Colin at 5:41 PM 
There's lots of snow in the forecast for the northeast this weekend, so let me save you the hassle of checking Twitter: expect delays on busses and trolleys, and slightly shorter delays Regional Rails.
And if you're into photography, find your favorite high speed grade crossing right after a plow goes through, and wait for the train.
Have a great weekend and stay warm.
SEPTA is thinking about providing wireless internet in 2010. This follows in the footsteps of some other transit services like UTA and BoltBus. Comcast also offers Wi-Fi at select NJ Transit stations.
With services like Comcast High-Speed 2go, CLEAR Wireless, and 3G cellphones that can tether to your laptop, is this something that's necessary for a transit agency to provide? Would you use SEPTA-provided Wi-Fi during your commute? Would the availability of Wi-Fi cause you to take SEPTA when you normally wouldn't?
Leave your thoughts in the comments.
To little fanfare this week, SEPTA unveiled their new mobile site. Most of the little fanfare is due to the fact that the site is clearly nowhere near finished.
There's a lot more to making a mobile site than simply reducing your real site to thumb-sized. When you open it on an iPhone, the screen is super-scaled down. Links are close together, and therefore hard to tap. TrainView is the same massively wide view you get on the desktop and requires lots of scrolling. A little bit of styling can go a long way.
Please, SEPTA. Finish your products before you release them. I know you want to make them grow based on how people receive and use them, and I know the excitement of launching something new, but this just makes you look sloppy. This is the web equivalent of doing your first passenger run of Silverliner V cars when they're still filled with sand bags.
Before you release, make it feature complete. Where are the other schedules? The mobile site is great if you're taking a train, but useless if you're on a bus, subway, or trolley. Put some styling on the site (take a look at iSepta), because most of us are going to be looking at this on iPhones, Androids and BlackBerrys, not on flip phones. Put in something to wow us, like an integration between TrainView and Google Maps.
Release it once, and make it good. Don't release an incomplete site just to say you released it.
The Army-Navy game was a very important day for the Pennsylvania Railroad. It was a day for the railroad to go all-out. Game-day specials started in 1936 and carried through all the way to 1975, except for the years of 1942-44 when the game was played elsewhere.
The operation saw almost an entire year of planning. Locomotives, passenger cars, and dining cars were cleaned and scrubbed, and staff specially trained to ensure the day went smoothly.
In peak years, as many as 42 trains, always with GG1 locomotives, would travel to Philadelphia from New York and Washington D.C., heading down the 25th St. viaduct just south of 30th St. Station. The trains would arrive at Greenwich Yard and deliver the crowd only a few hundred feet from the entrance to Municipal/JFK Stadium.
Since Greenwich Yard wasn't electrified in many sections, trains would coast past the AC Motor Stop sign into position. During the game, diesel switcher locomotives would be used to decouple the GG1s from the trains and bring them around to the other end for the trip home.
The game-day specials ended in 1975, the final year of operations before the Penn-Central declared bankruptcy.
The economy has still hit most of us pretty hard. No doubt one of the first things to go, aside from jobs, is gamblng.
The Atlantic City line, operated by NJ Transit to and from Philadelphia, saw ridership drop by 21 percent in the three months that ended Sept. 30, compared with the same period in 2008. Ridership for the quarter was 315,400 trips, compared with 399,200 a year earlier. Average weekday trips in the period were down from 4,550 last year to 3,450 this year.
The Atlantic City Express Service, which passes through Frankford Junction, goes from 18 to 11 trips next Friday.
RiverLINE ridership is down 6.5%. PATCO is expected to decline from a high of 10.3 million riders last year to 10 million next year.
In Philadelphia, Regional Rail ridership for the quarter was down 4%, except for the strike period, when it went up 36%.
The fear here is that these numbers will impact the planned expansions of PATCO and the Atlantic City Line. NIMBYs love to point at any decline in ridership and scream "see! see!".
MY CONCERN is with SEPTA.
Why won't the buses come to the curb?
They are stopping in the middle of the street. They won't let the step down for the elderly.
I'm starting to have knee problems. I ask the driver to let down the step, and they reply, what for, you can climb the step.
That's not all, but some of them, especially the women drivers, are the worst.
I think they need anger-management classes to deal with the public.
Lila Beckett, Philadelphia
I can almost guarantee that the busses aren't pulling all the way to the curb because someone is parked in the tail end of the bus zone.
As for not letting the step down, I'd get the driver's name and the bus number and complain to management each time it happened.
Every so often you start to lose faith in this city, and then someone like Eric Baldwin steps up and gives you back a little bit of hope.
Maddalena Marrero from left her wallet on his bus, and after a passenger turned it in to him, he trekked all the way to her home in NE Philly to return it to her.
A small gesture, but coming from someone who has left more than a few items on public transit (like my iPhone), actions like this make this city a bit of a nicer place to live.
PhillyBurbs.com brings us the news that the town of Burlington is having some issues with RiverLINE customers using parking lots as bathrooms.
Attorney George Hulse, whose firm has an office at 406 High St. that is connected to the historic Metropolitan Inn at the corner of Broad and High, said people he believes to be light-rail customers have used the rear of his building to urinate and even defecate.
All of SEPTA's trains have no bathrooms, but there are at least one or two intermediate stations on each line with facilities. The RiverLINE only has public bathrooms in Camden and Trenton.
Of course, it's no secret that the Center City concourse serves as a bathroom for more than a few of its patrons. The subway doesn't smell like that naturally.
But honestly. The trip on this line is an hour tops. You can't go before you leave the house and hold it that long?
Colin at 1:14 PM Following the endless dearth of news surrounding the strike, this has been a very slow week for SEPTA. A few things have happened, but nothing that deserves an entire post.
Joe Casey says the information about the SEPTA pension fund is inaccurate, and those who keep presenting "magic wand" solutions to prevent further strikes are naïve.
The SEPTA lost and found has an 84% return rate. And it could be higher if more people checked it.
Some people are sticking to their guns about not relying on SEPTA following the strike. SEPTA expects them to give in by the end of the month.
UPDATE: Oh yeah, and SEPTA busses are now on Google. Go ahead, plan a trip through Philadelphia on Google Maps, and choose public transit.
Colin at 12:55 PM UPDATE: Apparently these signs are the work of the Center City district. My point still stands.
In the time since their unveiling, SEPTA the Center City District has quietly killed off those new T signs for marking station entrances. The few that existed were replaced with a white-on-green version of the SEPTA or PATCO logo, depending on the entrance.
But the signs aren't dead yet. The Center City District is in the process of outfitting all of the Locust Street PATCO entrances with white-on-green signs to replace the red-on-white glass lanterns.
The new "Lindenwold Line" and "Concourse Access" flags on the poles are nice, although they'd be nicer if you didn't have to walk all the way around the pole to read them. But did the Center City District miss the memo that SEPTA and PATCO both have color schemes derived from red?
And here's a better question: why are we reaching so low? These signs don't offer much over the old ones - they're still plastic over lights with a static logo. The MTA isn't even finished rolling out their next train time signs along the L, and they're already looking to supplant those with digital maps. We're launching digital newsstands, but we can't put an LCD at street level that shows next departure times for the trains?
Thanks to Chris for the better photo.
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