Jim Kenney urges Mayor Parker to continue SEPTA program that gave free rides to low-income Philadelphians
The Zero Fare program gave recipients "a chance to breathe, to feed their kids and to live with a little less financial stress," Kenney wrote in an Inquirer op-ed.
Former Mayor Jim Kenney on Tuesday urged his successor’s administration to continue the experimental Zero Fare program that gives 25,000 low-income people monthly SEPTA passes at no cost so they can reach jobs, medical appointments, and other destinations.
“Eliminating the free transit program now would only mean fewer people able to work, more people relying on public assistance, and an even more strained local economy,” Kenney wrote in an opinion article published in The Inquirer.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s city budget proposal does not include funding for Zero Fare in fiscal 2026, which begins July 1.
City Councilmembers Nicolas O’Rourke and Jim Harrity have raised concerns about the coming end of the program, as have advocates for low-income people and the urban-policy PAC 5th Square, which is circulating an online petition to save it.
Defunding Zero Fare “betrays a serious anti-poverty strategy that actually helps boost our struggling SEPTA system,” O’Rourke said during a Council hearing last week.
“We have chosen not to continue that pilot, but that does not suggest in any way that we do not support SEPTA and are not concerned about their fiscal health,” Tiffany Thurman, chief of staff for Parker’s administration, told Council members.
Parker administration officials say it would cost the city’s general fund $30 million to continue offering the Zero Fare benefit, which Kenney started in late summer 2023 using federal pandemic aid money for a two-year trial of the idea.
As of mid-March, Zero Fare participants had taken about 6.6 million trips on SEPTA, the transit agency said. In the last three months of 2024, passholders took an average of 100,000 trips a week.
“I don’t get it,” Kenney said in an interview Tuesday, adding that evidence indicates the free-transit program helps people get to work, including in the hard-to-staff hospitality industry.
He did not directly criticize the mayor — “that’s not my role,” Kenney said in the interview. He said that the appropriation for Zero Fare appropriation was written to allocate city money for it to continue.
Kenney said in the commentary article that removing $80 to $100 a month in transit costs makes a big difference for low-income working families at a small relative cost in a $6.7 billion city budget.
“It gave them a chance to breathe, to feed their kids and to live with a little less financial stress,” while helping SEPTA build ridership, he wrote.
“A car picked me up and dropped me off for work every day at City Hall,” Kenney said in the interview. “This is for the folks on the corner in the dark, waiting for the bus to the subway, to get to work.”
The city provides an annual operating subsidy to SEPTA, and the mayor’s pending budget has earmarked $135 million for that next year, said Parker’s spokesperson Joe Grace. It based its current level of support, which is tied to state budget, on the governor’s original request for transit funding rather than the lower amount the legislature passed, Grace said.
Separately, the Parker administration is also planning to cut spending on a program called Key Advantage that gives free SEPTA passes to city workers, another Kenney proposal made as he presented his last budget in the spring of 2023.
“The city is not proposing to eliminate the SEPTA Key [Advantage] program,” Grace said in a statement. “Instead, we are proposing to rationalize the contract through a renegotiation” of the price.
The city funded that employee benefit at $9 million this year, and the pending budget proposal sets aside $5 million for it in fiscal 2026.
After an introductory discount, SEPTA reevaluates the Key Advantage program every six months and resets the cost of passes for participating employers, though prices are not allowed to rise more than 10% at a time.
Employers “decide whether to take it on fully or pay for part of it and collect a co-pay from employees,” SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch said.
Last August, amid a severe financial crisis, Drexel University said it could no longer afford to pay for the benefit for employees and dropped out of the program. Before taking that step, the university had been charging workers a $20 monthly co-payment.