SEPTA and PennDOT have done an inadequate job keeping riders and agency workers safe across Philadelphia’s transit system — and the federal government isn’t having it.
That’s the message of a 120-page report released last week by the Federal Transit Administration, the agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation that oversees local transportation authorities.
After spending about seven months visiting SEPTA facilities and talking with workers and administrators, federal investigators ordered the two agencies to perform two dozen corrective actions. They range from installing protective barriers for bus drivers and better training new hires, to improving dangerous intersections and executing long-delayed safety plans.
The FTA emphasized that SEPTA and PennDOT must act more aggressively than they did when it first noted the growing safety crisis, more than a year ago.
“SEPTA has experienced a deteriorating safety record, with significantly higher rates of fatalities, injuries and accidents compared to the transit industry average and its peers, particularly on fixed-route buses, trolleys, and heavy rail,” reads the FTA’s Safety Management Inspection (SMI) report. “Key safety performance indicators have not improved substantially and, in some cases, have worsened, even after enhanced PennDOT intervention directed by FTA in March 2023.”
Persistent staffing shortages and mandatory overtime have left train and bus drivers exhausted, and possibly contributed to accidents like a bus crash last summer in which a passenger died, the report said. Supervisors are routinely pulled into operational work like dispatching, leaving less time for critical oversight and training duties.
SEPTA is trying to overcome major employee shortages, but new hires don’t get needed coaching, have more accidents, and quit at elevated rates, the inspection found. At the same time, there have been a soaring number of threats and assaults against transit workers, including a bus driver who was shot to death while on the job last October.
“This is a difficult document for us to read, no doubt. It’s difficult to know that you’re coming up short in a number of areas,” SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch said.
“We want to get better. We want to make sure that we’re improving,” he said. The SMI report is “a good blueprint for everyone involved to follow. What we know we have to do is emphasize a culture of safety throughout the authority.”
In a statement, CEO and general manager Leslie Richards said the agency takes the feedback from the FTA and PennDOT “seriously” and has already started addressing the areas of concern.
The report comes as SEPTA faces a potential financial crisis this fall, after the state legislature failed to come up with the needed funding during recent budget negotiations.
Busch said addressing the FTA’s concerns will require ramping up hiring at a cost SEPTA is still trying to calculate. He noted that Boston’s transit system estimated that responding to its own SMI report two years ago cost an estimated $300 million.
Dozens of injuries led to rare federal intervention
The FTA first officially raised alarms in March 2023. It asked the Pa. Dept. of Transportation (PennDOT) to tighten oversight of SEPTA’s rail operations due to an “increase in safety incidents,” including three train collisions, a derailment, and a runaway train over the previous few months.
An FTA administrator said many of PennDOT’s corrective action plans for SEPTA were overdue, and he couldn’t determine if PennDOT was using its authority to ensure the regional transit agency was preventing accidents. Pa. Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll responded that PennDOT was engaging in “near-daily oversight” of SEPTA trains.
A PennDOT spokesperson noted that the agency oversees trolleys and trains but not buses, which are under FTA’s direct purview. Regional rail is overseen by a different federal agency and is not part of the current review.
Then July brought a whole new spate of crashes. A SEPTA bus rear-ended another on Roosevelt Boulevard, injuring at least 19 people and resulting in the death of 72-year-old Siu Nam Mak. A bus hit an electrical pole in Fishtown, injuring four people, and five passengers were hospitalized after a trolley rear-ended another in Upper Darby.
Later that month, an out-of-service trolley at the Elmwood Depot went out of control, hit several vehicles, and crashed into the Blue Bell Inn on Cobbs Creek, badly damaging the historic building. A mechanic who was on board and two people in an SUV were injured. The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the crash, which the FTA says caused an estimated $800,000 in property damage.
The trolley was undergoing repairs at the time, the FTA reported, but no one had set out a tag or note indicating its brakes had been temporarily rendered inoperable. SEPTA lacks “a procedure for the safe movement of heavy rail vehicles in rail transit maintenance facilities,” this week’s report says.
The new string of crashes led Joseph DeLorenzo, the FTA’s associate administrator for transit safety, to launch a comprehensive safety management inspection, or SMI, for just the third time in the FTA’s history. Previous SMIs have investigated the transit systems in Boston and Washington after they experienced major safety incidents, including passenger deaths.
SEPTA’s initial responses included putting 9,000 employees through safety training refresher courses, starting with 2,500 bus and trolley operators last August. FTA investigators arrived in Philadelphia for a series of visits and conversations that continued through January.
Yet accidents and violence continued to occur during the inspection period.
In September, a SEPTA contractor working on a track at 15th Street Station was nearly hit by a train because a safety worker hadn’t followed procedures for de-energizing the track and taking it out of service, the FTA said. The following month, driver Bernard Gribbin was shot and killed while operating a bus in Germantown.
In November, two SEPTA workers on the Norristown High-Speed Line tracks in Radnor were struck by a track-repair vehicle, including one who suffered serious injuries. That worker lost his leg in the accident, said Ron Newman, an official with Transport Workers Union Local 234, which represents operators and other SEPTA employees.
A struggle to hire enough drivers
The FTA suggested reasons for a few of the myriad problems identified in the SMI report.
For example, the increase in attacks on transit workers has coincided with a period of increased crime in Philadelphia generally, along with overdose deaths, homelessness and other problems, the report says. People trying to avoid paying fares is the primary cause of assaults, FTA found, along with late or delayed service, crowding on vehicles, and outbursts possibly related to mental illness or addiction.
SEPTA is now testing bulletproof shields for drivers and has switched over to automated announcements of fare requirements, rather than having drivers ask for fares, said Busch, the SEPTA spokesperson. The agency has boosted the number of SEPTA police officers to 230, the most in a decade, is graduating 30 recruits a year, and has seen violent crimes and felonies plummet 37% so far this year compared to 2023.
Many of SEPTA’s woes stem from severe understaffing as the agency struggles to replace a tsunami of retiring workers in a tight labor market and overcome the lingering effects of a pandemic hiring freeze.
To combat the driver shortage and overwork that causes fatigue and burnout, SEPTA says it’s continuing a ramped-up effort to hire more vehicle operators.
A new union contract in October boosted starting pay 25%, and SEPTA has increased the size of recruiting classes and been holding job fairs to let people know about openings, Busch said.
“To get candidates, we have to make sure that we’re highlighting the good career opportunities that people have at SEPTA,” Busch said.
.@Darrell_Clarke's district office is hosting a Septa Job Fair this Thursday from 11:00 am to 1:00 pm. Check out more details in the flyer! pic.twitter.com/JSRwDEjHLr
— Equally Informed Philly (@EqualInfo215) February 21, 2023
To stem a high rate of people dropping out of training, the transit agency added more individual mentoring. That’s helped boost the number of regional rail engineers — who also recently won major pay increases — and is expected to do the same for bus drivers.
The agency recognizes that safety is a big issue for drivers and potential applicants, Busch said, and hopes dropping crime rates and an expanded police force are helping assuage those worries.
“Those are concerns that certainly our employees are expressing,” he said. “We’ve made some good strides there, but there’s still definitely work to do.”
The FTA noted that PennDOT regularly inspects SEPTA facilities, reviews its safety plans, and monitors its progress correcting problems, but said the state department needed more staff to handle those tasks. Despite recently adding two regional managers to the program, it has only 11 PennDOT staffers dedicated to overseeing SEPTA, which is “not commensurate with the size and complexity of the SEPTA rail transit system at its current level of safety performance,” the report said.
A PennDOT spokesperson said it’s currently working to add three more people to the SEPTA oversight program. It’s also created a new process to bring failures to meet safety requirements directly to the attention of SEPTA’s board, as well as the state Secretary of Transportation.
The SMI report lays out 17 actions PennDOT must perform in the coming months. The department must audit rail operations at SEPTA’s Control Center and show how it will get the transit agency to finish up overdue accident investigations, put staff through required safety trainings, and create a rail engineering safety rules compliance program, among other tasks.
Safety officers need more power, union official says
While the FTA praised SEPTA’s System Safety Division for working to investigate accidents and promote safety, even with the recent hiring of several new investigators and analysts, that office still only has 37 people to cover a huge network that includes buses, trolleys, the El and regional rail. A new Safety Management System that FTA and PennDOT are requiring SEPTA to set up had just one staff member as of December but needs as many as 15, the report says.
Comparable safety divisions in Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. have more than twice as many staffers, the FTA said. Busch said SEPTA is committed to doubling the division’s headcount.
Newman, the TWU official, serves as co-chair of a joint health and safety committee of union members and SEPTA officials. He also praised SEPTA’s safety division, but said its recommendations are too often ignored by managers, who rarely face discipline or dismissal for not following industry guidelines.
He called on higher-ups to give the division more independence and authority, and to require strict adherence to safety rules, even if it costs more money.
“When somebody tells you, this is what you’re supposed to do, and you’re not following the guidelines that I gave you — especially when it has to do with safety, and putting people in danger — then that person shouldn’t work here,” he said. But instead, higher-ups often fail to discipline bad managers, he added. “They protect, they protect, they protect. And it’s wrong.”
Earlier this year, when welding work was being done on the elevated portion of the Market-Frankford Line, a “fire watch” worker was supposed to be stationed on the street below to make sure there weren’t people there who could be harmed by falling sparks or debris that could catch fire, he said. But a manager refused to bring someone in to do the job.
“His exact statement was, ‘That’s overkill for the person to be on the ground,’ ” Newman said. “That bothers me because, we understand that the work’s got to get done, but it’s got to get done in a safe manner to make sure that nobody gets injured.”
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