For years, the Delaware River Port Authority was a
celebrated hackatorium that mastered the fast-pork movement, while delaying
improvements to its aging infrastructure. Almost half a billion dollars fueled
powerful politicians' pet "economic-development" projects like
stadiums, museums, the Convention Center, and a heliport. PATCO riders and
commuters, the very funders of that pork through fares and tolls, often seemed
an afterthought.
PATCO is finally getting much-needed maintenance to ancient
tracks, alas, during this severe winter that tests customers in the best of
circumstances. Speedy, small, and long beloved by its users, PATCO has become,
to quote commuter William McLaughlin, "an unmitigated disaster."
The 14-mile transit system has been plagued by smoke
billowing into cars, lengthy delays, and repeated engine breakdowns, including
in tunnels and on the Ben Franklin Bridge, where only one track is in operation
half the week. There have been 55 engine breakdowns during the first six weeks
of this year, more than half of all last year's malfunctions.
To enter a PATCO station - that is, if the elderly and
disabled can make it with busted escalators and elevators already cited by the
Federal Transportation Administration - is to enter a dead zone of information.
It's the winter of disconnect.
If a station has a signboard, it informs commuters of the
time and date, which they already know, and nothing else, like train delays.
There's no cell service in the tunnels, the ones where cars are getting stuck.
Unlike SEPTA, which alerts passengers about problems through
Twitter, PATCO uses social media sparingly, as though it were the good silver.
Customer service has been pretty much an oxymoron.
Monday proved the mother lode of disasters. Half of PATCO's
14 elevators were out of service. A woman fainted at the perpetually
overcrowded Eighth and Market station, a subterranean pocket of woe, and got
caught in a closing door. Trains broke down on the Ben Franklin Bridge during
morning and evening commutes. In the evening, passengers had to be evacuated
through a tunnel from smoke-filled cars. It seems only a matter of time before
someone gets seriously hurt.
Of the smoke coming into cars, "I would be concerned,
worried, anxious if I were on a train and that happened," said PATCO
acting CEO John Hanson, who had the exquisite timing to start his job four
weeks ago as track work began and problems escalated. "I am not happy with
the results we are producing."
Join the club of 38,000 unhappy daily passengers.
After years of growth, PATCO's ridership fell last year, The
Inquirer's Paul Nussbaum reported. Commuters were complaining about delays in
September, before repairs and winter began.
Work to the 34-year-old tracks is scheduled to last two
years, with two extended periods of only one track in operation, not just half
the week, but every day for up to two months - and that's if the schedule holds.
"It doesn't make sense to me that they're closing a
track during rush hour. It's not well-thought-out," said McLaughlin, who
uses two rail systems to commute from Northwest Philadelphia to his work as a
clinical law professor at Rutgers-Camden. "There's a certain irony because
people would always complain about SEPTA, but, overall, they're doing a pretty
good job."
PATCO "should not have put off this work," said
Tony DeSantis, who got stuck on the Ben Franklin Bridge in June with his
granddaughter after a fire broke out on the track before the launch of repairs.
"And someone is dropping the ball with communications."
This is from DeSantis, president of the Delaware Valley
Association of Rail Passengers, who has long admired PATCO. When it first
opened in 1969, "it was like space-age travel to me," something out
of The Jetsons. The system is using those same cars that awed young DeSantis,
which are finally being refurbished.
"I am very sorry these conditions exist right
now," Hanson told me. "I am not defending what exists right now. We
can do better."
Beginning construction during the winter, when engine
trouble is more common, now seems foolhardy, as does operating only one track
during Friday and Monday rush hours. Hanson is reviewing all options.
The once-flush DRPA is being investigated by the U.S.
Attorney's Office for those "economic-development" awards. And it is
shackled with debt. In December, the former port-of-pork borrowed half a
billion dollars to pay for bridge repairs and PATCO car improvements.
Half a billion dollars, you may recall, is almost the amount
the DRPA spent in its drunken-sailor days on projects that did nothing to make
the trains run safely or on time.
Source: Philly.com
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