Scare-mongering in the Metro...

SEPTA's news page had a blurb about how convenient it is to take the BSS to sports events down at Broad & Pattison. The second half of the ad said this:

How would all these people get to the game without the Broad Street Line? Just think about the traffic and congestion around the sports complex if SEPTA was forced to cut service on the Broad Street Subway in order to close a $62 million budget gap.

Can you imagine it? Neither can SEPTA.

Unfortunately this is the future the region may face without adequate funding for public transit. Dedicated funding provides the resources SEPTA and all transit organizations in Pennsylvania need to keep moving, growing, and serving the community. Please contact your legislators in Harrisburg and tell them why public transit is important to you.

SEPTA hasn't rolled out their list of what they're threatening to cut this year, so is this for real? Or are they just threatening something popular/with a devoted ridership like last year when they said they were going to eliminate service to Warminster, the airport, Cynwyd, and one of the Chestnut Hill lines?

I really detest this scare-mongering that they keep doing. On the one hand, I think that there needs to be better funding of public transportation. On the other hand, giving more money to the current people in charge will just result in more money being flushed on multi-million abortions like SVM.

Thoughts?

I think it was very poorly worded but merely an attempt to show how essential mass transit is, in general, by showing a specific example. We often forget, while sitting (and cursing) in traffic, that the streets would be even worse without SEPTA.

I've already called all of our state and federal legislators and told them to withhold every penny from SEPTA. They don't deserve it. It goes to useless projects like electronic signs at train/subway stations, or high level platforms at Jenkintown. Sure they're nice to have things but we're trading in our Volkswagon for a Mercedes even though we just lost our drivers license.

Until SEPTA starts working to get people back into the system---which includes buses and trains, and makes it accessible to everyone requests for funding should be denied. The current system is broken and the people in charge of it are the ones breaking it.

OK, given what I think of SEPTA and the clowns, fools and simple incompetents that populate a good portion of its staff, I'm surprised I'm writing this, but IMHO withholding (sp?) money from the system is probably the worst way to fix it. It's a bit like the proposals to fix our failing school systems by diverting money to the schools that are doing well as an "incentive" to do better.

Until you get rid of the mismanagement and non-work ethic, just cutting funds will only punish the riders. The gang at the top has already worked out loads of angles to protect themselves under the current system of funding and (lack of) oversight. Before they'll look at reform, they'll cut service, raise fares, close stations, and all of the other tactics that have been used for decades.

The only thing that will fix SEPTA is for someone(*) to play The Donald in the direction of a good chunk of SEPTA's workforce. If it means a new system to replace SEPTA, so be it.

(*) I'm not holding my breath here. We've had any number of threads on this topic. SEPTA is a classic quango (QUasi-Autonomous NonGovernmental Organisation), as the British call it. It was set up so it really doesn't answer to anyone. The only way it can be dismantled and reconstituted is for the state to step in, and I shudder to think what the guys from some of the more rural counties would do if they had the chance to get up to their elbows in big-city mass transit.

R3 Rider wrote:

How would all these people get to the game without the Broad Street Line? Just think about the traffic and congestion around the sports complex if SEPTA was forced to cut service on the Broad Street Subway in order to close a $62 million budget gap.

Can you imagine it? Neither can SEPTA.

Unfortunately this is the future the region may face without adequate funding for public transit. Dedicated funding provides the resources SEPTA and all transit organizations in Pennsylvania need to keep moving, growing, and serving the community. Please contact your legislators in Harrisburg and tell them why public transit is important to you.

SEPTA hasn't rolled out their list of what they're threatening to cut this year, so is this for real? Or are they just threatening something popular/with a devoted ridership like last year when they said they were going to eliminate service to Warminster, the airport, Cynwyd, and one of the Chestnut Hill lines?

I really detest this scare-mongering that they keep doing. On the one hand, I think that there needs to be better funding of public transportation. On the other hand, giving more money to the current people in charge will just result in more money being flushed on multi-million abortions like SVM.

Typical SEPTA. It seems that every time someone at SEPTA opens their mouths, they're constantly begging for money. In the past couple years, SEPTA seems to spend more time pleading for help from Harrisburg than it does in making the system run properly. Over the past couple of months, there have been several reports of catenary failure on the RDG trunk, mainly between Wayne Jct and Jenkintown. And we're supposed to trust these people to design and operate rail service in the Schuylkill Valley corridor? Yeah, right...

And don't even get me started on the Route 15 fiasco. There's no reason why SEPTA should've waited so long to try and get the city to agree with their plans for accessing Callowhill Depot.

I think by letting the whole system shut down due to lack of funds we might have the opportunity to start over with fresh management, funding sources and overall system design.

Sen. McCain is often heard complaining that it would be cheaper for Amtrak to buy airline tickets for passengers than the cost of their LD trains. Same applies to alot of SEPTA's bus routes. Look around and see how many buses are out there carrying 2-3 people. The worst is in their Frontier Division.

We need the system to break down so we can re-organize how the system is run. I almost thought of the city taking over the bus routes. SEPTA passes every opportunity to make money. I noticed this on July 4th at the art museum when the 43 was shut down during the fireworks. Instead of SEPTA buses hauling the hoards of people out of there, there were privately operated buses by the "Philly trolley works" (that name alone boils my blood), charging who knows how much for rides back to Center City.

SEPTA has had their chance. Since the late '60's, all they've done is continued the work of the PTC, RDG and PRR by scaling back routes, discontinuing service and making everything much more difficult to use. SEPTA has to stop being the transportation for the carless (it is in the city). Not to mention that since the late '90's, not a single SEPTA route has operated at a profit.

If you look at funding for transit in Pennaylvania, you'll see that there is no and there has never been a mechanism to provide dedicated funding. The PAT system in Pittsburgh is projecting a $30mm deficit. SEPTA is projecting a $70mm deficit.

The Pennsylvania constitution prevents any of the fuel tax revenues from being used to fund public transit.

This year, SEPTA wrote the budget assuming that the deficit will be made up. If it is not made up, the service cuts will leave SEPTA with little service left to complain about.

If you're really interested in the facts, go to www.savetransit.org

Yes, shutting down SEPTA would be one way to "get their attention" in Harrisburg and elsewhere (and I sometimes think it may be the *only* way, long-term), but choosing that as the first course of action comes at a high risk. Think of the chaos caused by the various transit and RRD strikes over the years, then multiply by 4 or 5 since you'd have both arms of the system shut down at the same time.

Who suffers most? Not the bigwigs, not the suburbanites who could carpool, but the small business owners and those carless people that now make up much of SEPTA's ridership.

There's also the high risk of a game of political chicken, given the hostility of Harrisburg towards Philly and Pittsburgh. Remember what happened in Buffalo? The system was lurching towards a crisis and they pulled the plug, expecting that it would wake up the legislature. Instead, the pols sat on their collective butts and the system was out of service for about 6 months, returning only as a skeleton of its former operations. I believe something similar happened in Birmingham (admittedly a lot less transit-dependent) and the system shut down for good.

Two side comments. The canard about giving every Amtrak rider a plane ticket is just that - a sound bite thrown out by politicians who have a nearly religious fanaticism about eliminating rail service. Among other things they don't count the subsidies that are given to the airlines and the muni authorities that run the airports, nor deal with the issue of serving loads of small communities that even the bus companies don't touch.

Second, virtually no transit systems make a profit. They're a public service that would be priced out of the market if they were pay-as-you-go. Like the post office or fire department, they have a charge to serve all of the public in a relatively even-handed fashion. That means subsidies somewhere, since the very nature of such services is they can't follow a standard profit model. The key is that they need act as much as possible as if they aren't a money-losing operation, and minimize losses, a fact that SEPTA has never been able to get through its bureaucratic skull.

ctrabs74 wrote:It seems that every time someone at SEPTA opens their mouths, they're constantly begging for money.

Well the fact is that SEPTA does need more money. And yes, there are substantial management problems, and oversight problems too. The Board should not escape culpability.

Clearfield wrote:If you look at funding for transit in Pennaylvania, you'll see that there is no and there has never been a mechanism to provide dedicated funding.

There is dedicated funding for public transit, from several tax sources (taxes on tires, car rentals, periodicals, and others)

The PAT system in Pittsburgh is projecting a $30mm deficit. SEPTA is projecting a $70mm deficit.

Yep. The big problem is that one of the key dedicated funding sources (a utility tax) declined a lot after deregulation. Net state operating funds to SEPTA, PAT, and other operators have not increased much at all (and even declined some years), causing structural deficits (i.e. chronic deficits that can't be fixed with one-time bailouts).

The Pennsylvania constitution prevents any of the fuel tax revenues from being used to fund public transit.

Correct. But that doesn't mean we can't use other auto-related revenue to fund transit.

jfrey40535 wrote:Sen. McCain is often heard complaining that it would be cheaper for Amtrak to buy airline tickets for passengers than the cost of their LD trains. Same applies to alot of SEPTA's bus routes. Look around and see how many buses are out there carrying 2-3 people. The worst is in their Frontier Division.

Well, yeah, Frontier does worst in terms of cost recovery (a little over 30%), but they're not doing all that badly for a suburban/exurban operation. Fact is they provide more of a social service (transportation for the elderly) than the other divisions, and so they're always going to need a greater subsidy. But you could eliminate the entire Frontier Division and make very little headway in solving SEPTA's budget problem.

As for McCain's red herring, we could point to a lot of highways that are never going to even come close to paying for themselves. In fact, a lot of those highways are in states like McCain's.

jfrey40535 wrote:I've already called all of our state and federal legislators and told them to withhold every penny from SEPTA. They don't deserve it. Until SEPTA starts working to get people back into the system---which includes buses and trains, and makes it accessible to everyone requests for funding should be denied. The current system is broken and the people in charge of it are the ones breaking it.

Wow! What a brilliant strategy! Every intelligent transit advocate should do the same! But golly, you sure are one heck of a problem solver!

meyeowndmflt wrote:Wow! What a brilliant strategy! Every intelligent transit advocate should do the same! But golly, you sure are one heck of a problem solver!

After all, everyone knows that ad hominem attacks are the best way to accomplish anything?

Why not pay SEPTA for each rider they attract to their system? Transit is a service which benefits the region as a whole. Each trip taken on transit is about equivalent to a car taken off the road or a trip that would not have been possible without transit.

In its current form, SEPTA has no incentive to expand service by extending routes or increasing frequencies. Even if SEPTA were able to attract more riders with trains to Reading, West Chester, or Newtown, they end up with a bigger budget operating budget deficit after the expansion. From a business standpoint, transit cannot compete with private automobiles because of how roads are subsidized by all levels of government. If SEPTA were not obligated by law to run its routes, it would have sold off all their assets a long time ago and closed shop. If SEPTA doesn't get funding, this would be the de facto result.

The current system of funding SEPTA requires that they have a lobbying arm in Harrisburg and in each county seat to get the funding they require to operate. What we need is a system that ties SEPTA's performance to its funding, and my suggestion is to use ridership as a gauge. This is so that they can concentrate on running the transit system instead of lobbying legislators and campaigning for its own existence.