Why did SEPTA start running the Night Owl buses in the '90s, again?

Streets Dept. blogger Conrad Benner attracted a lot of attention last week when his petition to extend subway and El service into the wee hours got a miraculous acknowledgement from SEPTA. It almost seemed too good to be true when, within the span of two days, the famously unresponsive transit agency announced that it was mulling a pilot program that would demo late night service this summer.

The surprising announcement apparently came after years of the agency quietly studying the impacts of offering late-night service, according to sources at SEPTA. But judging by responses online, including my own Twitter conversation with Benner, some mass transit riders were just as surprised to learn that Philly actually had 24/7 subway and El service until 1991. So what happened?

The natural assumption is that ever-financially strapped SEPTA cut service to save money, and much of the recent overage of restoring late-night train service has revolved around questions of cost. The blog Sic Transit Philadelphia and others have already commented on the questionable cost savings presented by "bustitution," but newspaper articles from the time make it clear that money was only one of many concerns. In fact, the modest savings the transit agency expected to realize were mentioned as a kind of bonus atop other improvements: 

"The plan will conserve energy, improve service, increase commuter security, while saving SEPTA $960,000 a year," said SEPTA 's chief financial officer, Feather Houstoun.

$960,000 in 1991 would be equivalent to about $1.6 million in savings per year today — a fairly small sum for a multi-billion-dollar transit agency. Moreover, SEPTA actually had to spend $320,000 ($618,000 today) to install gates at every subway station, which had been open continuously since the creation of the first rapid-transit line almost 70 years earlier.

Back then, 24-hour service was considered a key component of mass transit. During the height of Philadelphia's industrial period, bustling factories could rarely afford to halt production just because the sun went down, which meant thousands of night-shift workers needed to take the train at all hours. By 1991, with industry largely in decline, only about 3,600 people (just over 1 percent of SEPTA's total ridership), were still using the red-eye trains.

But SEPTA runs a lot of lines that have low ridership at certain times of day, and many of those 3,600 people still working night shifts (hospital employees, remaining factory workers, etc.) were livid at the thought of waiting for the bus at 4 in the morning after a long shift.

But there was more to the termination of late-night service than just money or ridership:

Hal Davidow, assistant general manager of the subway-elevated division, said the night - owl time period "currently generates a large proportion of the litter and odors that the majority of our regular riders are faced with during morning rush hours."

If Davidow's comments weren't opaque enough, a more in-depth report by the Inquirer found that the open-all-night stations had become associated with rising homelessness and crime.

Homeless men and women bunk in the stations, contributing to SEPTA's problems keeping the system clean. And one third of subway crime happens between midnight and 5 a.m.

....On the platform at 15th Street, Dan Rooks didn't like the way police were treating him. He didn't like the way SEPTA wanted to close the subway, either. ''I won't have no place to sleep," he said.

Shutting down the system entirely during this time period seems like a pretty drastic step, particularly when you note, as some transit advocates have pointed out, that about one third of all crime happens between midnight and 5 a.m.  

But perhaps it was just a part of the popular philosophy for managing the seemingly endless decline of Rust Belt cities at the time. The 1980s had actually seen SEPTA-related crime fall by 50 percent, and in the Inquirer piece, SEPTA police sergeant Charlie Patterson seemed nonplussed by the criminal element:

A big, comforting presence, Patterson said he doesn't get many problems with the people going back and forth to work. "The problems come sometimes with the drunks or the homeless. And sometimes you get guys moving in what you call wolfpacks, but that doesn't happen all that often," he said.

For the average laborer using the late-night trains, preemptive fears of crime and homelessness seemed like abstract problems compared to just getting to work on time:

...Many of those people said recently that they oppose SEPTA's plan to close the subway-elevated system late at night.

"We suffer enough," Kerry Johnson, 25, a state mental health worker, said on a nearly two-hour trip home to Southwest Philadelphia from Bucks County.

It's not clear if Benner's petition provided an impetus for SEPTA, which has made efforts to be more reactive to customer service issues, to act on restoring service sooner than later or if it was just a happy coincidence. But it is clear that the end of restricted subway service, spawned by what would today be regarded as a fairly cynical method of addressing urban ills, can't come soon enough.