Federal Transit Administration orders SEPTA to fix issues that are compromising safety
The FTA investigation began after a string of bus and trolley crashes last year, but the agency earlier had warned SEPTA and PennDot of need for more safety controls.
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Citing a “deteriorating safety record” with a higher-than-average accident rate, the Federal Transit Administration has ordered SEPTA to better protect transit operators from assaults, improve employee training, and tighten bus and rail procedures to prevent injuries and fatalities.
The regulatory agency found 16 problems that it said make the regional public transit system potentially more dangerous for riders and workers — including staffing shortages in key jobs. In all, it required 24 corrective actions in its exhaustive Safety Management Inspection of SEPTA’s bus, trolley and subway operations, according to a report released Monday.
FTA launched its investigation in August 2023 after a rash of Philadelphia bus and trolley crashes, including five major collisions during a single week in late July of last year that killed one person and injured at least 25.
“We’re fully committed to collaborating with the FTA to continue addressing these issues,” Leslie S. Richards, the CEO and general manger of SEPTA, said in an interview. “We’re taking the report very seriously. They want us to be as safe as possible, and so do we.”
Improvements will require new spending, especially for hiring, even as SEPTA confronts a $240 million operating deficit, Richards and other executives said. It is not yet clear how much compliance will cost.
SEPTA’s probe was the third intensive federal investigation of a transit agency’s operations in the last decade.
In Washington, the federal government took control of Metrorail oversight for two years starting in 2015, after a passenger died of smoke inhalation while trapped on a stalled and burning Metro train. It abolished a regional safety oversight agency, and Congress created a new one.
And in 2022, federal regulators ordered Boston’s transit agency to correct more than 50 problems, citing lax safety procedures that led to the shutdown of an entire subway line for emergency repairs and to rail crashes that killed one passenger and killed and injured a number of track maintenance workers.
Regulators camped at SEPTA through January 2024, assessing its safety programs and examining adherence to internal and federal rules. They requested and analyzed 1,500 pages of documents, interviewed 150 people at all levels of the transit agency, and conducted numerous field inspections of SEPTA’s Operations Control Center, stations, routes, maintenance shops, and vehicles.
The probe looked at six trolley lines in the city, two Delaware County trolley routes, the Norristown High Speed Line, and the Broad Street and Market-Frankford subway and elevated lines, as well as SEPTA’s 126-route bus system. Regional Rail was not examined; a separate federal agency oversees commuter railroads.
Transit officials said they have already addressed or started working on several issues cited in the report. After the summer crashes last year, for instance, SEPTA required all its employees to take safety-refresher training. It already has begun developing more secure compartments for bus operators, the most frequently assaulted workers — a step suggested in the report.
“We didn’t wait for this report to start that work [but] it’s just that now we have a nice blueprint to press forward on making improvements,” said Scott Sauer, SEPTA’s chief operating officer.
Worker assaults and safety
Attacks on SEPTA workers, especially bus operators, have increased sharply, including threats, harassment, physical attacks, and gun violence — more than 2,100 assaults since 2019. Assaults jumped 284% from 2019 to the pandemic year 2020. Bus operator Bernard N. Gribbin, 48, was shot to death last October in Germantown.
Assaults erode safety, the report said: “Distraction, rushed decision-making, reduced situational awareness, and potential escalation to physical altercations … can contribute to safety events, high worker turnover, and underreporting of hazards.”
Assaults are likely underreported because cumbersome paperwork probably leads employees to skip documenting relatively minor issues, the FTA said.
Track workers on SEPTA subways, called heavy rail in the industry, experience “multiple near misses per year” and have had collisions with trains and maintenance vehicles, in part because of poor safety training and communications issues.
In addition to the work on stronger barriers between operators and the public, Transit Police Chief Charles Lawson said SEPTA now has the ability to use its remote cameras to view live video feeds on 100% of its buses.
“That is important because even if I don’t have a cop on a bus, I can have a virtual patrol specialist logging in,” Lawson said. “We can track bus routes with higher percentages of assaults and pull those cameras up more frequently.”
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Staffing the safety division and employee training
Safety division staffing is inadequate for the size and complexity of the system. The division manages compliance with rules and directives by the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (the day-to-day regulator for SEPTA), training, and crash investigation. Peer agencies in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, and the Washington region have more than double the number of SEPTA’s safety staff.
SEPTA’s control center has too few traffic controllers and supervisors. Training and performance management are inadequate.
Bus and rail transit safety issues
SEPTA’s staffing crisis is causing bus, trolley, and heavy rail employees to work excessive mandatory overtime, leading to a fatigued workforce. (The agency says it is working to increase rest hours between shifts and is hiring.)
The transit authority is operating at 8% to 12% below budgeted staffing levels in safety-sensitive jobs such as operators. With no relief workers available, sick time, vacations, holidays, and leaves worsen the staffing shortfall to 15% to 25% on some days in certain districts and divisions.
In Philadelphia and its inner-ring suburbs, buses and trolleys operate on roadways with poor visibility, unprotected pedestrian walkways, tight turns, inadequate traffic-control devices at intersections and grade crossings, and narrow, parking-lined streets. Addressing these issues requires cooperation from the city and PennDot.
Fiscal constraints
After the MBTA, operator of Boston’s T system, received a scathing safety report in 2022, it was required to operate with speed restrictions on some lines, undertake immediate infrastructure repairs, and hire 1,000 employees.
Massachusetts appropriated an additional $392.8 million in 2023 to help MBTA meet the requirements, including $187 million for hiring.
SEPTA doesn’t believe that its fixes will cost as much because its reported deficiencies, while serious, are not as extensive.
Still, “unstable and insufficient funding” of Philadelphia’s transit agency has impeded safety programs at SEPTA and could complicate achieving improvements, FTA said.
The report comes after SEPTA learned that it would receive about half of the state operating aid it was expecting for the fiscal year that began July 1.
Last Thursday, Pennsylvania’s legislature passed, and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro signed, a budget that included a one-time additional $80.5 million appropriation for all the state’s transit agencies, with $53 million for SEPTA.
Shapiro initially asked to pump $283 million into the Public Transportation Trust Fund by increasing the annual allocation of state sales-tax revenue it receives, which would have brought $160 million more to SEPTA. However, Senate Republican leaders insisted that new mass transit funding would need to include spending for highway and bridge infrastructure, too.
A deal could not be reached before lawmakers adjourned for the summer.
What’s next
SEPTA must prepare action plans to complete required changes, including deadlines and benchmarks, within 60 days. If approved, federal transit regulators then monitor progress. It can take up to three years to complete the requirements. SEPTA says it will post developments on its safety webpage so the public can track the agency’s progress.
FTA has broad powers to regulate safety on public transit systems and can order local authorities to take corrective action on serious issues with the potential to harm the public. FTA can redirect federal funding to safety programs if fixes are not made, or take over some local functions, as it did in Washington nine years ago. Both are rare.
“I am optimistic that in a short amount of time, in the next six months, the next year, we’ll be able to show marked progress,” said Richards, the SEPTA CEO and general manager. “In some ways we have a head start.”