Our house in Jim Thorpe.
I used to live in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, fifty miles north of foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, did not have a bus or train service up into Carbon County; I commuted every day. Why, then, I asked myself, was I taxed to support and subsidize the people who did have SEPTA service in Philadelphia and its collar counties. I no longer live in the Keystone State, so this story doesn’t affect me, but the question still remains: why should my old neighbors and friends in Pennsylvania, many of whom are out of reach of SEPTA’s service area, be taxed to support a system they cannot use?
SEPTA wants more state sales-tax revenue to avoid ‘draconian’ service cuts next spring
A change in the law would give SEPTA an additional $190 million from the state sales tax each year to run its buses, trolleys and subways.
by Thomas Fitzgerald | Thursday, August 24, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT
In an effort to secure desperately needed funding, SEPTA officials are lobbying for a proposal in Harrisburg that would increase by about 45% the annual share of state sales-tax revenue devoted to paying for public transportation.
If their efforts are successful, the state’s Public Transportation Trust Fund would receive 6.4% of the money generated by the sales tax, up from 4.4%, generating an additional $295 million annually for public transit operations across the state. The sales tax itself would not increase.
SEPTA estimates that it would get an additional $190 million annually, with a $65.6 million increase for Pittsburgh Regional Transit and $38.8 million more for other systems, based on the state’s funding formula, which allocates dollars to transit agencies.
“We’ll really be able to prevent a draconian service reduction and extraordinary fare increases,” SEPTA CEO Leslie S. Richards said Wednesday when asked about the proposal. “That is what we will be left with when we get to next spring, if we don’t see a way out of this looming fiscal cliff.”
Part of that “looming fiscal cliff” would be from the $75,000 per year raise that the SEPTA Board gave CEO Leslie Richards just last May:
A panel of three board members reviewed publicly available salaries for the leaders of other large transit systems to help determine Richards’ salary, SEPTA said in a statement announcing the reappointment.
Perhaps, but shouldn’t that also be based on whether Mrs Richards was actually doing her job well?
SEPTA has been plagued by delayed service and accidents, with chronic shortfalls in essential staff:
One in six budgeted engineer positions is unfilled, per SEPTA figures, and the total number of train operators and trainees is 12% lower than it was in January 2019. Funding isn’t the problem, although overall the agency is generally worried about its fiscal future.
Billy Penn also reported that workers are leaving faster than positions can be filled. If Mrs Richards cannot keep these, to use the Democrats’ mantra, “good, well-paying, union jobs” filled, what does that say about her job performance?
Early Monday morning (June 12, 2023), a Trenton train was delayed because of “manpower issues.” A park and ride service at one station on the line was repeatedly canceled last week “due to operator unavailability.” On Friday (June 9, 2023), trips on the Market-Frankford and Broad Street subway lines were canceled for lack of workers. “Operator unavailability” is frequently given as the reason for delays and cancellations, especially on certain bus lines.
The unreliable service has sparked doubts SEPTA can step in to provide a needed workaround to the highway collapse.
“SEPTA better commit to quick and significant improvements of service or the city is going to see a major exodus from any northern suburb employees,” rider Kristen McCabe of Media wrote on Sunday.
Yet, despite all of that, despite SEPTA’s inability to manage the assets and service it currently has, there’s significant political pressure to build the Roosevelt Boulevard subway line, guesstimated to cost between $2.5 and 3.4 billion, in year 2000 dollars. We have previously noted The Philadelphia Inquirer’s story in which the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, admitted that they had “lost control of the train cars.”
The Biden Administration and the global warming climate change activists want us to all leave our cars behind — if we would even be allowed to own them — and depend on public transportation as much as possible. The Philadelphia Tribune reported that 42% of Black households and 50% of impoverished households in Philly don’t own a car, yet SEPTA has been hit with decreased ridership:
Ridership remains well below pre-pandemic levels, and SEPTA needs those passengers back, officials say. Federal pandemic aid will run out by April 2024, and the agency depends on rider fares to make enough money to operate.
Really, who would want to depend on SEPTA? The trains are filthy, crime on board the buses and trains, and at the train and subway stations, has been increasing, and too many of the stations have become de facto homeless shelters, littered with trash and used hypodermic needles left by junkies.
That decreased ridership? It has been politically correct to lay the blame for that on the panicdemic — spelled exactly the way I see it, as a huge overreaction — and the fact that some Center City office workers who were able to work remotely during the COVID-19 shutdowns have found that pretty good, and are still doing so. But the crime and the filth are also to blame. It seems that the good Democrats in Philly, who gave 81.44% of their votes to Joe Biden, the President who wants them to use public transportation, aren’t quite so eager to ride SEPTA’s buses and trains.
And so we have Leslie Richards, $425,000 a year Leslie Richards, wanting to make the people in Jim Thorpe and Summit Hill and Mahanoy City have more of the sales taxes they pay go to help SEPTA, rather than those dollars coming back to their communities, even though Mrs Richards has proven that she cannot manage the system she oversees. SEPTA should be paid for not by the citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but by the people who use the service, and fares should be increased to support that service.
I work in the public transit industry…not directly, I work for a contractor that supplies products solely to public transit agencies.
I can tell you with great confidence that there’s not a public transit agency in the United States that funds their operations through fares. They are all funded primarily through local, state and federal taxes.
Most of the contracts my company wins are funded through federal “grants”…i.e. tax money.
Public transit is basically just another welfare program where middle-class suburbanites are subsidizing the denizens of the inner cities.
Many transit agencies are struggling because their state and federal money is usually tied to ridership numbers. When the geniuses in government shut everything down for the panicdemic, ridership tanked. Post China Virus, many office workers are still phoning it in (literally) and don’t go to their downtown offices much any more.
That’s exacerbated severely by the lax law enforcement of the big liberal cities so in those places, the only ridership they currently have are criminals, druggies and bums who generally don’t even bother the pay the negligible fares anyway.
The decreases in ridership have created a feedback loop and I don’t think they have any idea how to get out of it. Decreases in ridership mean decreases in revenue. That means they can’t afford to maintain equipment or pay personnel so they have service disruptions, dirty and unsafe conditions, and ultimately have to reduce service. Those issues cause frustration and fear for people who actually have schedules to keep (like, you know, making it safely to a job on time), so the people who could use public transit stop using it, which reduces ridership, which reduces revenue, rinse, lather, repeat.
The only way for them to survive is to increase revenue streams from outside sources that are totally independent of their ridership or the quality of service that they provide.
The problem with that is that when you disconnect the reward (revenue) from the performance, there’s no incentive to provide quality service so such schemes rarely result in improvements.
The genius, highly paid bureaucrats will end up “investing” the extra money in pie in the sky projects like electric buses that don’t work and brand new administrative offices but service gets no better because there’s no incentive to make it so.
But, because the Federal and World governments are determined to pack us all into cities, eliminate our ability to travel freely and control us like automatons, I’m pretty confident that the public transit agencies will be deemed too important to let fail. They’ll get their tax money.
When they finally accomplish their goal of making it so expensive that we little people can’t afford to own personal transportation, they’ll need some method of shuttling us between our cells and the salt mines. The overlords gotta have their salt after all.