SEPTA ٤+

I understand SEPTA has a shortage of drivers, but can’t they put a notification informing potential passengers? Today I waited 30 minutes for the Route 40 bus to Montgomery Avenue that was supposed to come at 12:30. That bus never showed up. The next Route 40 bus came st 12:50, a couple minutes past its scheduled run. I don’t mind the bus being 5 or 8 minutes late, but half an hour is a bit ridiculous. I am hoping there is a notice in advance telling your customers of any delays. I rely on SEPTA as my primary source of transportation because I am unable to drive due to a disability, so I get very frustrated when I am waiting 15 minutes to half an hour on a bus. Please try to allow your passengers to know if there will be a serious delay of more than 5 minutes it would be greatly appreciated.

Lots of good ideas here, and fantastic that real time is really real time pretty much everywhere, but so frustrating that the schedule times when you save things to Favorites are wrong!! BSL times are correct when you search the schedule, but wrong in Favorites (Ellsworth Federal to City Hall times are 3 or 4 minutes off). This makes me doubt the other schedules and doubt the app. The schedule part of the app is clunky and sometimes the searching doesn’t work, so I’m stuck with having saved my favorite routes. You can’t reorganize Favorites. So you have to think about the least important route and do that first and then work up to most important, and redo it if you add a route (because the Favorites tiles are so large that you have to scroll down to see them...I really liked the simple and easy single lines that appeared in the old app). Why doesn’t the map view show my location? It’s really hard to orient yourself when looking at a bus location on a zoomed in map.

This app is good but could use some improvements. The main improvement being mobile ticketing. This would improve using septa significantly:

It will allow customers to purchase tickets anywhere at anytime
It will reduce lines at ticketing kiosks and booths
It will save time for the employees who sell and check tickets in trains as less people will have to purchase tickets in the train

Here’s one way this could be implemented:

The app would allow customers to buy tickets between two stations. Once a ticket is bought, it would be stored in a “wallet” tab.
When the ticket is about to be used, it can be “activated”. An activated ticket can be used, but they will expire after 2 hours.
When a ticket is activated, it’ll show up in an “Active Tickets” tab.
Clicking on this tab will display the origin and destination of the ticket. It will also show the date, the current time (including seconds) and how much time is left until the ticket expires. The live time and date counter ensures passengers can not get away with screenshotting or screen recording an old ticket.

This system is an adaptation of the mobile ticketing system conducted very successfully by NJ Transit for the past few years.