I wouldn’t be here without public transit
While my family owns a car, we don’t rely on it. From my experiences, I know that the kind of freedom public transit offers is just as vital as the thrill of of the driver’s seat I craved as a boy.
I never expected to be a journalist, much less one who writes about SEPTA so often.
It wasn’t that I disliked taking the bus, but like many American teenage boys, I mostly dreamed of owning a car. I also wasn’t particularly interested in journalism at that time, despite going to a school with an excellent student paper, the Centralizer. I liked reading the news, not writing it. My plan was to become an attorney.
Then the financial crisis happened, and experience taught me the importance of sufficient public transit.
While my family has never been wealthy, what financial support they could offer to my college career disappeared with the Great Recession. Organized crime has long joked that their industry is recession-proof, but the collection plate is not. For a pastor like my father, shepherding a relatively small congregation, it frequently meant opting to keep the building’s lights and heating on rather than taking a paycheck. I tried working to make up the difference, only to see my grades slide. To me, there was little point in getting a degree if I could not use it to get into a top law school. I decided to move back home and get a full-time job.
That was easier said than done. Jobs in Philadelphia were few and far between. When I interned at Center City District a decade later, I learned that this has long been the case. Commercial centers like Center City or King of Prussia have more businesses than people. Residential areas have around 30 businesses for every 1,000 residents. Frankford, like most of Philadelphia, has about half that number. Getting a job meant leaving the neighborhood.
I eventually found a job in Cherry Hill. At first, this seemed ideal. I’d been to Cherry Hill many times, and it was a convenient 20-minute drive from my house. But, at least at first, I would be using public transportation. While taking the bus often took a bit longer than driving within Philadelphia, that usually meant another 10-15 minutes. For my job in Cherry Hill, it meant an extra hour and a half. Both ways.
Unlike the SEPTA buses I grew up with, missing my NJ Transit bus meant total catastrophe. The 8 bus I took daily to school arrived every 20 minutes in the mornings and every 30 minutes in the afternoons. It also stopped just a half mile away from my house. The 404 bus I took to Cherry Hill came once an hour, and required taking the El into Center City to catch it. This meant that I sometimes planned on arriving nearly an hour early, just to ensure that I didn’t arrive 45 minutes late. Under these circumstances, taking part-time classes was out of the question.
Getting a car did not provide a reprieve. Despite the years spent pining for a vehicle to call my own, it took mere months to realize that entry-level incomes and car ownership were not a great match. Beyond the cost of gas, insurance, and tolls, maintaining a car was a significant burden on my finances. Any time my bank account seemed to be reaching a healthy number, something else needed to be replaced.
When I eventually found a job in Center City, it was a godsend. Instead of coming every 60 minutes like South Jersey’s buses, the train came every six minutes. I vowed to myself then and there that no matter what happened in my career or how much money I made, I would never cut myself off from fast and frequent transit service again. While my family owns a car, and likely will continue to do so, we don’t rely on it. From my experiences, I know that the kind of freedom public transit offers is just as vital as the thrill of the driver’s seat I craved as a boy.
Unfortunately, without action from the Pennsylvania General Assembly, I may have that access taken away from me anyway.
My wife and I put down roots in South Philadelphia, right next to what SEPTA now calls the B. We bought a house and are raising our kids here, in the hope that they too could benefit from transit when they are old enough to ride on their own. If the proposed cuts go through, that route would end at 9 p.m. The bus route I took to high school every day would disappear, alongside dozens of others. The remaining lines would see their frequencies slashed, forcing riders into the kind of time-wasting episodes that I got used to back in South Jersey.
Conservatives have long said that struggling people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. By cutting SEPTA and other statewide transit agencies, Harrisburg is leaving folks with just a boot.