The thrill of victory, & agony of getting to the parade
Call it the thrill of victory, and the agony of trying to get to the parade.
Maybe you’ve heard, they are throwing a little party downtown today to celebrate the Eagles first-ever Super Bowl championship.
And you are invited – along with as many as 3 million of your closest friends and fellow Iggles Philly Phaithful.
Now comes the challenge of actually getting there. Call it spending time in Purgatory while waiting to get into Heaven.
City and SEPTA officials held a press briefing Tuesday morning and laid out their plans for the parade, detailing the restrictions that will be in place and how the city and transit system is going to handle this tidal wave of humanity all trying to squeeze onto Broad Street and the Ben Franklin Parkway at the same time.
Squeeze might be a bit of an understatement, especially where mass transit is concerned.
First the good news. SEPTA announced that service on two very popular lines – the Market-Frankford El and Broad Street lines – will be free all day.
Now the not so good news. SEPTA said it would limit service on its regional rail lines. The transit agency will utilize only 37 of the 154 stops on its regional rail system.
In short, trains will stop at a limited number of stations on the routes. Here in Delco, that means three stops on the Media/Elwyn line, at Elwyn, Media and Primos. On the Wilmington line, there will be two Delco stops, at Marcus Hook and Ridley Park.
Once in the city, regional rails will stop only at Jefferson and 30th Street stations.
More importantly, SEPTA announced that all riders on the regional rail lines would either have to have a weekly or monthly Trail Pass or buy one of the specially discounted $10 daily Independence pass to ride the rails Thursday. They planned to sell 50,000 passes, with a limit of 10 per person. All 50,000 were sold by 1 p.m. Thursday.
The system’s capacity in terms of getting people into the city is 500,000. Estimates are the crowd could approach 3 million. You do the math.
Now comes the bad news. SEPTA put the passes on sale Tuesday afternoon. See if you can guess what happened next. Yep, they were hotter than Springsteen tickets. Some already are showing up on eBay and other online sites.
Several stations quickly sold out. In some places, like Paoli, people stood in line for hours for the chance to buy one. By Wednesday morning, SEPTA reported only about 17,000 passes were left, and transit officials were trying to guide people to stations that still had some for sale. They said they expected all the passes to be gone by midafternoon. They weren’t lying.
That did not help the long line of people at the Bensalem station, who had the misfortune to be on live TV while the last tickets available were sold, and the counter then shut down.
We’ve been through this before.
SEPTA still carries the bruises from commuters’ experiences back in 2008 for the Phillies World Series Championship Parade. The transit agency wasn’t prepared for the swarm of delirious fans looking to get on their regional rail lines to head into the city. Trains filled quickly at the outermost stations and once at capacity, they simply zipped into the city, blowing by hundreds of fans left stranded at stations farther east across the county.
SEPTA put the lessons they learned into effect for the pope’s visit in 2015, limiting service and focusing on serving customers from specific stations. And still the system groaned under the weight of those looking to use mass transit. And SEPTA is now warning that simply having one of the passes does not guarantee you a seat on the train. If trains are full, they once again will not stop at other stations.
Here’s the problem. It’s simply numbers. SEPTA GM Jeff Knueppel was on TV Wednesday morning to explain the predicament. The system can shuttle 500,000 people into the city at capacity. They are expecting upwards of 2 million at the parade. You do the math. SEPTA said they would get more passes out to stations that featured long lines and posted on their website where people could still get them.
Other options remain getting to the 69th Street Terminal, and riding in on the Market-Frankford line, which will run for free all day. Or you could drive into the city and take your chances finding a parking spot.
It’s a reminder of the importance of mass transit. More than that, it’s the right thing to do. Not only on days like today, when driving into the city will become a most dicey proposition. As a matter of policy, the more we can do to get people out of their cars, the better off all of us – and the planet – will be.
Today is going to be a great day, one of the greatest in the city’s history.
We’ll get through this. And we’ll learn from it.
And we’ll adjust and tweak things a little more for that parade we just know Joel Embiid and the Sixers are going to deliver.