New year, same old SEPTA dilemma: What to do when someone’s bad public transit etiquette gets in the way of your commute?
Last month, my colleague (and fellow SEPTA superuser) Henry Savage and I debated if it’s worth it to speak up when someone is blaring music, vaping, or puff, puff, passing while riding the El for The Inquirer’s regular weekend advice column.
Our verdicts were split: Henry keeps his head down for fear of becoming a subway Karen or worse, and my solutions-oriented approach of offering up a pair of wire headphones yielded less-than-stellar results. (A high schooler laughed at me.)
You, dear readers, also had a lot say: We received dozens of impassioned takes from current and former SEPTA riders about how to manage subpar public transit manners. Frankly, most of your advice was better than anything we had to offer.
The responses speak to just how ubiquitous bad SEPTA interactions are: Everyone, it seems, has a story about the time someone loudly gossiped on speakerphone all the way from Girard Ave. to 30th Street Station, or the time someone refused to stop smoking on a crowded train.
The sum total of these anecdotes played a small yet crucial role in SEPTA’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2025, when it took months to patch a $213 million funding deficit and prevent sweeping service cuts. The transit agency has yet to recapture its pre-pandemic ridership, which some attribute to a mixture of chronic lateness and bad manners that can make taking public transportation feel like a chore you’d rather opt out of.
“Frankly, I have chosen biking and buses to avoid the El for these specific reasons,” wrote Rachel Howe, 48, who has lived in South Philly since 2013. “But my older children have to take the [train] to and from school and I especially worry about smoking and vaping becoming normalized to them when they see it on the regular at 8 a.m.”
Howe’s 13-year-old said he “sometimes has to hold his breath” for his entire ride to school because of smokers, though he finds the people who blast music to be the worse offenders because “it’s so in your face.” Speaking up, he said, feels like a non-option. What if it starts a fight?
And yet for many like myself, riding SEPTA is an inevitability. We have to get from point A to point B somehow, even if it means sitting through a medley of Drake hits or a cloud of smoke, so we need to make the best of it.
Here’s more advice for how to handle awful SEPTA etiquette, according to eight fellow riders.
Tip 1: Download SEPTA Transit Watch
Someone lighting up in the seat next to you? Or getting belligerent with another passenger? There’s an app for that.
The transportation authority launched the SEPTA Transit Watch app in 2017 as a means for riders to text anonymous tips to transit police over suspicious activity, harassment, and quality of life issues like smoking. Depending on the nature of the incident report, an officer may be dispatched to handle the situation at the next stop.
According to our readers, the app works — at least when it comes to pawning conflict off on someone who is trained to handle it.
“I love the SEPTA Transit Watch app. You can report loud music, smoking, substance abuse, etc. on it and somebody will respond ASAP to help take care of the situation,” wrote in Tyler Johnson, a current Fishtowner who has lived in Philly for 19 years. Johnson has only used the app twice to report situations that involved substance use, he wrote over email. Both times, he said, he got “immediate assistance.”
29-year-old SEPTA rider Danny Buckwalter said she uses the app regularly. “Sometimes, they’ll actually hold up the train so the engineer or an officer can tell the person to stop,” she wrote.
SEPTA Transit Watch is free and available in the Google Play and Apple app stores, though the same reporting mechanism is also available under the “Help” tab in SEPTA’s standard app. Those without smartphones can text a tip directly to SEPTA police at 215-234-1911.
Tip 2: Watch out for the conductor
For some, dispatching the police via an anonymous app or tip-line is a good solution. For others, it might feel like an overreaction depending on the situation.
Should you alert the police over loud music? Or text them to complain about a group of people who decided to DJ on the BSL?
The calculus is up to you. But for situations where you’re not bothered enough to contact the police but are bothered enough to pull out your hair, our readers recommended some alternatives we wish we thought of.
“I carry earplugs with me wherever I go,” wrote in Melinda Williams, 55, of Oreland. They come particularly in handy when Williams takes the BSL to and from Eagles games, when the noise of fans blasting hype music triggers her migraines. Wireless earbuds, of course, also do the trick (except for when they’re dead).
Mary Falkowski, 72, recommends riding in the first car, when you can, on El and Regional Rail. “I find there’s less loud music and disruptive riders when you ride close to the driver.”
Tip 3: Try a little tenderness — or don’t
Sometimes, a gentle nudge really is all it takes. You’ll never know if the only thing sitting between you and a peaceful commute is the courage to tell someone to cut it out.
Reader Gary Bolton keeps it direct, but nonconfrontational. “I’m a fan of ‘not everyone wants to hear your music, you know,’” Bolton wrote. “These types of disturbances should never be tossed off as consequences of living in the city. They are violations of basic civic consideration.”
And sometimes even the people meant to do the enforcing could use an etiquette reminder. Robin Salaman, 66, of Center City, was at 30th Street Station recently waiting for the train when a SEPTA employee was playing videos on his phone “loud enough that I couldn’t hear the train announcements.”
“I got up my nerve and very nicely asked if he could lower the volume a little — and he did! He turned them off completely soon after,” Salaman wrote. Sometimes, if the vibe and the situation (and the moon and stars) are right, [politeness] works.”
You do have to read the room first. Milton Trachtenburg, an 86-year-old Philly lifer, has a formula when he decided to speak up. “If I’m on the El and there are 50 students and me, and one group of students is responsible for the noise, I suck it up and let it go,” he said. “If it’s one rowdy person among 50 [passengers], I say something … I wouldn’t make an epic production of it. I’m a peacemaker.”
Of course, you can also just try what this anonymous Inquirer tipster does: ‘I sit as close to the person [as possible] and blare bagpipes on my phone.”
If it works, it works.
Tip 4: Just enjoy the ride
Sometimes, though, it’s about the journey and not getting to the destination. For every unwanted and ill-timed subway showtime I witnessed while growing up in and around New York City, there was one that put a smile on my face when I really needed it. And for every awful song blasted from a speaker on a train, I hear one that sneaks onto my playlists.
A little whimsy is good for the commute. Just take it from Johnson, one of the SEPTA Watch enthusiasts.
“This morning, a man was blasting Celine Dion at 6 a.m. on my commute on the El and I didn’t hate it as I usually do,” he wrote in late December. “It felt so out of place during my early morning commute that I just had to laugh and enjoy the moment.
That’s one of my favorite pieces to commuting on public transit, it’s always an adventure.”
