March 3, 2010
By Anthony Campisi
For PlanPhilly
SEPTA riders will be seeing new regional rail designations after all.
Despite some waffling by SEPTA officials over the past several weeks, communications director Elizabeth Mintz told a meeting of the Citizen Advisory Committee on Tuesday that the proposed change to line names was going forward as planned.
Starting July 25, the authority will rename the current regional rail lines after their terminus points.
In other words, the R8 will become the Chestnut Hill West and Fox Chase lines. Lines with two stations that frequently serve as end points will be named after both. Thus, the R5 Thorndale will become the Paoli/Thorndale line, the R5 Doylestown line will become the Landsdale/Doylestown line and the R2 Newark line will become the Wilmington/Newark line.
The only change to the current terminal designations will happen along the R6 Norristown line. That line will be renamed the Manayunk/Norristown line in recognition of the fact that Manayunk has become a popular destination for riders in recent years. The R3 Elwyn line will not be renamed the Media/Wawa line until the extension to Wawa has been completed.
To preserve information about service through the Center City tunnel, regional rail timetables will indicate the destination of any trains past Center City.
The change will coincide with a larger rebranding effort for regional rail, Mintz said, adding that she made a “hand on heart” promise to general manager Joe Casey that all references to regional rail throughout the system will be changed to reflect the new designations. That will involve changing signage and electronic monitors at all regional rail stations and on all vehicles.
SEPTA has begun a preliminary survey to track down all signs and maps that mention regional rail lines. The authority will also be replacing all the current regional rail colors with the blue-ish gray color seen on newly installed signs in Center City.
The change was prompted by efforts to standardize all modes of transit by the same color, Mintz said. It comes out of the same initiative in which SEPTA rebranded all of its trolley lines with a green hue several months ago. She added that not all of the details in the rollout have been worked out yet. The authority is still trying to figure out how to indicate through service to popular destinations like University City, Temple University and the Airport stops.
She stressed, though, that no service would be altered as a result of the rebranding. Riders will still be able to take advantage of existing through-service schedules even though the trains will change names in Center City.
As part of the rebranding, the authority will be making small changes to the schedules, which will now feature line maps on the front.
The real-time display boards at the Center City stations will also give the train numbers of arriving trains.
Mintz’s comments stood in stark contrast to SEPTA officials’ comments in the aftermath of a presentation last month by Harry Garforth, manager of rail planning, to the CAC in which Garforth detailed the changes. When asked by reporters, SEPTA spokespeople repeatedly said that no final decision had been made. And speaking at another meeting of the CAC last month, SEPTA spokesman Andrew Busch suggested that a public hearing might be held to discuss the issue.
That appears not to be in the cards, however. Mintz firmly said that July 25 was a non-negotiable date. “It’s going to happen on July 25,” she said.
Contact the reporter at campisi.anthony@gmail.com
Comments
So now the R6 Norristown will just be the Norristown! Oh boy, that's so less confusing! And it's the same color as every other line? Perfect, there's nothing confusing about that!!! While we're at it we should make the Market-Frankford and Broad Street lines the same color on the maps as well, right? And I also think they should drop number designations for all the SEPTA bus lines too. Too confusing I say! Oh and those green trolley lines? Please get rid of the numbers, they confusing me to no end, just give them lengthy names based on their end-points. Thanks for listening.
Shoshanah, the money part of it is a relatively small concern. SEPTA recognized that a lot of its signage is outdated, so they were ready to embark on a major signage replacement program anyway.
And I'm afraid that fares are likely to go up this summer, though not by a lot. It's been part of the financial plan all along--small increases every two or three years.
(note that I also disagreed with the decision to apply the same color code to all the RRD lines)
I think this is a collosal waste of money. In a time when trains, trolleys and busses could use use some repair and TLC, this just seems like a superfluous use of funds. I will definitely be more angry if fares go up because of this.
I also think that this is an unnecssary move. I like the current Regional Rail branding, and renaming the trains by their terminus will only have marginal benefits- benefits that would not outweigh the cost of the rebranding campaign.
I think they are making a grave mistake.
There are times--like last night--when the only way I know which Regional Rail train I'm getting on is by the color on the placard. Getting rid of that would not decrease confustion--especially during outbound travel--rather, it would increase said confusion exponentially. While eliminating the Regional Rail brand may be what SEPTA wants to do, it would be ill-advised indeed to not have some sort of easy-to-see designation on the front, sides, and rear of trains that can tell you whether a train is going towards Lansdale/Doylestown, say, and not West Trenton, without needing to read the placard--especially when, as often happens when you're catching a train--you're in a hurry.
I was at 30th Street the other day, transferring from an inbound to take the express back home that skips my normal stop. Had I not paused on the platform and looked around and saw that the train with the blue placard was the next platform over, I would have missed my train entirely. If this happened July 27th and there was no blue placard, this would have resulted in an angry call to Customer Service.
What I'm trying to say is while that SEPTA's desire to standardize coloring scheme according to different services is admirable, it should not be so zealous as to actually make wayfinding worse than it was before. The color designations are the most useful wayfinding mechanisms on the commuter rail lines; they do not have to be dismissed entirely for SEPTA to achieve their goal (namely, that of having the same color refer to all commuter rail lines; indeed, today it does; the color scheme for the Regional Rail is primarily a wayfinding mechanism once you get to the commuter rail following the gray commuter rail wayfinding designation amongst all public rail transit).