PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — SEPTA has unveiled the first draft of a top-to-bottom overhaul of its bus routes.
The proposal alters many bus routes and eliminates others with the goal of making bus service in the region more reliable, said Dan Nemiroff, SEPTA’s director of planning programs.
“Right now, we have about 125 bus routes. The new network has 99, so quite a bit less,” he told KYW Newsradio.
“I would say a good 60% of them are different from what is currently on the streets. Some, significantly. Some, not at all.”
The plan released Monday at SEPTA’s online “Transit Talk” is the result of a comprehensive three-year redesign dubbed Bus Revolution, which released planning options and began taking feedback in April. The goal is to simplify the transit agency’s spaghetti-like bus system to make it more efficient and improve on-time performance.
You can read details below on the two initial plan options as released in April, or click here to see more in-depth plans from which feedback came this past spring.
Overall, the proposal has fewer buses serving riders in Center City, Nemiroff said.
“They’ll still see lots of service coming to and going into Center City, but it’s less,” he explained. “That is enabling us to take those service hours – those resources that we allocate to Center City – and put them into other parts of the service area.”
Among the changes, SEPTA proposes combining Routes 17 and 33, which each travel along 19th and 20th Streets, into a single north-south route without turns into Center City. SEPTA is also recommending changes for many routes that run on the Schuylkill Expressway.
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“We are proposing that we end them at 30th Street Station and have people transfer to either bus service that’s on Market Street, or transfer to the El or to trolley services there,” Nemiroff said.
275,000 passengers ride SEPTA buses on a typical weekday. Bus ridership is at about 68% of pre-pandemic levels, Nemiroff said.
SEPTA plans to spend the next two months collecting public feedback and making adjustments, before the new routes go before the SEPTA board for approval next spring.
The changes would begin to take effect in the fall of 2023.