Ticket to ride?

By Diane Prokop, Jenny Swigoda and John Loftus

Times Staff Writers

Surprise!

In the small hours of Tuesday morning, SEPTA City Division operators went on strike, catching just about everybody napping.

Commuters awoke after several days of positive reports about contract talks to find out that city buses, trains and trolleys weren't running. Even some of the guys who were on picket lines had not known their union had called a strike at 3 a.m. Tuesday.

"I showed up for work in uniform around 4 a.m.," one driver said outside the Frankford Transportation Center after 10 a.m. Tuesday. That's when he found out he wasn't going to be driving his Route 73 bus that day and that none of the 5,000 members of Transport Workers Union Local 234 were going to be working either.

Another driver said he was equally shocked that contract talks had ceased.

"I told my friends it was a done deal," he said of a new labor agreement.

"Through the weekend, supposedly everything was progressing in a positive way," a third driver said. "All that needed to be done is cross the t's and dot the i's."

Several bus drivers who were standing together with the strike placards on Frankford Avenue Tuesday morning said they didn't understand what had happened, but they had their theories.

"Why did negotiations break down right after the ball game," a Route 3 driver said. It wasn't really a question.

The drivers, who asked not to be identified, contended that as soon as the World Series left town after the Phillies won Game 5 - and a strike would no longer make the city look bad on the national stage - SEPTA then stopped negotiating in good faith.

**

Shortly after 1 a.m. Tuesday, SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams sent out an e-mail warning that the union had called a strike for 3 a.m.

The Philadelphia Daily News quoted SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney saying as late as 11 p.m. Monday that union and management were close to an agreement. Then there was none.

So what happened?

For commuters who rely on SEPTA to get around, that probably wasn't their top question. Dealing with the inconvenience - and sometimes, the extra expense - was enough to keep them occupied.

Tiffany White, a 20-year-old Temple University junior from Somerton, had it a little easier than she said some of her friends did on Tuesday. She lives close enough to the R3 line's Philmont station, so she would take the suburban rail line - whose workers are under a different contract and are not on strike - to school. Some of her friends, she said, don't know how they're going to get to work or school.