The Rancorous State Politics Tanking Philly Transit

Philadelphia’s mass transit system has been careening toward a fiscal cliff for years, and now it’s falling over the edge.

This month, amid a grinding stalemate in the state legislature that is eight weeks late in delivering a budget, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) is implementing a series of service cuts and fare hikes that officials and advocates fear will inflict lasting damage on the system and the region’s economy.

SEPTA is facing a $213 million operating deficit. Starting this weekend, the agency will reduce transit service by 45 percent, eliminating 50 bus routes and five train lines, while running other buses less frequently and getting rid of nighttime service on some routes. It plans to raise fares by more than 20 percent, pushing the base fare to $2.90 per ride, equal to New York but higher than Boston and Washington, D.C., the other large systems on the East Coast. And it says if the state doesn’t deliver a solution, much worse cuts will come starting in January.

The origins of the current crisis were common to all big-city transit systems. When COVID-19 shutdowns began, people stopped riding buses and trains all at once. Between February and April 2020, SEPTA lost 70 percent of its bus riders and 85 percent of its subway riders; virtually no one rode the regional rail throughout that spring. Ridership has recovered since then, to 82 percent on buses and just over 70 percent on subways and regional trains. But the damage has been steep. While every public transit system is funded with a mix of local, state, and tax revenue, SEPTA’s budget was more reliant on fares than most. Systems with high farebox recovery, like Bay Area Rapid Transit in San Francisco, saw the worst revenue losses.

Federal relief money helped systems push off the crisis for several years, but now authorities are asking states to step in. So far this year, legislatures in Illinois and Oregon have both failed to strike transportation funding deals that would keep their transit systems from making cuts. Now the same might happen in Pennsylvania, where the bitter interregional politics of transportation funding have been on stark display.

Democrats, who control the state House, have put forward multiple proposals for more state funding for transit systems, including increasing the share of a state sales tax that goes to transit. But Republicans, who control the state Senate, have resisted raising taxes and suggested that SEPTA’s problems are of its own making. Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, asked for more transit money in his budget proposal last year, but the legislature ultimately wouldn’t sign off.

Partly the issue comes down to an urban-rural divide, with Republican legislators tending to represent rural areas with poor transit service and Democrats tending to represent urban ones with a relatively high share of transit riders. As state Sen. Joe Pittman, the Republican majority leader, told Governing last year: “We don’t see transit as the critical issue that our friends on the other side of the aisle see it as.”

Last fall, to stave off SEPTA’s cuts, Shapiro flexed $153 million in federal highway funding reserved for future construction projects to transit operations. Some rural legislators took that as an affront. Earlier this month, after the House passed a version of the budget that increased ongoing operations funding for transit, the Senate passed its own version, which would prop up operations for the next year by re-allocating money from the state Public Transportation Trust Fund, which pays for transit’s capital needs. SEPTA officials said that would only make the funding problem worse.

“Now you know how we felt back in November when the governor absconded $153 million from road projects and put it into transit,” Pittman said in a speech, addressing Senate Democrats. “Doesn’t feel so good, does it?”

Republican state Rep. Jamie Barton put it bluntly in a video posted on social media by the House GOP: “Why should the hardworking people of Berks County, the hardworking people of Schuylkill County be sending their tax dollars to a failed system and bailing them out?” he said.

Anti-Philadelphia sentiment has been a feature of state politics for decades, despite (or perhaps because of) the metro area’s role as the biggest population and economic center of Pennsylvania. There’s also general resentment toward the billions that go to state transit systems each year, of which SEPTA is by far the largest.

“People outside of Philadelphia tend to think a lot of state money goes to Philadelphia — more than they deserve,” says Berwood Yost, a director at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. “That’s always been a talking point.”

In response, another Democrat legislator from the Philadelphia suburbs, Rep. Melissa Shusterman, floated a proposal that attempts to undercut that argument by creating regional economic categories. The proposal would allow each region to keep the tax revenue it generates and spend it how it sees fit. It hasn’t been introduced as a bill yet, but Shusterman says it’s meant to emphasize the importance of the Philadelphia region and its transit service.

“For years I’ve listened to my honorable Republican colleagues disparage southeast PA, our communities, our diversity, our schools, our mass transit and our quote-unquote out-of-control spending without offering any meaningful solutions or compromise that is responsible or economically effective,” Shusterman says. “We here are the driver of the economic engine of the entire state.”

Despite the rural-urban animosity, Senate Republicans claim they provided solutions when they passed a budget that would move capital funding to operations. Some have criticized SEPTA for not accepting that deal and instead moving forward with cuts.

“Our proposal was to give [SEPTA] every penny that the governor wanted to give them,” state Sen. Joe Picozzi, a Republican who represents northeast Philadelphia, said in a recent interview with NBC10. (Both Pittman and Picozzi declined interview requests from Governing.) “Are you essentially holding our riders hostage to get the exact deal you want, or do you really need the money now to stop this crisis?”

In any event, the cuts are starting, and advocates and officials worry they will only make SEPTA’s financial problems worse. With less frequent service going to fewer places, ridership is likely to drop again, which could lead to more revenue losses and force more cuts — a “death spiral” that transit agencies are eager to avoid. Shusterman says she regrets the “either/or” dynamic of the negotiations, playing up divisions between urban and rural areas, transit and roads. But she fears losing transit service will devastate her district.

“I am fighting for my community, my constituents, and our regional economy,” Shusterman says, “because my back is up against the wall.”