SEPTA CHANGES IN FEBRUARY

On or around February 12, SEPTA will be making significant changes to bus service in West Chester.

For starters, the Route 314 bus - which connects Uptown with the Goshen Corporate Park during peak hours and loops through the Borough along with portions of West Goshen and to Bradford Plaza in East Bradford - will be restructured. The bi-directional loop service will be eliminated due to low ridership, however service between the West Chester Transportation Center (aka the "County Garage") and Goshen Corporate Park will be retained, with a possible re-routing to service the Government Services Building on Westtown Road.

For as long as I can remember, one of the Borough's items on it's Urban Plan was a circulator bus within town. The 314, in theory, was to have filled that need, however, the circulator service failed for one very simple reason - HORRIBLE PROMOTION!

In the couple of years since this loop was implemented, there has been no effort by SEPTA, the TMA of Chester County, Chester County government, borough officials, the Chamber of Commerce, or even the Business Improvement District to promote the new circulator service. By contrast, when West Whiteland partnered with SEPTA to operate the "WHIRL" service (thanks in part to a Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality grant), both SEPTA and West Whiteland Township made good faith efforts to promote the service. Unfortunately, that service drew very poor ridership as well, and was discontinued in 2003.

Yet, SEPTA had no problem promoting the hell out of new bus services in lower Bucks County a few years ago, up to and including a special "Be A Tourist In Your Own County" promotion. Sorry, but I would think that West Chester has a lot more to offer than Lower Bucks, but that's just my thinking. (Of course, it also helped the folks in Bucks that the Chairman of SEPTA's Board of Directors is a Republican Party heavyweight - literally - from Bucks County by the name of Pasquale T. Deon, Sr.)

This is the second attempt at a circulator bus service within the borough that failed miserably. The first such service was known as the "Run-a-round" and operated by Krapf's Coaches (whose transit management skills actually make SEPTA look like DART First State - yeah, they're pretty bad at it). There was far more promotion for that service, which operated between 1995 and 1996, though that wasn't saying too much.

In any case, such a useful service had the potential to be successful if someone had bothered to put anything resembling a good faith effort into promoting the service. Well, that didn't happen, because SEPTA was way too busy crying to Harrisburg for more money and the other stakeholders who should've taken an interest in this route dropped the ball to such a point that Terrell Owens thought it was ridiculous...

Meanwhile, while the 314 will be restructured, a new service service the borough will be initiated as part of PennDOT's Congestion Mitigation Strategy (CMS) for the US 202 reconstruction project. Route 306 will originate at the Main Line Industrial Park along the Charlestown/East Whiteland border, serve several office parks in the area - including Great Valley Corporate Center and Vanguard headquarters in Tredyffrin.

From there, the service would operate along Lancaster Avenue through Frazer, then head onto 202 between Lancaster Av and Paoli Pike, before reaching the County Garage/Transportation Center, and looping through town before heading down High Street and 202 through Chadds Ford and terminating at the Brandywine Town Center just over the state line in New Castle County, Delaware.

The service was initially supposed to have started this past fall, however delays in awarding a contract to operate the service pushed the start date back to February. The service will, unfortunately, be operated by Krapf's under contract to SEPTA.

This is yet another issue with SEPTA that irritates me. New route initiatives in Philadelphia and the other suburban counties are, for the most part, operated in house by SEPTA. Not here in Chester County. Nope. For reasons that simply defy logic, SEPTA has chosen to contract some of it's newly created fixed-route services in this county to a company whose operation of it's own transit service between the Borough and Coatesville is, to put it politely, third-rate. I guess if you have deep enough pockets, you can pretty much do what you want...

Hopefully, someone with enough foresight will actually be proactive in promoting the service instead of just assuming people will see the buses running around town and inquiring about the service.