Inside SEPTA’s nerve center: How hundreds of thousands of Eagles fans got to the Super Bowl parade
“Everything went according to the plan this morning, with a few hiccups,” a SEPTA official said early in the day. That was still the assessment after the festivities had ended.
Three hours until parade time.
Inside SEPTA’s 19th-floor nerve center, telephones purred. The transit agency’s battlefield commanders arrayed around a conference table conferred and gave orders, voices blending into a conversational hum.
Quiet is good. Remarking on it, though, is tempting fate because it probably won’t stay that way.
“Don’t poke the bear,” Joe Coladonato, assistant director of signals, said about 8:30 a.m.
SEPTA’s operations team was on high alert Friday — not in the sense of a disaster, but of an overwhelming task, moving hundreds of thousands of people — many of them rowdy, some of them inebriated — safely within a short period of time and with a limited amount of space.
About 20 people, experts in running transit operations, were on deck in the conference room, a command center of senior SEPTA leaders gathered for special all-hands-on-deck days.
Veterans of these drills warned that things would get more hairy in the afternoon, when the parade passed and people swarmed stations to head home.
The conference room is just off the massive control center, where electric boards show the movements of every Regional Rail train, Broad Street Line subway car, and Market-Frankford Line subway-El car in service.
Officials scanned 18 live video feeds from across the system. Thousands waited in line to board Regional Rail trains in Paoli and Wilmington. Subway cars rolled into Broad Street Line and Market-Frankford Line stations, picking up and discharging waves of Eagles fans.
But, just before 10 a.m., a swell of people overwhelmed the Walnut-Locust Station on the BSL. Somebody on the ground closed the north entrance on Walnut, near Broad, because a crowd at the top of the stairs was not budging. Passengers in the station couldn’t get out.
A feed showed the people stuck on the platform seeming to get restless.
“Is the panic starting to set in?” asked Mike Lyles, senior director for the Market-Frankford and Broad Street Lines.
Walnut-Locust gets tense
Some people who couldn’t move on Walnut Street climbed poles and scampered to the top of the plexiglass canopy protecting the stairs to get away.
“Idiots,” somebody in the conference room said, fearing injuries.
Aleta Evans, who was running the operation, gave orders and advice.
Using radios and the phone, Lyles scrambled to coordinate Transit Police officers and SEPTA ambassadors in the station to untangle the confusion over crowd control.
Soon, the crowds were directed to exit on the Locust stairs and people were directed to enter on the Walnut stairs.
“We didn’t want people to cross each other coming and going,” Lyles said. A potential crisis averted. “Lesson learned,” he said.
The platform emptied and the situation eased gradually. But trains would bypass the station for a bit more than three hours.
“You can poke the bear, you just can’t wake the bear up,” Lyles said.
A veteran conductor
Numbers of passengers that the system carried Friday were not available late Friday afternoon; they’re still being tabulated. SEPTA had a planned capacity for up to about 420,000 people — 70,000 on Regional Rail, and 350,000 on the BSL and MFL, spokesperson Andrew Busch said.
Throughout the day, Aleta Evans, who was running the operation, gave orders and advice.
Evans, 64, who retired in November as SEPTA’s deputy operations officer/control center, was brought back for the occasion, given her 37 years of experience and the need to mentor younger employees in the control center.
“I enjoy it. I liken it to being the conductor of the orchestra,” Evans said, making a motion as if she were using batons. “You want everything to blend together. That’s when it works.”
She said, “We are on the national stage today. We want to leave a good impression. It’s Philly’s time to shine.”
‘According to plan’
Walnut-Locust was also a pinch point in 2018, during the parade celebrating the Eagles’ first Super Bowl win. It’s the closest to Broad Street.
“We expected it. We just didn’t know when,” Scott Sauer, SEPTA’s interim general manager said about 1 p.m., the command center’s halftime, before it would be time to marshal the trains and get people out of Center City.
“Everything went according to the plan this morning, with a few hiccups,” Sauer said.
A few hours later, the impression of the day remained the same: “It’s going as well as possible — we’re actually doing pretty good, considering the volume, really well,” Lyles said about 4 p.m.
Later in the day as people rushed stations, there was crowding at 30th Street Station, served by the MFL and the trolleys, as well as at 11th Street.
People clustered at 12th and Market Streets, trying to get down to the concourse; the entrance was closed and the lines grew, spanning several blocks.
Workers were dispatched to open the entrance so people could get onto the 11th Street platform.
“It took six hours to bring everybody into the city,” said Coladonato. “Once it’s over, they want to be home — fast and all at once.”
As the sun set, massive lines of people wrapped around 30th Street Station, waiting to get to Regional Rail Lines. Amtrak owns the facility and that is sometimes used as a crowd-control measure for safety.
A steady stream of passengers also filed through 11th Street Station, several hours after the festivities ended.