Jonathan's Universe

Not to offset my tremendous satisfaction and extreme gratitude with SEPTA and a few of its employees from my last noteworthy SEPTA experience, the other night I had a pretty bad issue with SEPTA.

For those that don’t know, the north east got slammed by major blizzard-like snow storm on December 19, 2009. I think we had almost two feet of snow and severe wind. It was not a winter wonderland. At all.

I had to go shopping at Target due to a last minute change-in-plans on a gift-exchange party. And due to my limit availability and energy due to my new job, I decided to go on Saturday. It took me about an hour and a half to get to Target when it’s normally a 15 minute ride. This wasn’t just because of the storm.

SEPTA has a track-improvement project going on right now, and because of this, regular service stops at the Woodland Avenue stop. After this point, there is a shuttle bus that takes you further. The shuttle bus took forever to arrive, and we were waiting outside in a bus shelter for at least 45 minutes. Once the shuttle arrived, we had to wait for the next trolley to come to drop of its passengers. At this point, I was debating whether or not to get on that trolley and just go home.

I should have gotten on that trolley and gone home.

I went to Target and did my shopping. I then went up to the trolley’s shuttle bus stop and waited. I stood under the shelter, which did little good because the snow was blowing toward me.  I turned around so my back was facing the onslaught of snow and so I could try to protect my things I just bought from getting wet and snowy. I had little success.

I ended up waiting about two hours in this storm, holding bags with contents that are getting more wet every minute.  I see other bus routes coming by to pick up passenger, so that lead me to believe that my shuttle bus was still in operation.

After waiting this long time, I finally call my dad to pick me up. And later find out that SEPTA suspended 101 service west of Woodland avenue. Guess where I was. West of Woodland avenue.

My beef with SEPTA isn’t that they suspended service, per se. It’s that they suspended service on a whim, in the middle of the evening. Without notifying anyone. How in god’s name is anyone supposed to know to find alternate transportation in the middle of a snowstorm when they don’t know their SEPTA transportation is suspended? What about people that don’t have alternate transportation? How are they supposed to get home? I was standing out in that terrible storm for hours for nothing. My shuttle bus wasn’t harshly delayed by the bad weather like I thought. It wasn’t coming at all.

Why not send some sort of SEPTA taxi service to pick up stragglers and take them to some destination or at least have some SEPTA employee patrol around the routes and tell them the situation? You are wasting people’s time and putting them in danger by needless exposing them to the extreme elements for a prolonged period of time.

Hey, SEPTA: next time think of the employees like the ones mentioned in my previous post. And as a whole, be like them. You left me (and others, I’m positive) stranded for hours without notifying how waiting is hopeless and pointless.

Related posts:

1. SEPTA: A Christmas Story I admit, I’m usually one of the first to badmouth SEPTA when something goes wrong; tendency to strike, frequent rudeness, lateness. But I want to share a story that changed the way I look at things when it comes to SEPTA. Yeah, they do strike a lot, a lot of their employees are kind of [...]...