Judge orders SEPTA to continue selling bus transfers

After a daylong hearing at City Hall, a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge decided that he needed a few more days to decide whether to prevent SEPTA from going ahead with its plans to do away with the 60-cent transfer.

So late tonight, Judge Gary F. DiVito issued a temporary injunction maintaining the status quo until Monday - blocking a plan that was supposed to go into effect Wednesday morning.

Under the transit agency's plan, passengers using cash or tokens are to be charged a second full fare whenever they move from one bus to another - or between buses and the Broad Street Subway or Market-Frankford Line.

Attorneys representing the City of Philadelphia had asked DiVito today to issue a temporary injunction blocking the change.

City officials said that as many as 45,000 adult riders and 18,000 schoolchildren could be affected by the change, which Mayor Street opposes.

SEPTA officials say they see getting rid of paper transfers as a way to improve system efficiency, to reduce the handling of cash by employees, and to encourage riders to purchase weekly passes.

During thes hearing, John McGee, the transit agency's chief of revenue and ridership, told the judge that SEPTA did not have any more printed transfer slips and would have to scramble if not permitted to proceed immediately with the new fare structure.

But in his ruling tonight, DiVito wrote that he had been informed after court adjourned that SEPTA had located enough slips to get through the week.

In a statement issued late tonight, City Solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. said: "This ruling gives immediate relief to the many thousands of SEPTA customers, including school children, who would otherwise have been forced to pay two or more full fares to reach their transit destinations."

In court, Mark R. Zecca of the Solicitor's Office made several legal arguments in favor of an injunction, the primary one being that the fare increase violated a state law requiring fare hikes to be "reasonable and equitable."

The SEPTA board raised fares by an average of 11 percent this summer. But as several city witnesses pointed out, the hike for adults making single-transfer trips is much higher: 37 percent for token users (from $1.90 to $2.60), 54 percent for cash customers (from $2.60 to $4).

Witnesses testified that the increase may turn out to be even bigger for students who buy tokens through their schools on a subsidized basis. That's because the new policy would do away with free transfers for students using those tokens.

Said Zecca: "The kids get hit whether they have to pay, or their parents have to pay, or the school district has to take money out of their educational programs to fund it."

But attorney Thomas S. Biemer, representing SEPTA, said that the case was simple.

"The city is trying to substitute its discretion on how to run a railroad for SEPTA's discretion," he said.

Biemer argued that in a case such as this, the court may overturn the decision of a government agency only if the agency exhibited "manifest and flagrant" abuse of its discretion.

That did not happen here, he told the judge. In fact, he said, the SEPTA board rejected an alternative that would have raised the cost of tokens for all riders.

"Your Honor is not supposed to substitute your discretion for SEPTA's discretion," Biemer said. "Neither can the city. They just don't like what SEPTA did."