Despite the ways we grouse about SEPTA, it’s efficient. In fact, really efficient.

For many Americans, public transit is not part of daily life. The mere idea that someone would choose to ride the bus over driving is such a foreign concept that State Sen. Cris Dush (R., Jefferson) compared it to having a chauffeur.

So it isn’t surprising that there are a lot of popular misconceptions about transit spending in the commonwealth. Given more than a century of car culture and how hard it is to get Harrisburg to do just about anything, it must be a recurring act of divine intervention that has saved transit in Southeastern Pennsylvania so far.

SEPTA is an organization that was stitched together from multiple private bus, trolley, and railroad companies, and held together by 100 years of Band-Aid fixes. When our buses are often late or canceled, our subways are dirty, and the Regional Rail trains break down, it’s difficult to muster any appreciation for it. These scenarios are exactly how the average person could come to the conclusion that SEPTA is “wasteful” or “inefficient” with our money but, counterintuitively, this is not the case.

SEPTA is the reason Philadelphia is on every Top 10 list of transit cities in North America.

Despite the public’s commonly held misconceptions, our transit agency is actually one of the best at making your dollar go further, or more accurately, making your transit go farther for less.

While Pennsylvania spends more on transit than rural states that lack significant transit ridership, SEPTA operates with substantially fewer resources than its peers, like Boston’s MBTA and Washington’s WMATA, let alone regions with growing ridership like Seattle.

It’s hard to compare different transit systems to each other, but one place to begin is to take daily ridership of a system and its daily operational costs to arrive at the average rider cost.

Last fall SEPTA consistently had a daily ridership of about 790,000 and its operations budget for 2024 was roughly $4,647,000 a day. This gives us an average rider cost of about $5.90 per ride, which is not only impressive, but significantly better than other agencies of similar sizes.

New York’s MTA has a rider cost of about $8.71, Boston’s MBTA is $9.03, and Chicago’s RTA is about $10.04. If you want to see an actual wasteful agency just look at San Jose’s VTA, with a whopping $17.86 per rider cost.

SEPTA’s current budget crisis is almost completely caused by Harrisburg‘s failure to continue the successful Act 89, which helped create a yearly pool of money in the state budget for transit. In 2022, the General Assembly did not vote to renew the bill, and every year since, SEPTA has had to muster advocates and riders to beg their politicians to fund transit.

Senate Republicans are effectively wasting everyone’s time and money, making us do this song and dance every single year.

Any calls to privatize SEPTA are foolhardy, especially if you’re aware of SEPTA’s history. All of Philadelphia’s private transit companies went bankrupt.

Transit is no longer a profit-generating business, it is a public service — one that provides over a million rides to Pennsylvanians every day.

And maybe we should all be reminded that we dump billions and billions into PennDot every single year for highways — including for unpopular projects like the widening of I-95. Yet no one stops for one second to consider budget constraints for that.

Instead of forcing service cuts, Harrisburg should follow the lead of Illinois and Massachusetts by encouraging smart growth. Allowing for more housing construction near SEPTA stations, like SEPTA is doing in Conshohocken and Ambler, can help the transit agency pay more of its own expenses, while also helping alleviate the region’s housing shortage.

For any concerned fiscal conservatives, it doesn’t cost the commonwealth anything.

Alan Fisher is a transit, urban planning, and railroad advocate living in Philadelphia. He is the host of “The Armchair Urbanist,” which covers the complex layers of transportation and urban history.