Philly's Transit is on the Brink. How Did we Get Here?

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When my wife and I relocated from Austin, Tex. to Ambler, Pa., one of the big draws was the 170-year-old train station that offers direct rail access to Center City, Philadelphia. After a decade in a city where public transit is largely regarded as a safety net service for the unfortunate few who lack cars, it was exciting to be back in a place where transit is good enough that many people choose it over cars.

Talk about bad timing. On June 26, two weeks after we moved into an apartment building whose branding is tied to the train –– The Crossings at Ambler Station –– the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority approved a budget to decimate its extensive bus, rail and trolley service.

If the service cuts were fully implemented, we’d still have a train, but off-peak service will decline from once an hour to once every two hours and it will stop running entirely at 9 pm –– a major buzz kill for date nights in the city. Five other regional rail lines would be eliminated entirely, along with more than 50 bus routes. To add insult to injury, the gutted service would come with a 20% fare increase.

It was frustrating enough to watch Austin try to build its first ever light rail line only to be besieged by cost-overruns, NIMBY lawsuits and, above all else, a stubborn belief that trains simply can’t work in Texas. But the prospect of watching a stellar century-old transit system get destroyed is much worse. Don’t these people understand what they’ve got!? In my conversations with many lifelong Philadelphians, the answer is ambiguous. They both take SEPTA for granted but hold it in contempt for its shortcomings, including its oldest-in-the-nation trains that are frequently late due to mechanical issues.

In a city where 25% of commute trips are made by transit, such drastic cuts will cause serious pain. Not only will it lead to longer travel times for transit users, but it will almost certainly prompt many to abandon transit altogether, clogging the roads with more cars and prompting Philadelphia to follow in the footsteps of so many other American cities –– Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland –– that abandoned transit and walkability in favor of auto-dependence in the mid-20th century.

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In contrast to most transit agencies around the country, SEPTA has no dedicated revenue source besides passenger fares, which cover about 36% of SEPTA’s operating costs –– actually an extremely high “farebox recovery ratio” for the U.S..

The rest of its operating budget, however, comes from the state. While there is no shortage of state and local taxes in Pennsylvania, the state has thus far resisted allowing local governments (cities, counties, transit authorities) to levy taxes for transit.

For many years this wasn’t a problem. A 2013 law set aside hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue from state toll roads to local transit agencies, including about $180 million for SEPTA alone. But that law expired in 2022 and some legislators were not keen to divert money that they believed should be used for road maintenance to transit. This left SEPTA and other transit authorities at the mercy of the chaotic annual state budget process, which almost never actually concludes before the June 30 “deadline.”

Like other transit agencies, SEPTA’s budget was dealt a severe blow when ridership cratered during the pandemic. Bus and subway ridership has climbed back to 82% of pre-pandemic levels, but the more expensive regional rail service is only at 71%.

The drop in fare revenue, paired with rising costs due inflation, meant that SEPTA needed more money from the state. An influx of federal pandemic relief funds allowed the agency to get by for a while, and last year Gov. Josh Shapiro plugged the hole with a portion of federal highway dollars, but this year there were no quick fixes left. The state had to pony up.

Once upon a time, a partisan split at the state legislature wouldn’t have posed an obvious threat to urban transit funding, but in a political shift that mirrors national trends, rural Pennsylvania has grown redder while the cities and inner-suburbs have become bluer, leaving urban transit agencies without much standing in the GOP. Only one of the Senate’s 27 Republicans hails from Philly and only a few others represent districts with a significant number of public transit riders.

Many legislators from other parts of the state not only lack a political incentive to support transit in Pennsylvania’s largest city, but they are eager to portray SEPTA’s crisis as the “haves” from the big city asking the “have nots” from the country to bail them out.

In a fiery speech to his colleagues, Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman contrasted the pleas for help for Southeastern Pennsylvania with what he described as the indifference to the plight of his constituents in the coal-producing region of western Pennsylvania, “whose livelihoods have been threatened and continue to be threatened by bad environmental policies.”

There are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Leaders of the “collar counties” surrounding Philadelphia have signaled a willingness to levy new taxes to fund SEPTA.

In my view, the best bet long-term for SEPTA will be a local revenue source, paid by taxpayers who are keenly aware of the service’s value. Perhaps a local sales tax levied in the areas SEPTA serves. Relying on a source as distant and capricious as the state is a recipe for disaster. Hopefully even those who are totally indifferent to urban transit will allow the communities that value transit to fund it.

My hope is that SEPTA will not only survive this crisis, but emerge from it stronger, with not only greater financial support, but with greater appreciation from the hundreds of thousands of people it moves everyday. No matter how frustrated they may have been in the past with old or late trains, they now hopefully know that it could be much worse.

CoMotion's mobility goodness brought to you by:

Jack Craver,
Editor, CoMotion NEWS
jcraver@comotionglobal.com

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