While there are all sorts of reports on movement in the Pennsylvania General Assembly on additional funding for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), at least as of this Friday morning writing, no funding agreement has been reached. Mayor Cherelle Parker Mullins has paid forward some of the city’s $135 million subsidy, to keep city bus service for schools, but that’s only a stopgap for the system’s projected $213 deficit.
But this story from The Philadelphia Inquirer is at least a little bit better than the notion that the taxpayers throughout the Commonwealth should pay for SEPTA:
Philly’s collar counties are only authorized to tax property. Could SEPTA’s budget crisis change that?
County officials have long sought broader taxing authority. Some say the debate over transit funding could force the issue.
by Katie Bernard | Friday, August 29, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
Officials in Philadelphia’s collar counties are hopeful that the monthslong impasse over funding for SEPTA may push lawmakers to consider a change to state tax law they have sought for years.
With many of their residents dependent on SEPTA for daily work commutes and other trips into Philadelphia, officials across the suburban counties — Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Chester — say they are committed to its success, and they contributed more than $30 million to it last year. But the state’s laws, which allow counties to tax only property, prevent them from doing more to support the agency without raising property taxes.
Officials have long asked state lawmakers to grant them the authority to tax wages, sales, or property transfers. Some wonder if the current debate over the beleaguered transit authority may finally push the issue.
“They’re holding up public transit funding for the entire commonwealth,” said Monica Taylor, a Democrat who chairs the Delaware County Council. “All of these things are piling up and coming together, and they haven’t passed a budget. … This is hopefully pushing for the opportunity for people to come back to the table and start talking.”
There’s much more at the original, but you get the drift: the counties want to be able to wring more and more money out of their people.
My position is simple: the people who use SEPTA should be the ones who pay for SEPTA, through a reasonable fare increase of 75¢.[1]Here’s the math! SEPTA’s average daily ridership was approximately 768,291 unlinked passenger trips in May 2025, representing a 7% increase from May 2024. The bus system accounts for the … Continue reading
But, if the government leaders want to keep treating SEPTA not as a public transit system but a welfare agency, frequently welfare for the well-to-do, at least if Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Chester counties start taxing their own residents for a system that is available to them, then the people of Carbon, Cameron, and McKean counties, which do not have access to SEPTA, will not.
Chester, Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware counties are, respectively, the four wealthiest counties in the Commonwealth.
If those heavily Democrat counties — Philadelphia, Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware counties all voted heavily for then Vice President Kamala Harris Emhoff, while President Trump carried Bucks County by the slimmest of margins, 291 votes out of 402,349 total votes cast — want to tax their people more heavily to pay for SEPTA, let them!
The fairest system is for SEPTA riders to pay for SEPTA, but what I have suggested is at least the second most fair system.
References
| ↑1 | Here’s the math! SEPTA’s average daily ridership was approximately 768,291 unlinked passenger trips in May 2025, representing a 7% increase from May 2024. The bus system accounts for the largest portion of daily ridership, with 354,820 unlinked trips, or 50% of the total. With 768,291 unlinked passenger trips every day, and a projected operating deficit of $213 million, how much would fares have to increase to cover the deficit? 768,291 x 365 = 280,426,215 trips per year. A $213,000,000 deficit ÷ 280,426,215 daily trips = 75.96¢ per trip which would need to be collected to completely eliminate the projected deficit. Call it a 75¢ per trip added to the fares, just to male collections simpler, and the budget can be brought under control. |
|---|
“Here’s the math! SEPTA’s average daily ridership was approximately 768,291 unlinked passenger trips in May 2025, representing a 7% increase from May 2024. The bus system accounts for the largest portion of daily ridership, with 354,820 unlinked trips, or 50% of the total. With 768,291 unlinked passenger trips every day, and a projected operating deficit of $213 million, how much would fares have to increase to cover the deficit? 768,291 x 365 = 280,426,215 trips per year. A $213,000,000 deficit ÷ 280,426,215 daily trips = 75.96¢ per trip which would need to be collected to completely eliminate the projected deficit. Call it a 75¢ per trip added to the fares, just to male collections simpler, and the budget can be brought under control.”
The problem with your math is that it doesn’t consider the fact that Public Transit in the US is basically considered an entitlement program like welfare.
A goodly number (probably a majority) of those 768,291 trips per day are free or reduced fares.
If you tried to increase the fares by $.75 per trip, ridership would decrease dramatically, which means you’d have to increase fares again, which would further decrease ridership, rinse, lather, repeat.
Now, granted, that’s kind of how the free market works and I’m not opposed the principle of moving public transit into a private sector business…but if you did, basically public transit would go away.
Which means WAY more vehicular traffic in the cities. You think it’s hard to find parking now when you need to go downtown for something? Wait until there’s no bus or light rail service to ferry people around.
And many of the low wage service workers who work in the cities wouldn’t be able to afford their job any more. Students wouldn’t be able to make it to school. Even better off employees would have to start doing the salary vs expenses math and decide whether working in the city is worth it.
The cascade effects would be devastating.
Our former swabbie wrote:
That’s just it: I refuse to consider public transit as a welfare program!
Even with that, SEPTA provides transit from the wealthy ‘collar counties’ into Philadelphia where they work, for the well-paid businessmen and lawyers and others. If SEPTA is a welfare agency, why provide welfare for the well-to-do?
Or, if the 75¢ is just too much for a lawyer from Lower Merion, he could make his morning coffee in his Keurig at home, roughly 50¢, rather than spending $4.39 for it at Starbucks. Why should the taxpayers be subsidizing his travel and his job?