No more excuses — Harrisburg Republicans must find a way to fully fund SEPTA

For the third year in a row, Philadelphians await the commonwealth’s budget with bated breath. Will SEPTA, our local transit agency, get the funding it desperately needs this time around? Or is it three strikes and we’re out half of our Regional Rail network?

The first time Gov. Josh Shapiro proposed funding public transit in 2023, Harrisburg Republicans said that SEPTA needed to shape up, particularly around how it handled crime and unruly behavior on buses and trains, before asking for more money.

The second time around, the following year, a grand bargain that funded infrastructure for urban, suburban, and rural areas was floated, only for Republicans to fail to come to an agreement once again, even after promising to take the issue up again in the fall. Shapiro was forced to “flex,” or transfer, federal highway dollars to SEPTA to keep it afloat.

This time, the excuse is money. Not long ago, Republican Treasurer Stacy Garrity was proclaiming a “record high” amount of cash in the commonwealth’s Rainy Day Fund, which hit $7 billion. Now, apparently, Pennsylvania is too broke to spend another $200 million a year on the transit systems that provide more than a million rides every day.

No matter which excuse you pick, however, the claims simply don’t add up.

After Harrisburg Republicans demanded that SEPTA do better on public safety, the agency responded. It recriminalized fare evasion and other offenses, and hired more police officers.

In fact, almost half of SEPTA’s budget request is the direct result of money spent keeping the system safer and cleaner. The transit agency also posted the largest one-year drop in serious crime in its history.

When it comes to competing infrastructure needs, it is Harrisburg legislators who have proved the biggest obstacle to funding, not SEPTA or its proponents.

After I put up a social media post expressing skepticism about the need to fund roads in the 41 Pennsylvania counties that are losing population, a public relations person who works with SEPTA called to defend the idea as the way a commonwealth should work. If only the state Senate felt that same kind of solidarity.

The fact is that by adding it to the infrastructure, Republicans were simply making it more expensive … and thus, harder to pass, leading to their current objection that funding transit just costs too much.

Of course, once you take away the road spending Republicans asked for and the additional public safety spending Republicans asked for, SEPTA’s requested increase is less than $100 million a year, out of a budget that’s around $50 billion. Are we really pretending this allocation will be the straw that will break the camel’s back?

In fact, rather than saving taxpayers money, cutting SEPTA is likely to cost Pennsylvanians more in residual benefits connected to the system.

According to research put together by local consulting firm Econsult Solutions, the cuts to SEPTA service would trigger a loss of revenue at both the state and local levels.

Thanks to what Econsult terms the “housing premium” of being located near SEPTA stations, the proposed removal of five Regional Rail lines is projected to erase roughly $20 billion in property values, with the majority of these losses coming in the suburban counties. School districts along these routes will feel the financial burden sharply.

Beyond the loss of household property values, Econsult predicts 76,000 fewer jobs, a further collapse in the commercial real estate market, and $6 billion less in earnings, with a grand total of $674 million in losses for the commonwealth and local governments.

What kind of math are Harrisburg Republicans doing where it makes sense to forego nearly $700 million in order to save $200 million?

GOP lawmakers also claim SEPTA is inefficient. My Inquirer newsroom colleagues have done an excellent job of exposing the various grafts and schemes that have victimized the transit agency, but the fact is that SEPTA is easily the most frugal of the nation’s major transit agencies. In fact, it is thanks to an earlier and more responsible generation of Harrisburg Republicans that we know this.

Rather than saving taxpayers money, cutting SEPTA is likely to cost Pennsylvanians more in residual benefits connected to the system.

When Gov. Tom Corbett, the most conservative politician to hold that role since the advent of color television, worked with State Rep. John Taylor and state Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi to pass Act 89, they also included reporting requirements for SEPTA.

Every year, SEPTA must compare its own spending to other transit agencies across the country. The fact is that SEPTA is spending less than its peers, almost across the board. If anything, Harrisburg should be patting itself on the back for providing the most frugal transit service in America.

This is especially remarkable when you consider that SEPTA runs six different kinds of service, while many other agencies only provide one or two. SEPTA’s heavy rail service on the Broad Street and Market-Frankford Lines costs less than $5 per ride, with only New York’s MTA coming in cheaper.

When it comes to bus service, however, SEPTA does better than New York, with only Los Angeles and Chicago offering more efficient service. Of course, SEPTA has a plan to make its bus service even cheaper on a per-ride basis: Bus Revolution. It can’t move forward without sustainable funding.

Even Regional Rail, SEPTA’s most expensive service on a per-ride basis, is a national leader in efficiency. Only Denver’s Regional Transportation District comes in cheaper, and that is a modern system with four lines, 22 stations, and 54 miles of track.

SEPTA is operating a system that was designed in the 19th century, and offers 13 lines serving 155 stations on 280 miles of track. That the cost per ride comes in at just over $15 is nothing short of remarkable, and once again, SEPTA has a plan to drop costs even further.

Just ensuring all stations provide higher platforms with level boarding could potentially shave those costs down further. Once again, this plan awaits action from Harrisburg.

A more sophisticated critic might say that while SEPTA is more efficient than other American transit systems, it still trails transit agencies around the world. That’s true, but there isn’t much SEPTA can do to change that.

SEPTA starts its bus operators at a salary of just over $50,000 a year. That’s lower than regional competitors like NJ Transit. The minimum wage for bus drivers in London is 23,000 pounds. That’s around $30,000.

The pay is similar for bus operators in Tokyo, Paris, and other major cities. I would challenge you to find a single person who is willing and able to drive a bus in Philadelphia for less than you can make waiting tables or making lattes.

In addition to the significant salary disparity, SEPTA also has to pay a significant amount toward employee healthcare plans. This means SEPTA’s frontline workers need twice as much compensation as their international counterparts if they are going to keep up with the American cost of living.

That’s without getting into the way the Buy America requirement for new equipment and our litigation-based environmental protection regime raise the costs and lower the effectiveness of new capital projects.

We all know SEPTA is not perfect, but starving it of the resources it needs will only make it worse and hurt more than just those who ride. It is time for Harrisburg Republicans to stop making excuses and fund transit.