PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 Big changes are coming for SEPTA\u2019s bus routes, and riders got a chance to weigh in on the rollout during an open house held at SEPTA headquarters on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Riders perused easels outlining the phased-in changes to begin in late August, known as the New Bus Network. Transit advocate Douglas Diehl said there still were too many adjustments all at once.<\/p>\n
“They’re throwing the kitchen sink, the bedroom and the dining room together at everybody,” he said.<\/p>\n
Rider Jordan Alexander of Norristown asked why SEPTA couldn’t just increase service instead of eliminating routes.<\/p>\n
“What they can do is one: Buy more buses. Two, hire more people,” he said.<\/p>\n
SEPTA’s bus route overhaul reduces the total number of bus routes from 124 to 106, to create more frequent and reliable service.<\/p>\n
SEPTA Senior Director of Service Planning and Schedules Colin Foley said the new bus network also uses the existing bus fleet.<\/p>\n
“It’s essentially the same number of service hours that we provide today. But we’re just deploying them where we see people are traveling,” he said.<\/p>\n
Foley also said that was why SEPTA held more than 200 public meetings and outreach sessions about the new bus network.<\/p>\n
“The New Bus Network allows us to really allocate our existing service hours in places where people are traveling and where they’re needed,” he said.<\/p>\n
Changes this fall eliminate seven routes, but include a new Route 72 along Cheltenham Avenue and a new Route 76 bus from Crescentville down Columbus Boulevard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 Big changes are coming for SEPTA\u2019s bus routes, and riders got a chance to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[4632,69,71,70,21073,2618,2155],"class_list":{"0":"post-168051","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-bus","9":"tag-philadelphia","10":"tag-philadelphia-headlines","11":"tag-philadelphia-news","12":"tag-public-transit","13":"tag-septa","14":"tag-transportation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}