Exactly one month ago I dug into SEPTA’s fare data for the upcoming July 1 hikes. While fares will mostly be going up across the board, the re-shuffling of regional rail zones will actually save some suburban commuters money. At 
first I thought the alterations would be entirely regressive, but after sifting through the numbers I found that it was a little more complicated than that.
But changes to the structure of the “Center City Hub” could mean huge savings for a different group of urban commuters. The inner circle fare zone for regional rail currently includes seven stations: The five that are the most common commuter destinations — Suburban, 30th Street, University City, Temple and Market East stations — and two outliers, North Philadelphia and North Broad stations. These last two are being moved out of the Central Hub, because few people commute to these low-income neighborhoods and the stations are mostly used for what Burnfield called “reverse commuting”, or riders leaving the neighborhood to work in the suburbs. (Only 6 percent of the combined ridership at the North Philly and North Broad Street stations are headed downtown — that’s 23 riders.)
Riders “reverse commuting” from the North Broad and North Philadelphia stops will receive substantial savings by their absorption into Zone 1 combined with the option of a weekly Cross-County Pass, priced at $29. The 96 percent of North Philly and North Broad riders who commute to work via regional rail now use Zone 3 TrailPasses, which cost $42 apiece (soon to be $44). The Cross-County Pass, right now only available in monthly form, will be a huge boon to these riders who are moved out of the Center City Zone and commute to the ‘burbs because it allows, according to the SEPTA website, “Unlimited trips on Regional Rail trains when not traveling to, from or through Center City Philadelphia.” That’s $13 less every week, or more than $600 in savings for the year.
Got that? To sum up: We’re all getting a relatively small, regularly scheduled fare increase, except for riders from Eastwick Station (and a few from North Philly) who are getting a substantial price hike. Meanwhile, commuters from a band of affluent suburbs will pay less and the 346 riders (by SEPTA’s count) who regularly reverse commute from North Philly to the suburbs will save a lot.
