GOP blame shifting won’t restore SEPTA service | Editorial

Finally confronted with the reality of their indifference toward public transportation, state Senate GOP leaders and their allies have a new strategy to defend their yearslong refusal to agree to a sustainable funding solution for SEPTA and other transit systems across Pennsylvania.

The crisis is someone else’s fault.

According to Harrisburg Republicans and the Commonwealth Foundation, it is SEPTA that has mismanaged its operations and depends “less on fares and local funding” than other transit agencies. It is also Gov. Josh Shapiro and state House Democrats who are holding up the state budget — presumably over the piddling matter of sustainable transit funding — to the detriment of the state’s classrooms.

If GOP leaders are so concerned about kids and their education, they need only look at the children forced to leave their homes at the crack of dawn to get to school on time, or the students standing at the stop watching as full buses roll by. They may also want to check their math and realize SEPTA has been underfunded for decades in comparison with peers like Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority or the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.

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It should be a source of shame for the commonwealth that while New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and NJ Transit plot ambitious new extensions to their networks, SEPTA must beg and scrape just to keep what it has.

Without a funding deal, the pain Philadelphians have experienced this week as a 20% service reduction took hold on Sunday is only a fraction of what the region will face in January, when SEPTA will be forced to make even more draconian cuts — including shutting off all train service at 9 p.m., eliminating five Regional Rail lines, and cutting even more bus routes.

The current Republican funding proposal for state transit agencies taps into the state’s Public Transportation Trust Fund in order to cover operating costs today. It is an insultingly shortsighted solution.

Despite claims that this money is “just sitting in an account in Harrisburg,” each dollar is already earmarked to an agency for capital costs. SEPTA alone has already been forced to delay and defer roughly $2 billion worth of spending, with billions more needed simply to maintain the current network. Taking hundreds of millions of dollars from these projects would be irresponsible.

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Others have suggested that SEPTA shouldn’t get the funding it needs because riders aren’t paying their fair share of costs. It is true that the fare box recovery rate, or the percentage of costs that are covered by fares, has fallen in the last decade, but this is the case for every major American transit agency. According to the Federal Transit Administration, the pandemic eliminated about 80% of all ridership. This was in spite of research suggesting that using mass transit was safe.

Many American offices remain either entirely remote or working on a hybrid basis five years later, removing a substantial portion of ridership and fare revenue. Is it fair to tell schoolchildren and workers whose jobs require an in-person presence, two groups that already suffered disproportionately during the pandemic, that they must wait longer because of cultural shifts they have no control over and haven’t benefited from?

Regardless, SEPTA is making efforts to boost its fare box recovery rate. At City Hall and other stations, the agency is installing new fare gates that will make evading the fee more difficult. They’ve issued thousands of citations for fare evasion and smoking this year. A fare increase, the third since December, is scheduled to begin early next month.

SEPTA has never been perfect, but Republican charges of mismanagement and waste are off base. This is no time for excuses; Harrisburg must restore adequate transit service now.