Letters: SEPTA delivers a fiasco for the R7 line during evening storm June 24

AS A commuter into this fair city, I go through the monthly ritual of dropping more than 150 bucks through the bulletproof glass of the SEPTA ticket counter at Suburban Station for the privilege of wielding a tiny card that lets me ride anywhere in the system.

Hooray for freedom.

But what I saw during last week's sudden storm during the evening commute was a debacle of such magnitude that I debated giving up on SEPTA and driving to work every day.

We understand that bad weather hits, trees come down, signal and power lines fail and trains get stuck.

What we don't get and don't like is how SEPTA responds to such events.

I ride the R7. It was one of the few lines still operating during the evening rush on June 24. I considered myself lucky, but when I got to Suburban Station, things changed in a hurry. Crowds and heat aside, there were two major issues.

First was a readily apparent and perhaps dangerous lack of communication. There was an individual on the platform at the paging station whose normal job is to announce arriving trains and assist commuters who have questions. On this evening, he was in crowd-control mode.

Since few trains were coming in, he spent most of his time organizing cab pools and making comments like "Hey, folks, trains don't run when trees fall on the tracks." While this was a tad unprofessional, it wasn't the real problem.

That came when the 5:11 R7 was running about 30 minutes late. As we are standing there sweating and commiserating, the announcer pauses in his cab duties to announce that they "don't know when the 5:11 will arrive because they don't know where it is."

Apparently in the half-dozen blocks between Market East and Suburban Station, SEPTA managed to lose an entire train. When it did finally arrive, most of us cheered. The train edged up the platform, stopped, opened its doors, and we boarded. We boarded because the announcer stated this was the Trenton- bound R7. We squeezed in and waited.

Then the conductor gets on the in-car system and informs us that this train is ONLY going to 30th Street and NOT to Trenton. People get off the train. Train doors close, and it stays parked. All we know is if anyone wants to go halfsies on a cab to Ardmore see the announcer.

After about five minutes, the platform announcer tells everyone waiting for the R7 that the train we just got off is going to Trenton but is simply delayed. We should all board the train and wait since it's cooler in the cars. We all file in again and find seats where we can.

Can you sense what comes next? "Attention all passengers. This train is not going anywhere. We are pulling out and going straight to the yard." This was the grand finale of an hour and half of complete communications breakdown. No one knew what was going on.

This fiasco showed a dangerous lack of communication. Because of this rain event, half the system wasn't running.

But SEPTA's response was a complete failure to communicate from the top down and coordinate what WAS working in a way to keep its train crews, platform workers and paying passengers informed as to what was going on.

What if there were a greater emergency? Or a different kind of threat? Is there any confidence that the communication would be better?

There was also an apparent lack of any kind of contingency plan. SEPTA's solution to all those people who shelled out good money for reliable transportation was to tell everyone to group up on their own and chase cabs. That's not a solution. That's taking the cheap and easy way out.

IN OTHER MAJOR metropolitan transit agencies, when this sort of thing happens, they find a way to get people home. They summon buses, coordinate with other city agencies, adapt and live up to their implied responsibility to provide their customers with a safe form of transportation. They don't become an ad agency for the local cab companies and simply pawn off their problems to someone else.

That Thursday night was an example in poor planning, poor reaction, and poor communication. Thankfully it was only comically inconvenient and not downright dangerous.

C.T. Reed

Jackson, N.J.