Harrisburg can’t afford to let SEPTA fail | Editorial

It wasn’t too long ago that public transit in Pennsylvania was thriving. In 2012, the American Public Transportation Association named SEPTA as the nation’s best transit agency. The year before, the agency recorded its highest ridership since the end of the Cold War. It even ran the Market-Frankford and Broad Street Lines 24/7 overnight on weekends.

Smaller agencies like Lehigh Valley’s LANTA saw significant gains. With Republicans in the governor’s office and controlling both houses of the General Assembly, Harrisburg passed Act 89, which used tolls from the turnpike to fund transit statewide. For the first time in decades, SEPTA began to make progress on its maintenance backlog, and to explore new initiatives like Bus Revolution, Reimagining Regional Rail, and Trolley Modernization.

The future looked bright.

Today, however, public transportation is under threat. The pandemic and the shift to remote work has eroded years of ridership growth. Act 89 has expired without adequate replacement, leaving transit agencies statewide down roughly $400 million a year.

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Facing a $213 million structural deficit, SEPTA will be forced to make a 45% cut to service and raise fares by 21% to balance its books. LANTA, Pittsburgh Regional Transit, and smaller transit providers across the commonwealth are in a similar predicament.

Once gone, restoring services will become prohibitively expensive. Like the 23 and 56 trolleys and many other transit services that residents once relied on, these lines will likely be gone forever.

Gov. Josh Shapiro and Democrats in the General Assembly have proposed replacement funding for the lost turnpike revenue in three consecutive budgets. After coming up short in their first two attempts, it is essential their third time be charmed.

So far, GOP legislators have objected to the cost of supporting public transit.

Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman has said his constituents don’t benefit from SEPTA, despite the fact that transit access exists in every county in Pennsylvania. House Minority Leader Joe Topper suggested that SEPTA save money by privatizing bus routes, citing Denver as an example. Except Denver’s RTD spends more per ride on bus service than SEPTA. That doesn’t sound like a good deal for taxpayers.

Some Republicans have suggested they would support transit funding if the request was smaller. They should remember that part of SEPTA’s spending is being done at their behest. After all, Harrisburg and City Hall Republicans demanded that SEPTA spend more on policing. The agency has done so, and now has nearly 200 officers. Instead of demanding cuts, Republicans should instead take credit for the largest one-year drop in violent crime in the agency’s history.

If the commonwealth’s budget is truly so dire that Republicans can’t fund SEPTA, perhaps Shapiro should consider using his line item veto. There is plenty of state money going to economically unproductive programs that most Philadelphians don’t use. Horse racing subsidies, roads in counties that are projected to depopulate, and free state police coverage for wealthy rural and exurban communities that lack their own local cops all represent much more sensible ways to reduce the budget deficit than gutting public transportation.

In past negotiations, Republicans have sought to push the blame on Harrisburg Democrats, claiming that other priorities came before funding for SEPTA. Kim Ward, the Senate president pro tempore, cited education spending in particular as crowding out other priorities.

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Of course, education spending is something you perhaps might hope everyone would support. Especially given the ruling by Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer, who was elected as a Republican, holding that the status quo in education is unconstitutional.

Education funding also has a readily available solution. Pennsylvania is currently overpaying significantly for cyber charters. A proposed reform by Shapiro would unlock more than $600 million for school districts across the state. That’s double what the transit systems have asked for.

Frustratingly, most Democrats have not yet been willing to make SEPTA funding a red line in the budget, taking the confused stance that by insisting on transit funding they’d somehow weaken their hand. Democratic State Rep. Ben Waxman, whose Center City district will experience a devastating decline in economic activity and quality of life if the SEPTA cuts go through, has said that residents “cannot forget that there’s a lot of other things that will be talked about.”

Given Waxman’s penchant for showing up at transit funding rallies, the fact that even he is unwilling to make SEPTA his top priority is profoundly disappointing. Waxman and the rest of the Philadelphia delegation should follow the example of North Philadelphia State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, who told the Philadelphia Tribune’s Marco Cerino that he’s “not voting for any budget that screws over SEPTA.”

Kenyatta has the right approach, in part because public transit is essential across many policy areas, especially public education.

Beyond the more than 50,000 Philadelphia students who take SEPTA every day, access to transit also plays an important role in funding school districts. According to an analysis by Econsult Solutions, the proposed cuts would eliminate roughly $20 billion worth of property value across Southeastern Pennsylvania.

That means the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of revenue for school districts and municipalities. Once job losses and other impacts to economic activity are factored in, Econsult puts the total revenue loss at nearly $12 billion.

Legislators must realize that the threat of significant cuts to public transit makes funding these systems the most pressing issue for this budget. Any boost to schools that does not accompany adequate transit funding will only cost districts more over time.

The same is true for the Republicans’ stated desire to prioritize the state’s deficit and its road system. Without SEPTA, demand for highway construction in the southeast will skyrocket, crowding out initiatives in rural areas. Like school districts, the commonwealth’s bottom line will suffer.

» READ MORE: Proper funding may help SEPTA avoid Key card-style boondoggles | Editorial

That’s why Harrisburg must find a bipartisan solution that sustainably funds transit in Pennsylvania. Whether it’s through the sales tax, a tax on skill games, or the legalization and taxation of recreational marijuana, it is time to stop making excuses and fund public transportation.

In addition to passing Shapiro’s proposed increase in state funding, lawmakers should also authorize counties to levy their own transit taxes, something that is currently prohibited by state law. Doing so would be in the interest of both sides of the debate.

For transit-dependent regions in the southeast, a local transit tax would unlock substantive investments in service and coverage. It could mean more frequent service on Regional Rail, extensions to places like Phoenixville and West Chester, progress on SEPTA’s multibillion dollar maintenance backlog, and more frequent bus service along crowded commercial corridors. It would also relieve pressure on Harrisburg to increase transit funding in the future.

No matter what option they choose, Pennsylvania leaders cannot leave SEPTA and other transit agencies in the cold again. The commonwealth can’t afford it.