Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 26: Transit in the Age of Coronavirus

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

This is an emergency podcast where we talk about actual organizing stuff, which it turns out you can do successfully even in a pandemic! Here are the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEKzJ7h54Uc even though as mentioned we've won our main demand, there's still work to be done. here are the links: Sign the TRU petition, first to support the radically good ideas of the TRU, but most importantly for action – we'll be contacting everyone on that list to prep them to participate in the fare hearings live. https://actionnetwork.org/forms/tell-septa-no-fare-hike-during-a-pandemic/ The hearings will be May 26, 2020 - 11:00 am & 6:00 pm and May 27, 2020 - 10:00 am & 4:00 pm. Philly TRU will livestream the hearings - check phillytru.org or @phillyTRU on twitter for details

Hey, everyone. I'm adding this bit in in post because it actually, the news came out while I was about to render the podcast. So, most of this episode deals with a SEPTA fair restructuring, right? SEPTA's Philadelphia's, you know, bus and trolley and subway public transportation network, right? We're talking about a fair restructuring, which included a fair increase for certain people, which is going to get pushed through during this pandemic we're having right now, right? Well, just as I was about to render this, SEPTA announced they're going to postpone that fair increase until January 2021, while the good parts of the restructuring, which were free transfers, are still going to go through on June 1st. So, a lot of this episode

is already out of date, less than 24 hours after we recorded. But, you know, the news moves fast sometimes. Anyway, we at the Philly Transit Riders Union are going to try and ask for more. So, you know, listen to our calls for action, sign up to do stuff, join Philly Transit Riders Union, you know, you can be part of a political organization that wins stuff. You know, we've been doing a lot of winning recently, actually. It's felt pretty good. Anyway, on to the podcast. Hello, everyone, and welcome to a special emergency episode. Do we want to do it like a siren? Yeah, put a siren there. Do we put the action news theme?

We got a copyright strike. All right, excuse me. Special emergency episode of Well, There's Your Problem, podcast about engineering disasters. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. And I'm the guy who talks about engineering. Nailed it. Yes. You want to do your pronouns or you just go? Oh, yeah, I have to do pronouns. My pronouns are he, him. Dude, you want to go next? You want me to? I can go. Hey, everybody, my name is June Armstrong. My pronouns are she and her. And I have an art history degree, which I was reminded as I was thinking about getting on this podcast, even Barack Obama says is worthless. I'm also the

member or the recording secretary for the Philadelphia Transit Riders Union, the reason for the season. Yes. My pronouns are she and her. So nice. You'd said them twice. Finally, I nailed it. We're doing great. I am Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. I have an economics degree and a mathematics degree from Rutgers University. And I am the person more often than not who's screaming at you on Twitter and or in the YouTube comments section when you people decide to just be difficult for no fucking reason. Yes. And unfortunately, not with us today is Alice who who is too tired to record because she's a little baby. I was going to say what actually happened is you ever watch Old Doctor Who?

She got picked up by the Times Scoop from the five doctors and is now on trial with the Intergalactic Council of Landlords. So all right. Well, she's got that law degree, so it'll probably end up fine. It'll be fine. Exactly. Yeah. So don't represent yourself. Don't do it. No, never, never do that. No. So today, we have a special episode brought to you by the Philadelphia Transit Riders Union. We're going to talk about public transit in the age of coronavirus. Now, let's start the way we start every SEPTA board meeting. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. I'm not getting up, bro. No, not saying it. I'm wondering how I even start this video.

I just want to just insert the audio file of the, oh, boy. No, I'm going to make this work somehow. Why don't you just crudely draw the flag? It started in a whip around this way. This is what it does. I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. That's just terrific. Big props to Nat Lowndes for putting this video together.

Yeah. Thank you, Nat. That's brutal. All right. I love you, Nat. Yes. Okay. So, um, shit, where are the notes? Oh, Jesus. Oh, no notes. Okay. So, we don't need notes for this slide. We just need to bring the thing up. Okay. So, uh, let's, let's start this presentation by talking about

what is the Philadelphia Transit Riders Union? Yes. What is the Philadelphia Transit Riders Union, Jude? So the Philadelphia Transit Riders Union, of which Justin is a member, um, along with myself and many others, uh, is a democratic grassroots organization of transit riders, workers and residents who are organizing together to defend and expand public transit. We believe that public transit is a public good and should be equitable, affordable and sustainable. And really the, the Philly True was formed to focus on SEPTA specific issues.

I'm sure that we will get into the myriad of ways that a large government style institution that responds to five counties, uh, you know, a transit or the Department of Transit and other agencies can become an engineering disaster. But really what we wanted to, to, wanted to do was make sure we had an organization that was fighting for both riders and transit workers, be recognizing some of the issues that are outstanding and what we see on a daily basis, getting around Philly. And basically as, as, as they say, car bad, train good. Yes. So yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was, I was just gonna say, and you know, one of the things about like having a transit

riders union is that, you know, this is, this is there to like square the circle between those, those couple of times when, uh, let's say the workers' interests and the riders' interests don't perfectly align. You know, we're trying to, we're trying to make sure that we're provide the synthesis for that dialectic. If you want to get all alien about it. Yeah. So, and I think the reason that we wanted to put this together and thank you to the fine folks at, well, well, there's your problem for having me. But, um, the big issue going on right now, if you are in a Philadelphian or haven't been following local transit news as closely as some of us have, is that SEPTA is trying to do a fair hike during this pandemic,

prematurely ending some of its policies related to social distancing. And there's no way for safely organizing in person right now. We recognize that, although some, some agencies don't. And I guess the question really is, is podcasting praxis? So, yeah, go ahead. It's what we got right now. That's right. Yeah. So, just to, and I think that we're going to put this in the show notes, but we're asking listeners to sign our petition that's asking for, or telling SEPTA that we don't want a fair hike during a pandemic. We want a real reasonable response to what we see as a crisis. And everybody who signs that petition will be following up with them to

prep them to participate in the upcoming scheduled fair hike hearings, which are on May 26th and 27th at various times. There's one day session, or there's one like, middle of the day session, there's one like evening-ish session. And we're really asking for people to show up and come out to support those because those are really kind of the only opportunity right now to get your voice heard in any meaningful way about all this that we're going to get into. I think Philly True is also going to be live streaming the hearings. This is going to be one of those situations where, again, we can't get together. We'd usually show up in person with signs and all kinds of messages, but we'll get together live streaming the hearing

and kind of talk about what the next steps could look like then. Yeah, it'll be a good time. Everybody can sit down, watch the live stream, do what we can and form it. As Nat said, they're trying to do this fair hike in the middle of a pandemic. If SEPTA wants a circus, we will bring the clowns. Nothing but respect for our listeners. Anyway. We call them problematics, I mean. That's true. We're doing good. So there's some issues that public transit agencies are facing during this pandemic, right? Just a couple. If you're riding a public transit vehicle in some ways, you can, oh, I see these notes have completely changed. Very nice.

Doing good. Yeah, I should have read them beforehand. I had a lot of fun this afternoon. Fog it. Fog it. All right. So this coronavirus, the brony, spreads through close contact with people from coughing or sneezing, touching your face after touching the virus. Some metal surfaces can hold the virus for a while. There's asymptomatic transmission for 14 days, which is just dumb as hell. Oh, yeah. God hates us. And this makes stuff like contact, tracing difficult, makes it very difficult to contain the virus, especially, and that's also a big problem of, say, transit operators infected, right? Especially through asymptomatic. That's a

whole lot of fucking people you're touching and coming to contact with. Yes. But the big problems of public transportation in this scenario is that if you get in a transit vehicle, you are in a small enclosed space like a bus or a subway car, which has air conditioning. And that air conditioner is mostly recirculating the air in there, right? This is especially bad if you are a transit operator because you are in that same space for hours and hours, right? And if you're a bus driver or you're a trolley motor man, you're also in contact with all the passengers who come in and have the fare card or swipe the pass or pay with cash and all that stuff. Yeah. Now, in really hard hit places like New York City,

over 100 New York City transit workers have been killed by the virus so far. And there are seven SEPTA workers dead as of May 1. There's also a lot of employees out sick, which makes it difficult to maintain service levels because if you don't have drivers, the bus doesn't drive itself, right? Yeah. And I think one thing that I would just add is that a lot of these things that Justin just mentioned are really intentional choices or things that can happen on SEPTA or another transit system and a bus, but these are kind of things that don't necessarily have to happen, right? So, for example, you don't have to get within a foot and a half of a bus driver's face if there is backdoor boarding that's happening. But if your

management is telling you that you need to collect full fares from everybody who comes on, there will be situations where that does happen and maybe you'll cough in somebody's face or maybe the money that you hand them will have coronavirus on it, something like that. And I think that's the thing that has struck me most about the response that we've seen is that there are certain obvious intentional choices that have either been made or not been made, and those things are very critical towards preventing the spread of this disease. Yeah. And it's kind of like all in the name of revenue collection. They're trying to get whatever revenue they can during this time when I don't think revenue should be our primary goal.

You know, call me crazy. I don't know that during the coronavirus is when you want to think about, well, how can we make sure everyone's paying their fare? Now, this is an issue because during the pandemic, of course, ridership is pretty far down on most public transit systems across the country, right? The MTA lost about 90% of its subway passengers. For instance, Philly is also down about 90%, right? In fact, we have a chart. Oh, boy. Yeah. And that's so good. Great. Yes, the most recent shows about 92% as of May 1st. This was just right off the SEPTA website. And you really see this is combined. And I think Justin's probably better equipped to kind of discuss

it, but there's the regional rail division that handles what we call commuter trains through Philly. And then there's the city transit division that handles the buses and the trolleys and the subway and the elevated line. The consolidated number is past 90% for how down ridership is. So any efforts to kind of collect fares during this really, you're missing the bigger picture, right? And that's one thing that's really clear to me, is that this is not the right way to be handling this response. What is the bad to say? I mean, these numbers are looking pretty bad as indicated by this linear trend line they've decided to put on the chart for some reason. I mean, by the end of

April, we were projected to have negative 100,000 riders every day. That's crazy. Do negative riders get money from SEPTA to ride? Yeah, exactly. I think that's nuts to me, though, is that just observationally, it feels like there's been kind of on Facebook and other social media drivers have to kind of take the shit into their own hands. And I just like, obviously, I'm not an expert, but just I constantly see people being like, oh, this driver's crazier, this and that. So it just feels like there's absolutely no fucking direction from SEPTA itself. And then drivers come out looking like the assholes

or operators, I should say. It's been impossible to watch SEPTA kind of dig its own grave even more than it normally does. Right. And I think that's one thing that we'll get into a little bit later is just the ways that this is as much a kind of messaging or public relations issue as much as it is anything else. What SEPTA chooses to tell the public or not tell the public and how they choose to do that is really critical towards making sure that the response is handled the right way. And again, what they tell drivers versus what they tell the public, operators, what they tell, it's just kind of feels a little bit haphazard all over the place and two steps behind what other transit agencies are doing at a time where really there's no room for

error and the actions that you take early on in the process really dictate the outcomes you have in the middle of the process that then become the people who are really materially impacted by this. So I put together like a pretty comprehensive timeline for everything. I don't think we need to go into all of it. The situation moved really quickly from the start of March when the first case of coronavirus was found in Pennsylvania and one of those was in Delaware County, which touches Philadelphia. Around the same time as that, SEPTA began their full court press blitz to talk about their fair restructuring. And it's curious, again, you think about the PR aspect of this fair restructuring as a concept as opposed to what really what it looks like,

which is a fair increase. This whole idea of what is a restructuring versus what is a fair increase when you're, for those who don't know, we have the key card here in Philly that is the contactless fare payment system. Originally, the price to pay with the key was $2 or I think a buck 80 at first, but it's still $2 right now and cash fares were 250, which is obviously hugely problematic because who carries $2.50 on them, everything's exact change. But with the new fare increase tariffs that are proposed, this is a 25% increase. So all the fares are now 250, whether you're paying cash or key, the key costs $5 to begin with. So there's no advantage really other than quote unquote convenience of a card in your wallet,

which expires anyway, which expires because the Mastercard shit that never fucking works. Yeah. And it's beholden to financial banking regulations that really are inappropriate for a mass transit payment option where, you know, first the cards didn't have chips, then they had to have chips because everything had chips. Then I forget exactly what else, but it's just been this huge landslide of, you know, SEPTA trying to introduce a 21st century payment system that really represents the best than 21st century banking regulations that don't really help anybody, but give over an air of security and safety. The thing that's basically set up as like a debit card is the problem. And it's like, you know, that subjected it to a whole

bunch of other regulations, which it shouldn't have been. But, you know, on the plus side, theoretically, you could use it at a convenience store that accepted it and pay massive fees. Thank you, SEPTA. We love you, SEPTA. Yeah, the fees are really the crazy part here. I mean, like I remember, I remember looking at it right when it came out, and it was like, if you wanted to check your balance at anything other than the website, you needed to pay a dollar. If you wanted to use the card, there was originally, I think, some kind of fee associated with even just debit card use. Things that, you know, this was all branded as a way to bring banking to the quote unquote unbanked, you know, and again, without making too much of it. Philadelphia is the biggest

poorest city in the, you know, the poorest big city in the country. And all of these things, you know, are supposed to prevent the nightmarish system that keeps people going to check cashing places, payday loan providers. When really SEPTA wasn't helping, they were becoming a part of that process. So the fair restructuring that was announced on March 11th included a couple things, but this, you know, obviously increasing the base fare, they made a big deal out of removing one of the transfer fees, the first transfer fee that you pay, which is a dollar, which Justin, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but no other big city has transfer fees. And there's no reason from, you know, a digital kind of standpoint to have these fees. They're completely

archaic. And you can only you can only use it with the key now, which is awesome. I am not sure that no other big city has transfer fees. What I do know is that transfer fees, transfer fees are bad for ridership, because transferring is already inconvenient. And once you say I got to pay to transfer to, then it's like, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to drive. Right. And the other thing that keeps people in their cars going to work is when your convenient, fast and easy bus route turns into a 45 minute walk to a different bus that may or may not take you kind of close to your work. But we'll get into that. Hey, Ross had that problem once. I know, I've had that problem taking the 12. It was just like the 12 goes where it wants today.

And if you're late as hell to a doctor's appointment, you're late as hell to a doctor's appointment, but we're going to charge you more money for the privilege, which is super great. Yeah, a recurring theme living in Philadelphia for any given amount of time is that except that just kind of reroutes whatever whenever. And if there's a sign that's cool, but you probably won't see it. And it's not going to worry. Yeah. And so this fair restructuring from, you know, just kind of a lay person's point of view like mine. You know, this is this is a way for people who really know their way around finance and spreadsheets to manipulate the costs that are given to riders in a way that kind of very gently

accounts for inflational increases across the system without really changing things too much. You can brand it as a PR when if it's not a fair increase, it's a restructure, et cetera, et cetera. And that's not to say that there weren't some good things about it. Like in addition to eliminating that transfer fee, there's like $1 student fares. But, you know, really, I think that the bigger issue here is just the proportion of SEPTA's revenue that comes in through the fare box, which creates a situation where SEPTA needs to have this symbiotic relationship where they're taking as much as they possibly can from the working people who use the system without taking too much where they end up just driving to work.

And that's a delicate line that I'm sure plenty of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly where that line is and how to stay on the quote unquote right side of it. But it doesn't create positive outcomes for the people who are riding the system. It at best keeps a status quo of over a long term trend, you know, adjusted for inflation, the fare box revenue is about $250 a fare, $3 a fare. It's a really, it's a really kind of convoluted thing when you take a step back and think about who SEPTA is for. So let's see, what else is really kind of helpful here? So in addition to this, so the fare increase comes every three years, it's programmed into kind of SEPTA's capital operating budget. And they're like, you know, operating program where

they show what their expected revenues are, what their expected expenditures are, what they plan on, you know, building over the next three years. And this is kind of a, this is, this is a thing that happens on schedule, and it's supposed to happen every three years. And the SEPTA board needs to vote on it to approve it and move it forward. There's nothing that says that they have to provide one plan that works, you know, for every situation. There's not even anything that I could find on a quick glance, and I am not a lawyer. I have an art history degree. But there wasn't anything that I could see about, you know, punishment or provisions for in an emergency scenario, SEPTA not holding these meetings. But they continue to kind of operate business as

usual for most people for a pretty long time. March 17, there were, you know, 45 cases in the Greater Philadelphia area. SEPTA moved to a Saturday schedule for regional rail trains because people had already, you know, you can see in John Madden vision over here, that's right around the time when the drop starts to happen. So SEPTA kind of realized that something was up and that they should probably suspend service. But it was clear to kind of us as the Philadelphia Transit Riders Union specifically, that SEPTA didn't seem to acknowledge or be responding to the severity of what we saw as the global pandemic that we now are living through. The response was really lackluster. They were continuing to kind of move forward with things and say, oh yeah,

we'll just move this to a conference call. So they were planning on having a board meeting March 26. This is still just under a month ago, it feels like six years ago. But they canceled this meeting. I think partly because of our petition and partly a recognition that they couldn't kind of scramble together the resources at the board management level to have a conference call that had, you know, gated conversation or any kind of feedback. And so that's where you start to get things like that beautiful little clip that we played at the beginning of the show, where they moved forward with the April board meeting after the Transit Riders Union had put together a petition asking SEPTA to treat this as a crisis. Asking SEPTA to demand federal and

state relief, which up to this point they had not communicated they had been doing. Telling SEPTA that they had to provide hazard pay for operators and cleaning supplies and reporting on these things to the public. Because again, their response was really just kind of, we're taking care of it. We already cleaned the stations. We're just going to clean the stations extra good. And then like we mentioned, rear door boarding for people who did have to continue to take public transit and free fares, because this was the closest, most high contact way that bus operators interacted with the public. A couple of days after that, the statewide shutdown of non-life sustaining businesses begun. And then that was only eight

days after SEPTA rolled out their brand new fare restructuring plan. Let's see. The following day, SEPTA, the GM of SEPTA, who's new in seat and formerly a PennDOT official, Leslie Richards, she said that they were anticipating about $150 million in losses. Now, just to kind of put that in perspective, the entire SEPTA budget of what they, the part of what they spend money on is $1.5 billion. So they were anticipating it would be about a 10% whoopsy and everybody could go back to work just fine. Don't worry everybody. We're going to keep the stations extra clean. We're going to get through this just fine. Nobody worry. And I think this is really the kind of time where it's like, sure, we could pretend that everything's fine and not worry,

or we can actually start to kind of acknowledge that this is going to be a life changing event that's going to require a real kind of reimagining of what is appropriate and how a transit agency should respond. Let's see here. I'm just going to keep rolling through this and probably, I guess, we can edit it in post. So two days later, SEPTA announced that virtual fare increase hearings were going to occur as planned. And this is really the time where I started to scratch my head again as a Philadelphia and who cares about city infrastructure and good governance and all that nonsense. Where there were groups that were in the Philadelphia area who were focused on pro urbanism issues and pro good governance and all that who were actually excited

about this, which really struck a chord with me because, again, like, sure, you can get a different kind of public input from holding virtual fare hearings. But that really doesn't recognize the reality of the city of Philadelphia, where we got Comcast as the number one and number two tallest building. Both of those are tax abated, so they don't pay any city or school revenue. No. And in addition to that, outside of Detroit, Philadelphia is the number one least broadband penetrated city in America. So having fucking Comcast. Yes. Yeah, we got dialing into a virtual fare increase meeting on 56K. I don't think it would work. You know, I don't think AOL can manage that. I don't know if either of you live here when

Mayor Nutter tried to introduce Philadelphia free Wi-Fi assistance that would just connect to your device and not provide any kind of signal. It's kind of like that. So, yeah, sure. Maybe you have a smartphone that has 4G LTE that you pay a data plan on that's not unlimited. Are you going to really use your precious gigabytes of storage to dial into a meeting where SEPTA tells you that they're going to increase your cost of transit and that's all there is to it? Anyway, that's me soap boxing a little bit. But the fact of the matter is this is 30% of households don't have broadband access here. And the improvements that SEPTA was alleging to provide were ones to areas where people were more likely to take, for example,

a two seat trip to get to their job. You know, places that really don't have great transit service to necessarily begin with. They don't have bus shelters because God forbid somebody who doesn't have a home might fall asleep there. All these fun things. So, it's just like this whole thing to me is like every three days something happens and then every five days after that SEPTA thinks about responding. So on March 25, the first SEPTA employee test positive for COVID. And remember, we had submitted a petition that started to collect signatures. We have about 375 signatures on that first petition, I think at this point. But that was March 17. It took until the end of the month, March 31, after I think

six or seven different transit authorities had already gone to a rear door boarding. March 31 is when SEPTA finally moves to it. Far too late. Far too many people were impacted by this. And again, by this point, it had already been two weeks or no. It had been over 10 days since everybody who wasn't working in an essential business was told to stay home. So these were only people who are the emergency workers who are keeping everything running while folks like anybody who has an office job with a laptop and an internet connection can work from home and is either encouraged or explicitly only allowed to do so. The people who are riding SEPTA at this time are only the people who are out in the world most likely to have or transmit

coronavirus. And they're either interacting with SEPTA operators who are doing this all day long or they're interacting and giving that disease to people who they're in close proximity to. Thankfully, April 3, we get news about the CARES Act getting passed. But shortly, and the CARES Act provides for an unprecedented $643 million of transit funding, which again, the last figure that anybody had heard publicly was, oh, SEPTA is just going to lose $150 million. So there's just all these breakdowns in communication where we know that we're not getting the most up to date or the most accurate information. And then we have to find out after the fact, after something happens that SEPTA is adequately being cared for. I think a big portion,

and we'll probably get into this a little later, but a big portion of the funding gap between that original notice and what the CARES Act ultimately provided were anticipating a decline in payments from the Turnpike Authority and or the Turnpike Commission, excuse me. And this is one of those things where funding for transit in the United States is in and of itself a future episode of this podcast, truly just hobbled together from all different kinds of sources, including the people who drive cars, but mostly people who take toll roads have to pay some. But actually, the Turnpike uses that money to do other things. So they have to take out a loan to make this payment. There are some federal subsidies, and there are some state subsidies, but the state subsidies

were only set to happen until the 2022, in which time it would become future legislators' problem to handle. And this could be said for a lot of government institutions and things that people rely on, but here we are again. And this is really showing the breakdown of all those different things. Well, you know, the Turnpike has to keep paying people to paint bridges, or those same those same people will start to complain that an interstate highway is told. You can take route 30. You can take route 30. It's not that bad. Well, the original plan was for Route 80. But God forbid we make anybody pay to use roads. I mean, that's frankly, un-American. Yes. Yes, it is. Thank you. Thank you, Gene. I agree.

God bless. Greatest country in the entire United States, this United States of America. How many other countries have been to the moon, June? Name them. Name them, June. It's funny, because I was actually, I was talking to Raz, actually, about the 76, the Turnpike price increases, and how it's like the frustration. This is not totally related, but like, I want to take the Pennsylvanian to Pittsburgh that I basically can't unless I'm willing to work around one train leaving a day at an inconvenient time. But it would be cheaper, and it would be nicer. But it also takes two hours longer than driving. And it's like, so like, I want to take the train. It doesn't leave at a convenient time. You can't go get drunk

in Pittsburgh by train. It's dumb as hell. Exactly. It's so frustrating. I just want to be able to take a train and like Amtrak, obviously, that's that makes it fucking impossible. Yes. Yeah, I had a I had a past life where I had a lot of Amtrak points saved up. And one time I decided to take take Boston to DC, the whole Northeast regional, because why not visit, why not see the the Eastern seaboard, the most luxurious way possible. It was the most hung out hung over miserable nine hours of my life, because of course, the train got delayed for an hour for no reason, because fuck you is why. And I told it's the same. It's the same exact thing where we have all these things that are available to us. We have all these, you know, massive

infrastructure projects that we're grateful to, to just have sitting there. And instead of treating them as something that's worth caring for for our children and our grandchildren. Um, you know, we might as well just all buy cars, build some leather towns. We're on slide five of 19. We're 40 minutes in. Let's go. Oh, shit. Okay, cool. So point being, okay. Yes. Okay, so the big, the big issue here, and then we can definitely move on to the next slide is the the lifeline service that SEPTA implements. The night before, they say, okay, everybody, good news. Nobody's riding SEPTA. So we're just going to slash service across the entire board.

They name they name some routes that they're doing. I forget the exact numbers, but I think it's I think it's maybe cut by a third, if not more. And also the number of trips drops precipitously during this time, where instead of following even like an hourly schedule, it goes to just kind of will show up when we can and hopefully you'll get to your job. Um, you know, and obviously there's a bunch of other things that happen, like for example, the subways when stopped being 24 hours so that they could quote unquote clean them overnight. But they didn't run buses to substitute and they checked with the hospitals first, but they didn't check with the cleaning crews of those hospitals, I believe. So while the shift change

worked for nurses, it didn't work for anybody who was actually responsible for keeping the hospitals and the nursing facilities and everything else clean. That's a tough job if you've seen the shit they need to clean up, which includes a lot of actual shit. Oh, absolutely. And then I think other than that right now, the SEPTA April 23rd board meeting is just kind of worth mentioning the one where we heard the that's where the pledge video is from, where instead of responding to actual complaints and concerns from riders, there was a nine minute long run through the schedule of normal business and a promise at the end of the no common conference call, which apparently is the best technology that the powers

that be can provide. Anybody who's, anybody who's under the age of 40 and many people over the age of 40 know this is a lie. They promised to answer at least as well as the Joe Biden campaign. You know, Justin, that's a really good point. It's tough when everybody's half asleep and maybe more than asleep, but they promise to answer all emails and leave it at that close out the meeting and everybody can go back to sitting at home in their giant suburban houses. That's one thing that's just kind of worth mentioning off to the side is that the SEPTA board, because some portion of the funding, even though the majority of the funding comes from the city of Philadelphia and the people who live in the city of Philadelphia, us, since some some portion of that money comes in

from all five counties, each of those counties has two representatives on that SEPTA board. So while the majority of fares come in through the city, the majority or there's a disproportionate representation of the suburbs. And therefore, there's this split between regional rail and city transit, where regional rail gets basically everything that they want and more. It's a commuter system. So it's made for the people who go to the high rise buildings every day and can go back through the underground tunnels and don't have to interact with the city. That's kind of my biggest issue with what I see is the landscape of where we can maybe start to think about some improvements here if they're more durable and long term is

figuring out how we get the SEPTA board to really represent the riders of SEPTA, not just these municipalities that aren't really helping. Okay, so just the last thing or last two things are on April 30th, we released our counter proposal for COVID recovery. Again, because it seems that stimulus is the way to get yourself out of an economic recession that is possibly worse than the Great Depression, making transit $1 for all fares until this entire crisis is over with a promise to make sure that this crisis, however long it lasts, people will be taken care of so that I went on unemployment at the beginning of this crisis. I lost my job. I know most of my friends are in a similar boat.

May 4th, a couple days later, the Turnpike Commission asks their regulators or the state representatives, I don't know exactly who, to postpone a payment to SEPTA that's scheduled for July. This is a $44.5 million payment, and this goes back to the whole Turnpike Commission issue that I was mentioning where they borrow this money to pay us. The real issue here is that there's conflicts of interest between the Turnpike Commission and the SEPTA board chair, Pat Dionne, who is a local real estate developer, Bucks County resident and beverage distributor, and again, nothing but respect for the people who bring beer and deliver beer to, especially you two gentlemen, but this is a massive conflict of interest that really has

problem. Huge red letters written all over it, and there's nobody who's really thinking about the implications of somebody who's disconflicted basically waving their hands and saying, you know, they'll figure it out. SEPTA will probably just have to pull itself up by its bootstraps if people really want to get to work, and there's no issue with missing out on a $44.5 million payment from the Turnpike Commission that's legally promised because, you know, we'll figure it out later. When in my mind, this is the beginning, this is a clear evidence of further austerity, right? This is the canary in the coal mine of what can we figure out, how can we figure out how to strangle SEPTA right now so that in the future, they can work with less

because, God, why would we pay for all those people to get to work when they can pay for it themselves out of wages that they earn, you know, and if they can earn the wages, they can work in the workhouses. I didn't actually know, I didn't know Pat Dion was also a Turnpike Commissioner, as well as being SEPTA board chair, as well as having the SEPTA board room named after him. Hilariously corrupt as the phrase that comes to mind. I was about to say, now he... That's Philly, baby. He does like me, apparently, or at least from that one board meeting where he's like, I like the word bustitude, which he hadn't heard before. Which is a shining example of how connected the SEPTA board is with people who actually

fucking ride it, but you know. Or people who know stuff about public transportation, yes, but he has a caboose in his backyard. I also know that. Yes. So there's some good things going for Pat Dion, and this is not the Pat Dion hate show, although I'm sure we can have that next time. Absolutely. And one day, one day, Justin, we will figure out how to get him to a bar with you, and then you guys can hash out all of the SEPTA issues and hopefully get him to see your side of things. So that's basically. Somehow wind up agreeing on lengthening the platforms for the L. Yeah, he'll be. Yes, fuck. Whatever it takes. So that's basically the long and short of where we're at. The Philadelphia Transit Riders Union is now kind of setting our sights on making sure

that we can prepare for the future. We had a meeting with the Pittsburghers for public transit, nothing but respect for Pittsburgh and everybody who lives in it. They've got a wonderful early transit riders, transit riders union who was part of the inspiration for what we do. They've got a really wonderful team working with them. And as Pennsylvania is two largest cities, we are hoping that our voices can be heard in Harrisburg for a permanent solution to transit funding in Pennsylvania. Again, especially in recognition of the world that our children are inheriting that's increasingly unlivable and just awful if we can't get things like public transportation, a Green New Deal, meaningful jobs program, and now we're facing a recession as bad as

the Great Depression. So that's that's the kind of long and short of the timeline there. I'm sure there's some things that I missed, but I think that kind of highlights the biggest missteps in in this whole kind of situation so far. And now that the city is planning on reopening and now that the state is planning on slowly reopening and people as evidenced by some astroturf protests are begging to return to work, we have an opportunity now to see what the future holds under coronavirus and if social distancing is really a smart idea or a dumb idea and like drunk driving, it's impossible to say if it's good or not because it gets people to work. So all right, that was the whole podcast. That was all the information. See you all next week.

Solidarity with our Pittsburgh comrades. Also, fuck the pens, fuck Sydney Crosby. God, I fucking hate Sydney Crosby. No, there's more podcasts to go. All right. I fucking hate Sydney Crosby. Okay, so first, first, the first fucking time I've been to Pittsburgh in years, first fucking time I've been to Pittsburgh in years and it was after we had gone to Nova Scotia and I was talking to my dad as we were checking into the hotel about Nova Scotia and the fucking desk clerk pipes in with a, oh, you know, Sydney Crosby's from Nova Scotia. I fucking know, but shut the fuck up. All right, I fucking hate Sydney Crosby. I'm going to assume that's a sports reference. That's cool.

Yes. Go Flyers, except do not go Flyers. Flajirou can go to hell. Right, I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm here. Okay. All right. So, the way these notes were working, it was going to dovetail into the slide that was before the last slide. Okay. Anyway, no, I'm going to jump back into it. So problems that we are experiencing right now with the coronavirus, right? One of the problems transit agencies are experiencing is this thing called less ridership as evidenced by the line that goes to negative 100,000. Number go down. Yes, number went down. It stinks. It's supposed to stonks, right? So, if you're in, so there are certain kinds of transit agencies, right, which can weather this better than others, right? Those are places like, say,

Kansas City. They recently made transit free, which actually means they're not really affected by low ridership, but making transit free is also something which is more practical for transit agencies, which don't make a lot of money off affairs, which is not the case in Philly, right? So, there's some costs that go down during reduced service in the pandemic and other costs that do not, right? So, and that's, you know, service reductions don't necessarily result in a linear decrease in associated costs. So, let's say we're running, we have half as many passengers. Obviously, we have 10% as many passengers in actuality, but let's say we run half as much subway service, right? The only cost that actually goes down by that proportional amount is, you

know, you may be using half as much electricity. You may be paying fewer operators, assuming you're able to furlough some operators, but you may not be able to do that during due to union rules, right? You're still staffing stations. You're running equipment like transformers, signals. You're doing train dispatching that requires people. You have transit police. You have administration. You have maintenance of both, you know, maintenance away, maintenance of trains and things like that. You have cleaning staff, so on and so forth. You have fixed costs, right? That's like debt service, rent of offices, stuff like that. You have capital projects that's building stuff, right? Some of that stuff you may be able to pause construction on. The other stuff,

you know, maybe you're adhering to a schedule. Maybe you can't do certain kinds of construction in the winter. You have to keep pressing on, right? So this results in, you know, we have a system which is running fewer trains for marginal savings or running fewer buses or running fewer any kind of transit vehicle. And that's less useful to passengers for marginal savings. And this leads to a sort of downward spiral and ticket revenue, which compounds the problem, you know, you start cutting and cutting and cutting. And as you cut and cut and cut, you have to cut more to keep going, right? And in a pandemic, this is worse, right? Because the public's avoiding public transportation, even if it's useful, since they don't want to be in a big crowd,

right? Right. And since you're running less service, even though you have less ridership, you're still likely to have crowded vehicles, right? I mean, this is what a SEPTA bus looks like now. That's not so great if you're trying to social distance. No. And again, this is a conscious choice if you put lifeline service in, but you ignore rush hours and other possible times when buses can get crowded. You know, one of these things that SEPTA, you know, that you can think of as a PR style issue is that SEPTA didn't really communicate a lot of these things very well or comprehensively. One of those was that, you know, oh, we're only going to let 20 people on each bus, which obviously, as you can see from that photo, isn't exactly

always accurate. It's kind of operating. It isn't always practical because so many people have to people have to fucking go places. Exactly. And so if you have a if you have a bus stop where a bus hasn't come for, you know, 45 minutes during peak rush hour leaving center city, you're going to get a situation every once in a while where 20 people are just going to get on the bus because the bus stopped, you know, they they're not going to close the door or maybe they will and that'll hurt somebody. But, you know, again, it's just it's just this whole issue of when you have less service and you make it an intentional decision, crowding happens and, you know, the buses have like hatches on them that can be open that are emergency escape hatches

that let a little bit of air in. But I think there's regulations that need to, you know, go through some kind of set of approval processes before those hatches can be open. And even then, you know, you're still in a closed environment. Yeah. And and you know, it's it's it's what the prophet himself said, Yogi Berra, nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. It's like, because I think for a lot of people, you know, it's just like, people really do think, oh, well, they could just fucking walk. And it's like, if fucking Popeyes is an essential business, and you're asking a guy making 850 an hour, okay, that does no longer going to get you there accurately. So just good fucking luck, coupled with like the fact that they shut down overnight

L and subway service, how the fuck are hospital workers supposed to get their jobs? Shit like that. I mean, it's just the whole thing has just been been mismanaged is not an appropriate word for how angry I've been about this. It's just like, how are people supposed to get to work? How are people supposed to get away from work? If you want everyone to quit to keep fucking working in a pandemic, then like, you have to rise to the occasion and say, okay, we'll make sure you can get to work. Yeah, and I think an appropriate term for it is probably engineering disaster. Yeah, just engineer disaster. Yeah. And again, there are,

there are all kinds of intentional decisions here. There's all kinds of things where either a reaction led to an overreaction. And I think that the lifeline service is probably one of the obvious ones where for a variety of reasons, Septus said, okay, we're just going to slash service across the board to save us some money. And I'm not really going to get into this in a huge amount of detail, but I just wanted to kind of compare, right? And I definitely am not saying that the Fed is good. I don't want to get canceled on this podcast. I will unironically do that. So I'm here. Come at me, folks. So here's the thing, right? The Federal Reserve has been pumping

so much money into the economy. 4.5 trillion dollars. Exactly. 4.5 trillion dollars. There's absolutely no, you know, there's limited oversight of the Fed. They have the ability to print money like crazy and inject it into the economy and buy back all of these failing loans from J crew and all these other companies that haven't really made revenue in a very, very long time because that doesn't count. Stock market prices doesn't count. It doesn't count. Yeah, it's QE. It's not. It's QE. It's QE. It doesn't count. Right. It's QE, so it doesn't count. It's not real. It's not real. But meanwhile, it's not printing money. Well, it's just a loan, actually.

It's a forgivable loan. And then meanwhile, you have Congress squiddling over, you know, $150 million of whatever to add to this $2.2 trillion package, so not even half. And we're supposed to treat it like the greatest thing since sliced bread. And meanwhile, you know, Shake Shack is eligible to get a loan to continue to pay their employees, even though the Shake Shack near me is open right now. And a whole bunch of churches, too. That's a fun one. Oh, churches. Churches are great because they don't have to file any kind of income tax filings. So like a regular non-profit has to file a 990. Churches don't have to say shit.

Render unto Caesar. What is Caesar's? Pay your fucking taxes. You know, maybe, maybe we're, well, there's your problem should reorganize as a church. But that would actually be a, that would make us Protestants. It makes you whatever you want to be. So yeah, that's, that's my little soap box about that is like, you know, the, there's, there's plenty of problems with the Fed. I highly recommend Adam Curtis's All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace to see how Alan Greenspan really got in there. But honestly, there's so much that can be done. Everybody forgets in the question of how we,

how are we going to pay for it? That the people who ask that question control the money printers. This is not, this is a false choice. And to pretend that this is a, oh, we need to be very careful about our revenue stream over the upcoming fiscal year really misses the forest for the trees. Especially when you think about the ability for a well functioning and responsive and, you know, communicative transit agency, what they could be doing as the connector between the most vulnerable emergency workers who are keeping the country's lights on right now versus people who work in management positions who think that everything's fine. This is all going to go back to normal as soon as two weeks is up. And we can just keep collecting

our paychecks and doing a great job and patting each other on the backs. Cool. Yes. Thanks. All right. Now, the other thing that is going on here, of course, is, you know, SEPTA's ability to sort of communicate with riders for what is acceptable and what is not. Right. And so, I also haven't seen the notes for this slide. Welcome to another surprise. Yeah. So, I was on a bike ride a couple of days ago and passed by this beautiful convenience corner store at 20th and Wharton. And you'll see that a lot of corner stores in Philly have the red sign at the top that says, do not enter with a mask or hoodie. Now,

there's a long history of these signs that is not related to SEPTA immediately, but we're going to get into that in a second. But also, they seem to be discriminating against the IRA. Right. Yes. This Irish American neighborhood of Point Breeze. Well, formerly, that's another story for another day. Yes. Maybe a Franklin episode. But below that is a sign that says, you cannot enter this store without a mask on. And this in a nutshell, when I saw this was like, oh, this is exactly the kind of communication that we saw from SEPTA as soon as the Lifeline Service got initiated, because in addition to a bunch of transit route changes and cuts, they also introduced the number of rules.

They also said like no masks and masks simultaneously, right? Correct. So, if you went to the SEPTA information on Coronavirus webpage after the Lifeline Service was announced, they said that they would only let you on a bus if you had a mask on. At the same time, if you went to the SEPTA rules and regulations portion of the website, it said, absolutely nobody is allowed to wear a mask or facial covering while riding SEPTA transit. So, this is again, a question of kind of how you message, how you PR, and how carefully you are concerned about the issues that actually are affecting people who run and ride your system. And just like this convenience store, or just like this corner store,

you are both supposed to not enter without a mask on or end enter with only a mask on. So, that brings us to the video. The day after the service was announced, a Philadelphia Transit Riders Union member was sent the following video that was posted to Facebook showing the outcome of this incredible policy. Right. And I'll try and, no, that doesn't work. And also, what's curious, just while Justin's getting mad and vision going, the, yeah, play the video. So, I don't know if you can count. I believe that they counted seven or

eight Philadelphia police officers here. These are Philly cops, not, not SEPTA cops. Let's see that a couple of them are not wearing face masks correctly. Props to the guy for not taking shit from them. Oh, seriously. And look at the cell phone, too, that just gets kicked around because, you know, what's a personal property when you can teach somebody a lesson about what they should or should not be doing on public transit. So, yeah. What's also curious about this is we got a photo sent in an anonymous belief from a

SEPTA operator that showed a message saying that masks and facial coverings were optional. And apparently this was distributed to all SEPTA operators on their routes. I don't, I don't know how that works. I'm not employed by SEPTA and I never have been. But you can see, you know, this, this video is ridiculous, right? Obviously, if cops were really concerned about making sure that people didn't catch COVID, they certainly wouldn't be manhandling people to get them off of a bus. They would give them a face mask. This is not, this is entirely counterproductive. There's no reason in hell why you should do this. Absolutely. It would never be beneficial to public safety.

No, this is not public safety. This is something far, far more obvious. The frutality is the phrase I believe you're looking for. I was thinking racism, but this one works, too. Why not, why not both? Why not both? The famous taste we all love. Inability to conceive of solving a problem without using force. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, I mean, you know, this is so obviously ridiculous. You know, I've seen very similar things in non-pandemic situations of people getting similarly treated in written house square and other places in Philly, but to do this during the middle of a deadly pandemic shows the level of, you know, kind of concern that

Philadelphia police have for themselves and others. The whole thing is just totally disheartening. And thankfully, people picked up on that, at least on social media. It gained a lot of news coverage, and we were really grateful to be able to boost this video, showing some really ridiculous shit. Let's look at some examples around the world, not just in Philadelphia, how other transit agencies have been handling the pandemic. Now, we'll start in the belly of the beast. In Wuhan. All right. So, in Wuhan, Wuhan has a metro, ah, come on. I was trying to, John Madden. Wuhan has a metro. They have trams. Beautiful city. This is a cool bridge right here. You know, so this is right in the center of the

pandemic. And of course, what did they do? January 23rd, they shut everything down. The whole public transit system stopped, right? Now, this is probably the best way to deal with it. It's also not something we've found ourselves capable of doing in the United States, right? Because we're not capable of that kind of state intervention to like provide people with food and stuff like that, you know, start delegating tasks in such a way that like so few that you can have, you can maintain social distancing so aggressively, right? But they were able to reopen on April 8th. They were actually very similar lockdowns instituted in Northern Italy, where just everything shut down. And it wasn't like here in the United States where, you know, you could still

get takeout. You couldn't even do that. Marat. Yeah, this is, this is America and people need to get to work so that they can feed themselves because otherwise, they'll get greedy and lazy on all of the, all of the food. Yeah, so yeah. And I think that's, yeah, Justin to your point, this is, this is the benefit of essentially planned economy, right? To respond to a crisis like this, you can build hospitals very quickly that help people that don't have a profit motive behind them. And you can make sure that your transit system shuts down so that everybody stays safe and home and doesn't try to go to work. On the other hand, they have a horrible dirty wet market where they, where they sell live animals to eat, which is definitely not something that exists in the United

States. Yeah. No one would, no one would do that. Certainly not in like South Philly on like 9th Street. That would never happen. No, no, no. No such thing as a wet market here. What is the Italian market? Who are you? Anyway, so an example of what they're doing in Moscow on the Moscow Metro, you can see there's this nice red indicator, every other seat says, don't sit here, do some social distancing. You're doing Russian though, right? Because it's Russia. In addition to that, in San Francisco, the municipal railway, which is a municipal railway, is what they call a transit authority. They've done a lot of service reductions. They also completely reoriented service to focus on grocery stores and hospitals and other essential

businesses like that. They redesigned their bus network overnight just to focus on that. Except for like, obviously, the trackless trolleys probably couldn't really re-root those, but no, that attitude. Yeah. Well, you know, if you could put up the wires overnight, sure, let's go for it. Put up some goddamn wires. Put up some goddamn wires. Electric buses are easy. Batteries are stupid. Don't use batteries. New York City has done some, they've decided to shut down the subway overnight for cleaning the first time in however many hundreds of years, which is not good. Whether that comes back or not, anyone's guess. I mean, you know. Yeah. And then this is one of those perfect examples of how you can use PR as a tool to

kind of do whatever you want, right? New York is the epicenter of the COVID crisis in America, but Andrew Cuomo is on TV every day telling people that he's doing a great job, and people believe him. And maybe he's more charismatic than our current Democratic nominee. So maybe we can figure out a way to slot him in there and create a great PR story for everybody when overnight cleaning is the best that we can get in New York. Oh, it sucks. Andrew Cuomo fucking sucks. Yes. Andy bifurc for president. Andy bifurc for president. We need a real planner. We need a real, somebody who actually knows stuff about things and doesn't know, just know how to get on TV and say, stay home. Yes. So what's, what's SEPTA doing? I mean, we talked about this a little

bit before. How is SEPTA reacting to this, right? You know, we saw, there's, you know, they've put in shields to protect bus drivers from a certain amount of interaction with passengers, right? They've done rear door boarding on transit vehicles, including buses and trolleys, that should be a permanent thing. Actually, they should just have another, another tapy tap doohickey in the back, because that means you can make the buses go faster, but no, no, no, no, no will go for that one for whatever reason, no fair collection during the pandemic so far. Again, that's coming back on May 17th, along with ending rear door boarding, which is also dumb. They've, they've been limiting the amount of people on every transit vehicle at

once. They have headway based schedules, as opposed to specific, you know, time schedules. And then they've implemented something called lifeline service, right? We also talked about that a little bit before. Now, just a little lifeline service, who's life, right? They've completely suspended a lot of routes, including my route, the 34 shown here, and other routes, you know, which have completely deprived some neighborhoods of any kind of service, right? This is all ending May 17th. They're going to go back to basically a regular schedule, even though in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, coronavirus cases have only just begun to drop, right? And the governor just extended our lockdown to July 4th, although he's not on TV,

and Andrew Cuomo is. And this lifeline service has, you know, completely deprived certain neighborhoods of service, right? So this is North Philadelphia, right? This whole area here, around about Lehigh Avenue, going down to Montgomery Avenue, just north of Cecil B. Moore, this whole area used to have another bus line that would connect with the Broad Street line this way and this way. That was the 54. And then there was the 7 went north-south, right? That's the 33. 33, excuse me. Yeah. Yeah, the 7's over here. I'm done. Just closer to my house. That's the only reason I know.

Yes. So both those buses were suspended as part of lifeline service, right? And this area is not small, right? And if you're, even if you're close to, say, the 7, you need to take the Broad Street line, you're not going to take the 7 to the 15 or the 3, you're going to wind up saying, it's going to be faster for me to walk two miles. So this is a huge amount of area that was just left with no service whatsoever. And I mean, I guess if you're young and fit, sure, walking two miles, not a big deal. If you're not young and fit, that's so good. Yeah. And I think the only things that I'd add are, yeah, I mean, the ability to

have a meaningful transfer with the service reduced like this is ridiculous. I mean, there's some articles in the Inquirer of People who usually have hour and a half commutes across city, which is just terrible. I can't imagine losing that. I used to drive to Princeton from Center City every day and then felt like dying after a year, but you can't have transfers with this kind of system. Trips that would usually take 30 or 45 minutes can, you can just be sitting on both ends of that for 30 or 45 minutes without a bus in sight. I think the other thing that's worth mentioning is that this area kind of comprises Strawberry Mansion and is that Allegheny that it gets up to, Justin? Allegheny West? Or is it? I think it's Allegheny. Liam's more familiar

with this area than I am. I think this is 33rd and dropping. Liam, 25th in Cambria. Yeah, that's fucking up there. Yeah. And that's basically Allegheny. Yeah, I mean, that's for an area where especially a lot of people have to commute and a lot of people end up commuting to the suburbs. If you have to take the 124 to the King of Prussia area, because that's where you work, I used to take it every day. I am familiar. I used to take, fuck, the L to 69th and then 69th to the high speed line and then the high speed line out to the King of Prussia area. And I had to get on the 124 or 125 actually. If you had to fucking do that with this busser, I mean, you can basically assume you're going to get fired through no fault of your own because

how the fuck are you supposed to get to work? Yeah, it's been six hours of your day commuting. Yeah. And also, this is one of the lowest income zip codes in Philadelphia. The ones that are on the west side of Broad Street, north of Center City, they abut the rapidly gentrifying portion, but these are places where because of redlining and racism, the houses have lead paint problems that are often not corrected by absentee landlords, water intrusion issues that bring black mold. So what Justin was talking about with the health of the people who live here, there are many opportunities for significantly negative health outcomes just because of the poorly maintained but affordable to you house that you live in

where there's no meaningful oversight of your living condition. And through no fault of your own, your kid has developmental disabilities because of lead paint dust. All these horrible negative health outcomes and SEPTA showing the world that we live in decides to cut all service through this part of Center City that again, the people who are working on the front lines of COVID are not people who have laptops and workday jobs. They are people who need to go to work and make 725 or 825 an hour and keep the city alive and really showing them the least amount of respect of anybody in this crisis just makes my head hurt. And while y'all are actually commuting out to King of Broucher from this area,

I don't, there's not a, there's not a 124 bus stop somewhere right around here, is there? Hell no, there's not, son. I think it's right on fucking 76. You might be paying like three, you might get lucky and I don't even know take the nine. You would probably pay three fares each way. Yep. You'd be paying three fares each way unless you have a pass. And if you're not in the sort of economic situation where you can afford a pass every month, you're paying six fares a day. And passes are capped, right? So if you take, if you take six, six a day, you might run through two passes a month. So again, there's all kinds of, there's all kinds of long term issues that Philadelphia Transit Riders Union is really focused

on making sure we get sunlight on. Because ultimately, anybody who can rub two sticks together to take fire or whatever metaphor you want to use, anybody with half a brain can look at this and say, this is messed up, this is wrong, and this is not the right way to run a public agency. And we need to, we need to do something about it because we have an unprecedented opportunity to create a new world. Or we can see what returning to the old world looks like on May 17th. It's ludicrous. Yes. So, which I guess we sort of talked about earlier, I was going to do it here on this slide, except it's still trying to push through this fair restructuring, which is an increase except for everyone who's paying in cash. And the thing is, they want to push this

through during a pandemic just because your transit fare, unlike other transportation user fees, like the gas tax or the vehicle registration fee or tolls, public transit fairs increase with inflation. So they just want to do this as usual. Then I understand, June, you mentioned before, there was a nine minute meeting before where they said they would accept public comment and didn't address any of it. Right. So, I mean, again, you go to accept a board meeting, not to talk to a customer service representative, because you can call those people or email those people with numbers that are on the website. Oh, yeah, I can use a low wage worker any time I want. I want to abuse a Tadeon. Yeah, exactly. You go to the SEPTA board meeting to yell at those people's

bosses because you need the problem solved. You don't just need an outlet for your frustration at the SEPTA board meeting that happened in April because they canceled the March one because they couldn't get their technical acumen together. The April board meeting was closed to the public. You could dial in and listen, but you could not participate. And it was nine minutes long. They said the pledge. They ran through some reports. They had a very brief but somewhat, you know, depending on what your perspective is, they had a brief mention that the three employees of SEPTA who had died up to that point said a little bit about them, which was nice to hear, but extremely unfortunate, and then closed out the meeting by saying, yeah, we're going to

respond to everybody who wrote in via email. And, you know, this is particularly frustrating because the Philadelphia Transit Riders Union had reached out or had found and connected with 30 different workers who were still using the system to commute to and from work. We asked them and we were able to get them to share their stories of how a fair increase would affect them. And their voices were completely, completely out of the conversation here. Now, maybe, you know, I don't know what your capacity is for doing extra credit reading about your work or your job, but I'm sure that if I was on the SEPTA board and just trying to not worry about this and get back to my family and get back to working at my day job, you know, looking at comments,

maybe scanning through them and saying, oh, yeah, these people, this is great. Okay, cool. Thanks. Somebody else gets to handle it, whose job it is to handle this. So the whole idea of this being a public meeting where you can actually make a meaningful complaint was thrown out the window and it kind of calls into question these upcoming fair increase hearings or fair restructuring hearings and the whole mechanism behind them. What it says on the SEPTA website is also kind of ridiculous if I can even pull it up for a second. I might have it right here. They're going to read a written statement or they're going to read a prerecorded statement at the beginning of the meeting and then a facilitator is going to be available to hear

people's objections. So again, what the Transit Riders Union is pushing for is a meaningful response to this, which is not to hold meetings during the middle of a pandemic, instead providing fares that work as a bailout for people and keep emergency workers getting to work. I think that's about all the steam I have on that one, but it's just so, yeah. And again, the fair increase hearings are every three years, they keep the cost of the fair rising with inflation in ways that other modes of transit don't have. And this is a system that our elected officials and our appointed board members and all that stuff choose to perpetuate on the backs of the people who ride public transit in the poorest big city in

America. We just to the stupid situation, we're riding in a big bus with 60 other people who's more expensive than driving your own car. It's, you know, because that's almost where we are at this point. I mean, if you have good insurance, it's standing here close, right? Gas is pretty fucking cheap now. That's not exactly the position a Transit agency should have, but here we are. Yeah, it's about to say, you know, everyone's bought all their negative, negative, priced oil stored it in their basement, you know, 100 barrels just sitting in the backyard. Oh, yeah. It's my college retirement fund. Yeah. So I guess to sort of start to conclude here, we talked about what is TRU doing earlier.

But, you know, we're trying to organize still. We're trying to get people out for these these hearings or these these meetings, right? You know, it's difficult to organize during a pandemic because it's not like we can go out into a bus and, you know, talk to people. You can't do that because you might get the coronavirus. Not good. If you're listening to this, especially if you live in the Philadelphia area, as you mentioned before, we do have a petition that's linked below petition to stop the fair hike. And, you know, that's to support us, but also, you know, for action, we'll be contacting everyone on that list who signs to prepare them to participate in the fair hearings live, right? So, crap. I did a thing there.

So, you know, go to PhillyTRU.org or go to the link in the description. Hearings are May 26, 2020, 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, excuse me, Eastern Daylight Time, and May 27, 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. We will also be live streaming the hearings on the Philly Transit Riders Union. However, we decide to do that, follow the Twitter. And, yeah, show up. Yell at the board. Welcome. Yes. And if you're not in the Philly area, shout out to the many other Transit Riders, Transit Riders unions and organizations across the country. I just wanted to shout them out because I believe we were all on a group call recently, which I missed or something like that. Me too. So, if you are in, there are many organizations

you can join. If you are in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you can join Pittsburgh or Republic Transit. If you're in Cleveland, Ohio, you could join Clevelanders for Public Transit. If you are in Atlanta, Georgia, you can join, this is my favorite one, you can join the Marta Army. If you are in Nashville, Tennessee, you can join Music City Riders United. If you are in Cincinnati, Ohio, you can join the Better Bus Coalition. If you are in Seattle, Washington, you can join Seattle Transit Riders Union. If you are in Memphis, Tennessee, you can join Memphis Bus Riders Union. If you are in Detroit, Michigan, you can join the Motor City Freedom Riders. If you are in Minneapolis or St. Paul,

you have the Twin Cities Transit Riders Union. If you are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, you can join the Milwaukee Transit Riders Union. And there are many more. This was just what I was told to shout out. Yeah, there's all kinds of efforts underway. There's all kinds of different ways to help out with each of these organizations. They're all doing really important work right now, especially if you are a person who is trying to envision a better greener world and a better public transit system that actually works for your local city or where you live. This is really important stuff that is often overlooked and is often behind the scenes, but we have an opportunity to really shine some sunshine on it and make sure that some good things come of this crisis as we

prepare to create a new future that maybe includes everybody going back to work and feeling great about that and then two weeks later seeing what happens or a more long-term durable strategy where our elected officials and appointed people are held accountable for really creating better outcomes. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is all going to end. Get back on a bus when it does. Take the bus. Bus is good. Take the bus. The bus is great. Bus is good. Far bad. All right, so I think that was the episode. Next week, we'll cover the Comaneros bridge disaster. Finally. Yeah. Can't wait. I know this whole thing was a commercial for Philly Transit Riders Union, but does anyone have any commercials before we go?

I can start. You can follow me on Twitter at RITTSQRitSquare where I retweet random stupid shit I find and complain about the Philly Transit Riders Union and post pictures of the PSFS building, Frank Furness buildings and other cool Philly gyms that I find around town. You should also at least check out the Philly True website at phillytru.org and consider becoming a member and getting involved. It's my advertisement is Franklin 11. It's out now. Franklin 12 coming soon. It's been one year from now. What hope? We would hope, yes.

All right. I don't know. Follow me on Twitter at Old Man Anderson. Don't be a transphobe. And that's it. Okay. We pray for release of Alice from the Time Scoop. Oh, I forgot she got Time Scooped. Yeah, she got Time Scooped. The Time Lords slash Land Lords. Oh, very clever. Yeah. Synergy. I wish her luck in her quest. God. Big, big weird cat. Big weird cat. All right. I think that was an episode. All right. Cool. Thanks for having me on, guys. I really appreciate it. Oh, thanks for coming on. Oh, anytime. Yeah, maybe you'll do an engineering disaster about, I don't know,

some other area of expertise I have that I is limited right now. You could do park friends groups. That's another massive failure of unseated government. All right. All right. Bye everybody. Bye everyone. Cool. Bye everybody.