KPIs updated September 2024
Key Performance Indicators
In order to track our progress moving forward, we have established a new set of organization-wide key performance indicators (KPIs) that are aligned with the goals and strategic priorities established in the Strategic Plan. These KPIs not only provide transparency to the public, they are also used as an important internal resource for benchmarking, goal-setting, and arriving at insights that push our industry forward. SEPTA’s ability to quickly identify and react to trends, problems, and changing rider needs will be critical for our success.
These KPIs include a mix of leading indicators, which will help SEPTA anticipate upcoming trends, and lagging indicators, to assess our performance and ensure the actions we are taking are helping achieve our desired outcomes. We will continue to improve our KPIs and this website over time by adding new KPIs and improving existing ones.
For more information or progress on initiatives underway, check out the 2023 Annual Performance Report.
Proactive organization
provide an intuitive experience
deliver a seamless transit network
*Metric updated each fiscal year
**Estimated as of July 2024
Develop a Proactive Organization
As we build towards our goal of developing a proactive organization, we will track our progress with several key performance indicators.
Safety is paramount in everything that we do. As we continue to be proactive organization, we need to continue putting safety first. Learn how SEPTA is addressing system safety in our Comprehensive plan, “Leading the Way: SEPTA’s Response to Safety and Security.”
Tracking overall operating expenses indexed to passenger trips provides insights into the efficiency of our efforts to provide service. For a look into SEPTA’s Operating Budgets visit the finance and budget section on the reports page.
The overall usage of our service compared to the amount of service we provide broadly indicates how effectively we are meeting the changing needs of our region. A linked passenger trip is the journey a passenger takes from origin to destination, which may involve multiple vehicles. We are building a Lifestyle Network to meet the needs of the region with a frequent, all-day network that will grow ridership, efficiently use resources, and build an equitable future.
While transit in inherently sustainable, tracking our own carbon footprint ensures that we are acting as good stewards of our resources. Learn what Sustainability initiatives SEPTA is taking to reduce our carbon footprint.
Tracking soft costs (costs spent on administrative or professional services) as a percentage of overall project costs within the capital program ensures that spending is in line with industry standards to maximize the impact of the capital budget.
As SEPTA continues to drive the economy of Southeastern Pennsylvania, tracking the economic impact of our investments ensures that we continue to provide value. SEPTA’s operations and capital investments employ people directly as employees who work for the Authority and indirectly as suppliers and contractors who provide goods and services to the Authority. Those workers then re-spend their earned income, circulating money and creating additional jobs in the region. This analysis is based on an economic impact model provided by the American Public Transportation Association.
The following key performance indicators are established and in development but cannot yet be reported on.
Percent of Projects on Schedule
Delivering projects on-time is an important part of ensuring that our systems meet the changing needs of our region and keep cost in line with budget.
Employee Engagement
Our people are essential to the success of our region – making sure that they are engaged in the work they do helps us to be the best SEPTA possible.
Please view this page on a desktop to see individual KPI visualizations.
Employee Lost-Time Due to Injuries Per 200,000 Work Hours
Safety is paramount in everything that we do. As we continue to be proactive organization, we need to continue putting safety first. Learn how SEPTA is addressing system safety in our Comprehensive plan, “Leading the Way: SEPTA’s Response to Safety and Security.”
Operating Expense Per Passenger Trip
Tracking overall operating expenses indexed to passenger trips provides insights into the efficiency of our efforts to provide service. For a look into SEPTA’s Operating Budgets visit the finance and budget section on the reports page.
Passenger Trips Per Revenue Vehicle Hour
The overall usage of our service compared to the amount of service we provide broadly indicates how effectively we are meeting the changing needs of our region. A linked passenger trip is the journey a passenger takes from origin to destination, which may involve multiple vehicles. We are building a Lifestyle Network to meet the needs of the region with a frequent, all-day network that will grow ridership, efficiently use resources, and build an equitable future.
Pounds of CO2e Per Passenger Mile Traveled
While transit in inherently sustainable, tracking our own carbon footprint ensures that we are acting as good stewards of our resources. Learn what Sustainability initiatives SEPTA is taking to reduce our carbon footprint.
Percent of Construction (Capital) Dollars Spent on Soft Costs
Tracking soft costs (costs spent on administrative or professional services) as a percentage of overall project costs within the capital program ensures that spending is in line with industry standards to maximize the impact of the capital budget.
Economic Impact
As SEPTA continues to drive the economy of Southeastern Pennsylvania, tracking the economic impact of our investments ensures that we continue to provide value. SEPTA’s operations and capital investments employ people directly as employees who work for the Authority and indirectly as suppliers and contractors who provide goods and services to the Authority. Those workers then re-spend their earned income, circulating money and creating additional jobs in the region. This analysis is based on an economic impact model provided by the American Public Transportation Association.
Future KPIs
The following key performance indicators are established and in development but cannot yet be reported on.
Percent of Projects on Schedule
Delivering projects on-time is an important part of ensuring that our systems meet the changing needs of our region and keep cost in line with budget.
Employee Engagement
Our people are essential to the success of our region – making sure that they are engaged in the work they do helps us to be the best SEPTA possible.
Provide an Intuitive Experience
As we build towards our goal of providing an intuitive experience, we will track our progress with several key performance indicators.
While we upgrade stations to improve access, we will continually analyze and evaluate ridership patterns to inform decisions. By measuring the number of trips that go through stations without accessible options, we can prioritize investments that can have the greatest benefit. This measures trips through rail transit stations that are wheelchair accessible. SEPTA is planning several new accessibility renovation projects. Read about the New Accessibility Project at Tasker-Morris Station.
For our services to be easy-to-use and attractive to riders, paying for a trip should be seamless and require little more than a tap of a transit card, bank card or smartphone. Measuring the percentage of trips that use these “contactless” payment methods can help us understand how easy this point of the journey is for riders. We are adding new fare products to SEPTA Key to match your travel needs and currently piloting mobile ticketing to give you more contactless ways to pay.
In Fall of 2022, SEPTA launched the Pulse survey to offer riders the opportunity to access our service and provide more immediate and regular feedback. The Pulse Survey is similar to SEPTA’s Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSS) but is shorter, more frequent and set up to reach a broader audience, including non-English speaking communities. Riders are asked to evaluate SEPTA’s service across the whole range of their travel experience from trip planning to alighting at their final destination. Customer Experience questions on this survey ask riders about their overall satisfaction with SEPTA and help us to identify the biggest obstacles in their journey.
In Fall of 2022, SEPTA launched the Pulse survey to offer riders the opportunity to access our service and provide more immediate and regular feedback. The Pulse Survey is similar to SEPTA’s Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSS) but is shorter, more frequent and set up to reach a broader audience, including non-English speaking communities. Riders are asked to evaluate SEPTA’s service across the whole range of their travel experience from trip planning to alighting at their final destination. Customer Effort questions ask riders about the ease of traveling on SEPTA and help us identify what stages in the trip process are most difficult for our customers.
Listening to how customers feel about SEPTA as a brand can help us understand where we excel and where we can improve. Analyzing social media posts to and about SEPTA can let us respond to what our customers are thinking and feeling in real-time, including those who we might not hear from otherwise. Using social listening technology, we categorize social media posts to and about SEPTA as positive, negative, or neutral. These capture high-level insights into how our customers feel about SEPTA that we can use to improve how we communicate with and serve them.
The following key performance indicators are established and in development but cannot yet be reported on.
Customer Engagement Score
To better understand how our customers are interacting with us outside of their travels, we can track how people use our website, app, customer service centers, and other points of contact. This will help us provide the best tools to help our customers get around.
Rider Delay Minutes and Buffer Time
Delays to service–both at the start of a journey and the duration of their trip–can affect how willing people are to use transit. Tracking the additional time riders spend on their journey and how much extra time they allot to be sure to arrive on time can help us understand how reliable our services are. Many factors that affect this are outside of our direct control. We will coordinate closely with our partners at Amtrak and local communities across the region.
Additional Time to Make Accessible Journeys
If transit is not fully accessible, some riders may need to take longer trips in order to get to a destination. Measuring the impacts our infrastructure has on the way people make trips will help us prioritize projects based on the impact they have for riders. It also helps us more fully understand funding needs for vehicles and stations.
Please view this page on a desktop to see individual KPI visualizations.
Daily Trips Through Stations Without Accessible Options
While we upgrade stations to improve access, we will continually analyze and evaluate ridership patterns to inform decisions. By measuring the number of trips that go through stations without accessible options, we can prioritize investments that can have the greatest benefit. This measures trips through rail transit stations that are wheelchair accessible. SEPTA is planning several new accessibility renovation projects. Read about the New Accessibility Project at Tasker-Morris Station.
Contactless Trips
For our services to be easy-to-use and attractive to riders, paying for a trip should be seamless and require little more than a tap of a transit card, bank card or smartphone. Measuring the percentage of trips that use these “contactless” payment methods can help us understand how easy this point of the journey is for riders. We are adding new fare products to SEPTA Key to match your travel needs and currently piloting mobile ticketing to give you more contactless ways to pay.
Customer Experience Score
In Fall of 2022, SEPTA launched the Pulse survey to offer riders the opportunity to access our service and provide more immediate and regular feedback. The Pulse Survey is similar to SEPTA’s Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSS) but is shorter, more frequent and set up to reach a broader audience, including non-English speaking communities. Riders are asked to evaluate SEPTA’s service across the whole range of their travel experience from trip planning to alighting at their final destination. Customer Experience questions on this survey ask riders about their overall satisfaction with SEPTA and help us to identify the biggest obstacles in their journey.,
Customer Effort Score
In Fall of 2022, SEPTA launched the Pulse survey to offer riders the opportunity to access our service and provide more immediate and regular feedback. The Pulse Survey is similar to SEPTA’s Customer Satisfaction Survey (CSS) but is shorter, more frequent and set up to reach a broader audience, including non-English speaking communities. Riders are asked to evaluate SEPTA’s service across the whole range of their travel experience from trip planning to alighting at their final destination. Customer Effort questions ask riders about the ease of traveling on SEPTA and help us identify what stages in the trip process are most difficult for our customers.
Customer Attitude Score
Listening to how customers feel about SEPTA as a brand can help us understand where we excel and where we can improve. Analyzing social media posts to and about SEPTA can let us respond to what our customers are thinking and feeling in real-time, including those who we might not hear from otherwise. Using social listening technology, we categorize social media posts to and about SEPTA as positive, negative, or neutral. These capture high-level insights into how our customers feel about SEPTA that we can use to improve how we communicate with and serve them.
Future KPIs
The following key performance indicators are established and in development but cannot yet be reported on.
Customer Engagement Score
To better understand how our customers are interacting with us outside of their travels, we can track how people use our website, app, customer service centers, and other points of contact. This will help us provide the best tools to help our customers get around.
Rider Delay Minutes and Buffer Time
Delays to service–both at the start of a journey and the duration of their trip–can affect how willing people are to use transit. Tracking the additional time riders spend on their journey and how much extra time they allot to be sure to arrive on time can help us understand how reliable our services are. Many factors that affect this are outside of our direct control. We will coordinate closely with our partners at Amtrak and local communities across the region.
Additional Time to Make Accessible Journeys
If transit is not fully accessible, some riders may need to take longer trips in order to get to a destination. Measuring the impacts our infrastructure has on the way people make trips will help us prioritize projects based on the impact they have for riders. It also helps us more fully understand funding needs for vehicles and stations.
Deliver a Seamless Transit Network
As we build towards our goal of delivering a seamless transit network, we will track our progress with several key performance indicators.
The total number of trips on transit compared to the total population of the region is an industry standard measure to determine what percentage of the region is using transit. An unlinked trip is the trip a passenger takes on a single vehicle, which may not complete their entire journey. We are expanding service and building a Lifestyle Network to meet the needs of the region with a frequent, attractive, all-day network.
As vehicles age, they require more maintenance to provide a safe and reliable trip. This can contribute to increased costs of providing service. Tracking the average age of our fleets can help us monitor and project fleet replacement needs and proactively plan for maintenance needs. SEPTA’s trolley modernization program will replace our aging trolley fleet with modern, universally accessible vehicles and on-street stations.
Our mission is to provide safe, reliable, and accessible choices for everyone. We track the number of people that live within ½ mile of walking distance to transit to measure whether we are serving people where they live. We then use the Indicators of Potential Disadvantage (IPD) developed by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to evaluate how we are serving members of vital population groups identified by federal Title VI and environmental justice considerations. Learn what steps we are taking to build a lifestyle network.
The populations of interest are youth, older adults, female, racial minority, ethnic minority, foreign-born, limited English proficiency disabled, and low-income. A higher IPD class indicates a higher concentration of people in these groups. Compare the IPD classes served by the entire network to those served by the frequent network to see who lives where SEPTA is focusing our service.
Riders have an increasing number of choices to get around; a seamless transit network must provide a competitive travel time compared to vehicular travel, particularly in critical transportation corridors such as Chestnut Street or I-95. To speed our passengers along, we have partnered with the City of Philadelphia and PennDOT to make Center City bus lanes highly visible and enforced.
Transit must work effectively and consistently in order to meet the needs of our region. For our riders to arrive on time, we must be on time. On-time Percentage measures whether our vehicles arrive at their scheduled times. We will also include headway adherence, which measures whether the wait time between arriving vehicles meets expectations. In the future, we will publish Rider Delay Minutes in Goal 2 to measure the delay our riders experience. We are building a lifestyle network that is convenient and reliable enough to be used for everyday trips, all day long. We have also created numerous travel tools for planning your trip beforehand and in real-time.
We track and count an extensive collection of destinations accessible via SEPTA’s network and organize them by categories that matter most to travelers. By identifying the number of destinations that are within reach of our transit network, we gain insights that allow SEPTA to meet the evolving travel needs of the region. Learn what steps we are taking to build a lifestyle network.
The following key performance indicators are established and in development but cannot yet be reported on.
Average Transfer Wait Time
Transfers connect our network together; shorter transfer wait times help riders use the entire network. The way we design and schedule services can support this.
Please view this page on a desktop to see individual KPI visualizations.
Unlinked Trips Per Capita
The total number of trips on transit compared to the total population of the region is an industry standard measure to determine what percentage of the region is using transit. An unlinked trip is the trip a passenger takes on a single vehicle, which may not complete their entire journey. We are expanding service and building a Lifestyle Network to meet the needs of the region with a frequent, attractive, all-day network.
Average Vehicle Age by Mode
As vehicles age, they require more maintenance to provide a safe and reliable trip. This can contribute to increased costs of providing service. Tracking the average age of our fleets can help us monitor and project fleet replacement needs and proactively plan for maintenance needs. SEPTA’s trolley modernization program will replace our aging trolley fleet with modern, universally accessible vehicles and on-street stations.
Population Near Transit & Equitable Service
Our mission is to provide safe, reliable, and accessible choices for everyone. We track the number of people that live within ½ mile of walking distance to transit to measure whether we are serving people where they live. We then use the Indicators of Potential Disadvantage (IPD) developed by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to evaluate how we are serving members of vital population groups identified by federal Title VI and environmental justice considerations. Learn what steps we are taking to build a lifestyle network.
Transit Travel Time Competitiveness
Riders have an increasing number of choices to get around; a seamless transit network must provide a competitive travel time compared to vehicular travel, particularly in critical transportation corridors such as Chestnut Street or I-95. To speed our passengers along, we have partnered with the City of Philadelphia and PennDOT to make Center City bus lanes highly visible and enforced.
On-Time Performance and Missed Trips
Transit must work effectively and consistently in order to meet the needs of our region. For our riders to arrive on time, we must be on time. On-time Percentage measures whether our vehicles arrive at their scheduled times. We will also include headway adherence, which measures whether the wait time between arriving vehicles meets expectations. In the future, we will publish Rider Delay Minutes in Goal 2 to measure the delay our riders experience. We are building a lifestyle network that is convenient and reliable enough to be used for everyday trips, all day long. We have also created numerous travel tools for planning your trip beforehand and in real-time.
Destinations Near Transit
We track and count an extensive collection of destinations accessible via SEPTA’s network and organize them by categories that matter most to travelers. By identifying the number of destinations that are within reach of our transit network, we gain insights that allow SEPTA to meet the evolving travel needs of the region. Learn what steps we are taking to build a lifestyle network.
Future KPIs
The following key performance indicators are established and in development but cannot yet be reported on.
Average Transfer Wait Time
Transfers connect our network together; shorter transfer wait times help riders use the entire network. The way we design and schedule services can support this.