Sale of “Pope Passes” Crashes SEPTA Site

Those trying to buy the special SEPTA regional rail passes for the weekend of the pope’s September visit were thwarted yesterday by high volume crashing the site. The site for buying the passes went live at 9 AM yesterday and crashed almost immediately. By 10:30 AM SEPTA decided to shut down the site and the ticket sales indefinitely. The agency has announced that it doesn’t know yet when ticket sales will resume, but promises that riders will have a notice of at least 24 hours before it happens.

SEPTA says that it does not know when the regional rail passes will go back on sale.

SEPTA clearly was unprepared for the sheer volume of people wanting to buy passes. News reports stated that the agency had tested the site for volume last weekend, and determined that it should be capable of processing 1,700 requests per second and up to 600,000 visitors at a time. Clearly, demand surpassed that. The site had 900,000 visitors in the first ten minutes that it was available. One hour later, after sales had been shut down, 64,000 people were still trying to buy passes.

Normal weekend rail services will be suspended during September 26-27 as Pope Francis comes to town for the World Meeting of Families. SEPTA’s regional rail system will operate from only 18 stations to keep an express service available. The passes are only being sold online. They are $10 each and good for a specific stop apiece. They are good for one day only. Before the site crashed only 28 transactions went through. Those transactions amounted to 201 passes, or an average of 7 passes per transaction. There is a limit of 10 passes per transaction.