 1000 years for each one of those 7 days, we get 7000 years.  And when we project 7000 years into the future from 4990 BC, we find that it falls on the year 2011 AD.”

Need more proof?  “The amount of information available is far too abundant and complex” to explain here, the website says. But it is important to know that God left all churches on May 21st, 1988 and Satan took his place – perhaps God couldn’t stand all the acid-washed jeans and fingerless gloves.

Never mind, on to the good stuff. On May 21st, “true believers elected by God” will be “raptured”: that is, taken up to be with the Lord in the air.

Jesus, this is boring!

The other “billions” will begin five months of the worst tortures imaginable, including mass earthquakes. Then, just when you thought that at least you’d get to go Trick-or-Treating while all the goody-goodies are floating with Jesus in the candy-free air, the Earth itself will be destroyed on October 21st. “God is tenderhearted and full of mercy,” the tract finishes. But “there is no possibility that God will not follow through on His intention to destroy the world in 2011.”

This leaves me to consider what I will do on May 20th. I think I’ll stomp on my calculator, since I’ll no longer need to figure out whether I can meet my student loan payments and still pay the electric bill. Then I’ll write a few e-mails without bothering to read them over for typos. Next, I’ll spend all the money that would have gone towards June bills on a flight. At the airport, I’ll eat two Auntie Anne’s cinnamon sugar pretzels and a Cinnabon. Once I arrive in the U.S Virgin Islands, I’ll go to the nearest store and buy an umbrella, a cooler, and six cartons of Häagen Dazs ice cream, each one a different flavor. I’ll sit on the beach and eat them one after the other while reading “Pride and Prejudice”.

BRING ON THE APOCALYPSE.

All this makes me realize that Ms. Judgment Day did not cut a very convincing figure. If I truly believed I had less than two weeks left on Earth, I would not spend it riding SEPTA trains in a bulky neon-yellow T-shirt with a foot-high stack of brochures in my arms. I noticed the woman’s hair: it was beautifully braided. My sisters-in-law are African and I know how many hours it takes for them to get their hair done. Personally, I wouldn’t waste that kind of time in the face of the Rapture, unless I thought good hair would give me a leg up with the Lord.

As the train reached my stop and I stood up to exit, I saw the woman’s shirt glowing in the back of the car. She was watching me with narrowed eyes, watching me fall into the fiery pit and writhe with scorpion stings.

I’m sure it’s just the attitude God is looking for, come next Saturday.

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Posted in Challenges of the Modern World, Feelin' Grumpy | 6 Comments »

Epiphany of a Narcissist

January 29, 2010

Don’t ask me why, because I either won’t remember or won’t admit it, but I once watched a reality show about Hulk Hogan’s family. In the episode, they visited a theme park in disguise. They strode around the park commenting on how nice it was to walk around without getting mobbed by fans. But it didn’t take long for the fun to wear off, especially when they had to wait in line like everyone else. Hogan’s daughter (who, like most girls with very rich or famous daddies, wants to be a pop star) sidled up to a sweaty, pimpled teenager: “um, so, do you know who Brooke Hogan is?”

“Uh. I dunno. I guess,” the boy replied warily.

“Well…do you think she’s hot?” Brooke purred.

The family couldn’t take it anymore. They stopped in a crowded walkway and conspicuously removed their costumes, wigs and latex make-up. The crowd recognized them and a cyclone of flashing digital cameras engulfed the grinning family, relieved to be back in their element as the center of attention.

Fortunately, not everyone is as narcissistic as reality TV stars. Most of us aren’t utterly fixated on our own selves, we don’t pine for a bevy of cameras everywhere we go, and we don’t feel entitled to whisk right up to the front of the line. Though I say it myself, I (and probably you) are not so selfish. In fact, I’m so far from overestimating my own importance in the world that I maintain a generally pessimistic outlook – because what is undue optimism but an unreasoning belief that the forces of fate take an interest in you – that the world is on your side? By contrast, I’m a pretty firm believer in the inevitability of problems and the natural regularity of wildly frustrating setbacks.

In no other arena of life is this better demonstrated than in the realm of public transit, a service underlying nearly every function of my life, from social to professional. But public transit operates by some hard-and-fast rules that are painful to stomach. If I am on time for the train, it is usually late. If, however, I am one minute late for the train, it is bang on time and just pulling away from the station. When the guy squeezed next to me on the packed 5:49 thinks the train is a picnic ground for his super-size McDonald’s dinner, that is, of course, when the train is marooned for 20 minutes behind a mechanical failure at Temple University Station. When ten high-school students board the mostly empty subway car, they will pile into the seats directly around me as surely as seagulls circle funnel cake, and their screeching will rival the noise of Antarctica’s Bird Island, which is home to approximately 100,000 penguins, 60,000 albatross and 65,000 fur seals. And whether I am running late for a press date determines whether the bus will be late: 20 minutes will pass while I wait at a stop which is meant to have service every ten minutes. Finally, at the precise moment that hope of being on time slips away, two buses lurch into view, one running early, the other late, so that they drive the entire route one after the other, the first bus packed and the second one empty. If I were good at math, I could work out an algorithm predicting how many minutes late the bus will be based on the distance between me and my destination and the number of minutes late I will be once I arrive there, processed with the relative comfort of the outdoor temperature and presence of precipitation, factored by the amount of influence the person kept waiting for me has on my career.

But last night, something strange happened. I had nowhere special to be after work, but the other woman at the bus stop was agitated. She was meant to be at a show whose curtain was in 20 minutes, and the bus was 15 minutes late. Was the universe conspiring against her, instead of me? What happened to the universe’s usual careful focus on my personal desperation? Apparently I am as egotistical as the self-centered people I’ve always reviled. Instead of having an optimistic view of the world’s care for me, I am a pessimistic narcissist – a person who believes that the forces of fate consistently go out of their way to thwart my daily plans. But what about the other 310,000 people riding SEPTA today? The bus can’t be late at a crucial moment for everyone. Do the fates take a break from irritating me to go frustrate someone else? If the universe does not, in fact, single me out for difficulties, am I comfortable with that lack of personal distinction? Perhaps my pessimism boils down to some unflattering assumptions: that I (as I sweat the clock and find myself next to the dude who’s having a cigarette inside the bus shelter on a rainy day) am so special that supernatural forces of the world conspire against me, and that I thrive on this perceived perverse distinction just as much as a wannabe starlet revels in the crass publicity of a reality show.

But can I give up my self-centered, negative views?

It’s true, sometimes events occur which lead me to question my entrenched perspective. For example, I was recently rushing from work in the city to a family gathering in the suburbs. Whether or not I could make it to my grandfather’s dinner depended on whether the bus was on time. I had pretty nearly resigned myself to a hopeless wait when the bus came rumbling down the street immediately.

This is something the optimist might take for granted. Optimists would not write essays about a punctual bus more than a month after the fact – they would accept it as the natural order of their lives, and move on. But I experience the arrival of an on-time bus as a memorable, dazzling, improbable boon. Perhaps the deepest truth of being a pessimist is that I am incredibly easy to please. And when something like this happens, I still appreciate the sensation of being at the center of world – though once, just this once, the world is on my side.

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Posted in Feelin' Grumpy, Pompous Philosophizing | Leave a Comment »

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