June 22: PA House loosens PPA residency requirement | Trolley Tunnel Blitz | Bus map reform

Someone on the Philadelphia Parking Authority board doesn’t want to live in Philadelphia anymore, reports Cassie Owens, and they persuaded Rep. Scott Petri in Harrisburg to introduce a bill exempting two PPA board members from Philadelphia’s residency requirements. That bill passed the state House on Tuesday evening, 127-68. 

SEPTA’s fourth annual “Trolley Tunnel Blitz” is scheduled for next month, from July 8th through 18th, Mike Lyons reports. “During this year’s blitz, more than 400 members of SEPTA’s in-house Engineering, Maintenance & Construction Division crews will work around-the-clock on key maintenance and construction tasks. The Trolley Tunnel Blitz is held during the summer when ridership is lower, according to SEPTA.”

Writing at SPOKE Magazine, Michael Noda makes the case for SEPTA to make frequency a higher priority, and crucially, to let people know which lines run frequently. “Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell from a standard transit map which lines run frequently and which don’t. SEPTA’s ubiquitous system map displays only rail routes rather than buses…Meanwhile, the larger, more detailed, and more obscure city and suburban bus map shows every route as a maddeningly uniform red line.”

It wouldn’t be summer in Philadelphia without a big public misunderstanding of how pop-up beer garden permitting works. This time it’s Heffe Tacos in Fishtown, whose temporary beer garden was shut down over failure to obtain a use registration permit. Jim Saksa explained how this all works in a post last year.

Anticipating the formal legalization of ride-hailing services statewide, the Pittsburgh Transportation Group is phasing out its Yellow Cab taxi business, reports Daniel Moore. Yellow Cab has held a de facto monopoly on taxi service in Pittsburgh for more than a century. From now on, they’ll be pouring all their resources into their new zTrip ride-hailing app, which they developed to compete with UberX and Lyft.