SEPTA's new chief maps route to better service

SEPTA's new general manager, Joseph M. Casey, takes the helm at an unusually auspicious moment in Philadelphia transit history.

Ridership is up.

Dedicated funding is a reality.

The overdue, over-budget Market El reconstruction is nearly finished.

And a new, transit-friendly mayor is in City Hall.

So, with the wind at his back, Casey says he plans to tackle the toughest assignment of all: making SEPTA more attentive to its oft-alienated riders.

One of Casey's first moves will be to appoint a customer-service chief who reports directly to him. Riders also can soon expect shorter waits at Center City ticket windows, expanded peak hours, and more frequent service on the Market-Frankford Line, and, perhaps, newly scavenged train cars for the overcrowded Regional Rail lines, Casey said in an interview last week.

"If not for our customers, we wouldn't exist," Casey said. "Transportation service is more than putting a bus on the street and making sure it's on time." Casey was SEPTA's chief financial officer until assuming the $202,000-a-year top job after Faye Moore retired Thursday.

"My biggest challenge is changing the philosophy of the organization and how we deal with our customer," he said. "To change that culture will be difficult, but that's my number-one goal."

Casey will push the basics: "Vehicles need to be cleaner. We need to announce stops. We need to answer questions in a friendly manner."

Better service "starts from me. I need to push it, and that's what I plan on doing."

Casey returned last week from a seminar where representatives of the Walt Disney Co. stressed their company's focus on "cleanliness, friendliness and fun."

SEPTA, Casey said, "might not be able to do the fun, but we certainly can do the cleanliness and the friendliness."

In selecting Casey in December, the SEPTA board of directors chose an insider and a finance expert rather than searching outside the agency or choosing a transit operating expert.

Casey, 51, has been with SEPTA for 26 years and six general managers. He knows the organization, and to the 15 politically appointed members on the SEPTA board, he is a known quantity.

That makes his ascendancy suspect with SEPTA's critics.

"We're disappointed that the board, by not even considering outside candidates, was saying that they're satisfied with the status quo," said Matthew Mitchell of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers.

"We have another accountant running the system," he said. But his group has "worked well with Joe Casey in the past," Mitchell added.

"As much as we felt SEPTA would be better off with someone from a successful system who could change the status quo, it's true that the treasury department has been one of the better-run parts of SEPTA," he said.

"The question is whether he'll have his hands tied by the board," Mitchell said. "He'll need both hands to change the culture at SEPTA."

In the past, the board has gone both ways in its general manager selections - the independent outsider and the familiar insider. It has also vacillated between financial and operational expertise.

Casey's predecessors include leaders from other transit agencies, such as David L. Gunn (who came from Boston's transit authority and went on to head New York and Toronto authorities and to run Amtrak), and Louis Gambaccini, from New Jersey Transit and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, as well as inside financial experts, such as Moore, who was a SEPTA treasurer before taking the top job.

SEPTA board chairman Pasquale "Pat" Deon Sr. said outsiders have to be educated about Philadelphia and SEPTA. He cited general manager John K. Leary, who was hired from the St. Louis transit agency in 1997.

"It was a long learning curve when we brought Jack in. Then he wants to bring his people in, and you're two or three years in by the time they learn where the light switches are," Deon said. He dismissed the argument that an outsider brings a new perspective on how to do things.

Deon praised Casey as a customer-oriented manager who will help the nation's sixth-largest transit agency "change our image in the community." He said Casey's financial acumen will be a help as SEPTA moves to replace its outdated fare system of tokens and paper tickets.

Casey will have the support of Mayor Nutter, said Rina Cutler, the new deputy mayor for transportation.

"I expect the relationship between the city and SEPTA to be very good," said Cutler, who is to begin her job March 1, after stepping down as deputy secretary of administration for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Casey commutes to work daily on the R3-Media rail line from his home in Delaware County. He said 36 years of riding SEPTA will inform his efforts to improve customer service.

One of his first moves will be to try to ease overcrowding. Ridership has increased 10 percent in the last year on Regional Rail lines and 3 percent on buses and subways.

Casey said peak service on the Market-Frankford Line will be extended a half-hour, to 9 a.m. on westbound trains, and 45 minutes, to 9:24 a.m., on eastbound trains, as of Feb. 11. In weekday off-peak hours, trains will run every six minutes instead of every eight.

On the Regional Rail lines, Casey said, SEPTA is trying to acquire cars from other transit agencies to add to overcrowded trains. SEPTA has ordered 120 new rail cars, but they won't all be delivered until June 2010.

"Two years, I can't wait," Casey said. "I need to ease overcrowding right now.

"We have the same kind of capacity problems with buses," Casey said. Buses could be shifted among routes, he said. And larger, two-part "articulated" buses may be moved to heavily used lines. The first of 400 new buses SEPTA ordered are to arrive in August.

Casey said his biggest priority, after customer service, is an electronic "smart card" fare-collection system.

SEPTA expects to issue requests for smart-card proposals by mid-March and to award a contract by the end of the year. SEPTA is interested in a system that would use a Visa or MasterCard that could be waved at a reader, making a ride just another retail transaction.

Casey said he will try to mend relations with riders' groups that felt largely ignored in the past, such as the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers and SEPTA's own Citizens Advisory Committee.

Change won't come overnight to SEPTA, Casey said.

"It's going to be gradual. Not everyone is going to see changes immediately, though some will."

In the end, he said, "it's not what you say, it's what you do."

Is it better for a transit agency to be run by an experienced transit operator than by a financial or political administrator?

The nation's largest mass-transit authorities have done it both ways.

New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority last year hired Elliot G. "Lee" Sander to be its executive director. Sander is a former New York state director of transit and New York City commissioner of transportation who had worked most recently as a senior vice president and director of strategic development for DMJM Harris, an engineering firm.

In Chicago, the president of the Chicago Transit Authority is Ron Huberman, a former police official who most recently was chief of staff to Mayor Richard M. Daley.

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority is run by chief executive officer Roger Snoble, who came in 2001 from a similar position with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit District.

In Washington, general manager John B. Catoe Jr. was hired last year from Los Angeles, where he had been Snoble's deputy chief executive officer.

The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has been run since 2005 by general manager Daniel Grabauskas, a former state transportation secretary who, in that job, was also chairman of the MBTA board of directors.

- Paul Nussbaum

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