Riding the pothole

Every bright patch on the map is a cluster of calls — potholes, dark streetlights, broken signals, crumbling pavement. The hotter the block, the heavier the maintenance backlog the street is carrying. Philadelphia's 80,310 reports since 2024-01-01 are not evenly distributed across the city.

SEPTA runs about 10,063 bus and trolley stops across Philadelphia, plus 91 Regional Rail and subway stations. Next: those stops appear on the map, sized by how many defect reports sit within walking distance.

The city's stops don't sit evenly across this heat. The cobalt dots mark the stops with the most nearby 311 reports — sized so the worst-hit stops read larger. A handful bear an outsized share of the rider-facing wear.

About 8,014 stops accumulated three or more defect reports in walking distance. The bars rank the heaviest dozen.

The ranking is geographically clustered — heavy-traffic corridors carry both heavy ridership and heavy maintenance load.

Next, the map zooms to 16th St & Walnut St — the single SEPTA stop with the most rider-eye street wear in walking distance. Accent shifts to brick.

This is the view a rider sees standing at 16th St & Walnut St: roughly 274 reports of broken pavement, broken signals, or dark streetlights filed within a 300-meter walk since 2024-01-01. SEPTA does not own the street. The City Streets Department does. But the rider waits at SEPTA's stop and looks at the street the City is responsible for keeping.

Reframing 311 from "where defects are" to "what the rider sees" doesn't change the data — it changes where attention lands. Maintenance budgets that score corridors purely by car traffic miss the rider's experience of the same corridor. The Streets Department's queue and the SEPTA rider's wait are the same wait.