Soon, any size business will be able to offer SEPTA passes for their workers
SEPTA is opening its zero-fare pass program to any business or institution that wants to offer employees an incentive to take transit — at no cost to the workers.
One year after it began, Key Advantage is having a growth spurt.
SEPTA is opening the zero-fare pass program to any business or institution that wants to offer employees an incentive to take transit — at no cost to the workers.
Last March, Key Advantage began as a test with Penn Medicine, Drexel University, and Wawa agreeing to purchase SEPTA passes to offer to 15,000 eligible employees.
“We’ve doubled in a year,” said Erik Johanson, senior director of budgets and transformation at SEPTA.
About 30,000 people are now eligible for the employer-financed passes, he said, after SEPTA began offering the program to firms with 50 or more employees last fall in line with a new city law requiring businesses of that size to offer commuter benefits to workers.
Small businesses, which are about half the region’s employers, offer a potential growth market for the program, Johanson said.
Businesses with fewer than 50 workers will be able to sign up for Key Advantage on May 1.
“We wanted to make sure we were administratively ready for the demand,” Johanson said. “We’re able to leverage the Key [card] infrastructure from a card distribution and data perspective, but standing up a whole new benefit program is a lot.”
SEPTA is ready to handle it, said Johanson, who supervises the Key Advantage program.
The transit agency began the pass program in large part to put customers in empty bus, trolley, subway, and Regional Rail seats. Overall, SEPTA is still carrying a little over half the passengers it did in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. The passes are also being pitched as a perk companies can use to help attract and retain employees.
Trips have increased about 29% since May 2022, when participants in the program tapped their Key Cards 176,732 times. In January, SEPTA recorded 228,618 taps by participants. To be sure, more companies are enrolled in the Key Advantage now so it’s not a precise measure.
Key Advantage customers on average tap their fare cards 26.5 times per month, which represents about 1,314 round trips on SEPTA service, Johanson said. The passes are good on all modes of transit.
“This is definitely being used,” he said.
Mayor Jim Kenney’s latest budget proposal also included $80 million in city taxpayer funds over two years to provide SEPTA passes to all city employees and an additional 25,000 residents living in poverty at no cost to them. If City Council approves, roughly 50,000 people would be eligible for a Key Advantage pass.
At this point, SEPTA is talking with colleges and universities in the region about a version of Key Advantage for their students. Officials hope to have a campus pilot program up and running for fall semester.
For farther down the road, SEPTA is developing a proposal in which residential and commercial landlords would be able to give zero-fare passes to tenants, as an incentive to lease or in place of parking spots, Johanson said.
The Philadelphia Inquirer is one of more than 20 news organizations producing Broke in Philly, a collaborative reporting project on solutions to poverty and the city’s push toward economic justice. See all of our reporting at brokeinphilly.org.