Sixers

I Took SEPTA to the Sports Complex and I Didn’t Get Mugged

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Jan 15th, 2026 · 11:32 AM EST

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We’ve been doing a lot of recent complaining about the South Philly sports complex, and rightfully so because the driving situation down there is garbage. It’s the worst it’s ever been. Getting in and out of the stadiums is a chore because exits are blocked off, cops are sitting in their cars twiddling their thumbs, and nobody is directing motor or foot traffic.

Back in August, traffic was so bad getting into a combination Eagles preseason game and Nate Bargatze comedy show that a bunch of people decided to just turn around and go home. One person emailed Crossing Broad saying he and his wife drove past the sports complex entirely and went to dinner in Center City instead. No refund. They ate the ticket cost and called an audible to salvage a night out.

Naturally, the best way to avoid the driving nightmare is to not drive. Take SEPTA instead. Captain Obvious supports that thought while also pointing out that not everybody lives near mass transit. Options can sometimes be limited, but you don’t know if there’s a better way to do it until you actually try it, so I figured it was time to bite the bullet and run the experiment to answer the following questions:

• Is SEPTA faster?
• Is it more convenient?
• Does the experience overwhelmingly support never driving to the stadiums again?

Background

I’m in the North Penn Area these days. It takes about 80-90 minutes to get to a typical Sixers, Flyers, or Phillies weeknight game. You’re leaving anywhere between 4pm and 530pm and trying to haul ass down the Schuylkill “Express” way or the Blue Route and find your way into a lot without ripping out your steering wheel and throwing it at the car in front of you.

On the way back, it’s been much worse, usually an an hour and 45 minutes on average. There’s always something shut down, closed, or under construction. PennDOT has two lanes blocked off but nobody is actually working on anything. And getting out of the lots is a huge pain in the butt, depending on where you end up. It’s one thing to wait for the complex to clear out, maybe you go to Stateside Live or drink some beers while standing around your car, but that’s not always tenable for families or people that work 9-5 or need to get home for whatever reason.

In all, it’s usually more than three hours roundtrip to get to the sports complex and back:

Stage 1 – trucking it to Fern Rock

The Doylestown Regional Rail line runs through this area. You can get the train and then switch over to the Broad Street Line in Center City, or drive to Fern Rock station in North Philly and ride the BSL all the way down.

I’ll run both experiments to see which is faster and more convenient, but started first with Fern Rock, which is the BSL’s northern terminus.

The drive is about 18 miles through North Wales and down route 309. There’s always a bit of rush hour traffic on Sumneytown Pike, usually because of this ridiculous stop sign near the William Penn Inn, then you have to scoot down Cheltenham or Ogontz Avenue, which is typically a cluster of stoplights and volume. You go a few blocks down to Nedro Avenue and you’re there.

It took me 51 minutes to drive the first portion of the trip.

Parking is only $2 and easy at the kiosk or using the app. The platform is right next to the lots and there’s really no walking involved. It’s an easier in and out than the Chic-fil-A drive through:

Stage 2 – Broad Street Line

The BSL has express trains that skip a bunch of stops. They weren’t running any of those when I arrived, so I hopped on the local instead, which stops 20 times before getting to NRG station. It’s a little more than a half hour from start to finish, and honestly not that bad. You sit there and zone out, listen to music or dick around on your phone and then you look up and you’re almost there.

This particular ride was pretty standard. One guy was smoking a blunt and another guy was panhandling, walking up and down the aisles asking for money. Some woman sat on a broken seat which wasn’t screwed into the ground, and that’s to be expected when the trains are a hundred years old. The Broad Street Line moves a lot of people and it’s pretty quick and efficient. It’s not the London Tube in terms of cleanliness and grandeur, and the orange seats are hideous, but it gets the job done.

It took me 40 minutes to get to NRG:

The verdict

Throw in a five-minute walk to Xfinity Mobile Arena, and it took 96 minutes to get from my driveway to the arena. A little more than an hour and a half, which was slightly slower than driving.

On the way back, I walked out of the arena at 9:49 p.m., and got off the train at 10:45 p.m., so 56 minutes for the first portion of the return trip. I had to wait for a train this time around, so it took a little longer. After getting back in the truck at 10:46 p.m., I pulled into the driveaway at 11:18 p.m., so 32 minutes for the driving portion, totaling 88 minutes coming back.

In all, it was 96 minutes down, 88 minutes back, and 184 minutes total. That’s a shade over three hours and makes for an almost-negligible difference between driving down and back. We’ll run the Regional Rail experiment sometime soon and see if that winds up being faster than driving to Fern Rock.

Positives and negatives

The positives are pretty obvious. For one, it’s cheaper than driving. You burn less gas and don’t have to pay $30 to park. The SEPTA surface lots cost $2 a day and a ride itself is a little less than three dollars, so that’s a difference of about ~$22 roundtrip. You also save yourself a bit of road rage, not having to join the parade of assholes and instead walking right out the door and down the steps to get back on the train.

The negatives? Well, you’re ceding control to someone else, i.e., you gotta wait for the train and work off the SEPTA schedule. The BSL runs past midnight, but if you need to take it back to a Regional Rail point, those trains don’t run with as much frequency and you have to be deliberate in timing it out. There’s also something to be said for just getting in your car and getting out of it when you reach your driveway. You’re at the steering wheel and calling your own shots, playing music at a loud volume, whatever. And then obviously you can’t set up a tailgate for the Eagles or Phillies without a vehicle, nor can you leave something in your car before heading into the stadium, so you typically have to travel light when doing it this way.

All told, I would take the BSL again. I used to take it back and forth to work years ago between Ellsworth/Federal and Spring Garden and it hasn’t changed much. It’s not glamorous, but it gets the job done. In this case, the travel time ended up being mostly negligible, a wash, but I was calmer and did not want to get out of my truck and strangle anybody. Recency bias certainly influences this feeling, since driving to and from the games is like a foray into Dante’s 9th Circle of Hell. But if they simply fixed the problems at the sports complex and directed traffic and had someone who gives a shit running the show, then I’d start driving again for the convenience factor.

The elephant in the room

SEPTA has been in sports-adjacent headlines somewhat frequently over the last two years. It was central to the 76 Place plan, which was ultimately scrapped. It was then the subject of a funding crisis ahead of the 2025 Eagles season, which was patched with $394 million in capital assistance to kick the can down the road for two years. SEPTA will be key in the sports complex redevelopment spearheaded by Comcast and HBSE.

But it’s not as simple as putting two options side by side and making an emotionless choice. There’s a negative stigma that some people associate with mass transit. Right or wrong, fair or unfair, people think they’re going to get mugged on the train. They think it’s unsafe, dirty, or simply beneath them. They think SEPTA is for poor people without cars, and/or they saw a story on the news and want nothing to do with stepping on a train.

This certainly comes with an element of “suburban guy afraid of the city,” but while smelling weed or being harassed for money may be nothing for anybody who has ever lived in Philadelphia, it does bother other people, and it makes them drive their gas-guzzling SUV in from the Main Line instead. Add to this a general lack of understanding, for instance, thinking the EL and the Regional Rail are similar, and there’s some basic ignorance of mass transit in these parts.

With proper funding you also need a robust ridership, and SEPTA would benefit from people believing that mass transit is “cool,” for lack of a better word. Maybe some sort of marketing campaign – “SEPTA doesn’t suck! Give us a try!” You’re going to have people coming from all over the globe for the World Cup, MLB All-Star Game, and Semiquincentennial celebrations, and I’d be lying if I didn’t express some concern with how they’re going to view our transit system. It is absolutely crummy compared to what they have in Europe and Asia. Not even close to the standard overseas. So you have an opportunity to showcase mass transit in Philly and convince people that it’s decent and workable, but that truly feels tenuous at best.

To that point, I think of Jeremy Blatstein repeatedly going to City Hall and challenging councilmembers to take SEPTA into the city. He’s the guy who runs the “Next Philly Mayor” Twitter account. The whole point of his campaign, I think, is to generate some sort of top-down example, that public servants taking public transit promotes SEPTA in a beneficial way.

Essentially – How can you sell others on mass transit when you yourself don’t use it?

That’s the question he’s asking, and it’s a legitimate one that extends into Philadelphia sports fandom.