In Pennsylvania, drivers pay heavily for mass transit

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro diverted $153 million in federal highway-construction funds to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority last November. Maybe drivers in affected (largely rural) regions weren’t happy, but they’re used to paying for transit riders. 

State appropriations hearings have examined a large gap between available revenues and needed road and bridge projects. Yet motorists pay copiously for others’ public transportation.

“It’s a constant conversation: How do we get more revenue for our roads, how do we get more revenue for our roads?” said Elizabeth Stelle, policy vice president of the Harrisburg-based Commonwealth Foundation, a policy-research nonprofit. “At the same time, we’re diverting some of that revenue for our roads to things like mass transit.”

Most of this bus and rail revenue flows through Pennsylvania’s Public Transportation Trust Fund (PTTF), which has a yearly budget of nearly $2.48 billion.

The PTTF draws a quarter of its revenues from vehicle sales taxes and a full third from non-vehicle sales taxes. Another 17.5 percent comes from automobile fees and fines and 2.5 percent comes from the turnpike. It also benefits from federal grants, among other sources.

Transit fares meanwhile fund just 3.1 percent of SEPTA’s last yearly budget according to the most recent data. Stelle says the status quo fails to strike a proper balance and Pennsylvania is fairly unique in terms of its reliance on state funds for public transportation. Shapiro has proposed increasing the state’s mass-transit contribution by $292.5 million this year. A budget should be enacted by June 30, assuming lawmakers pass it by the deadline. 

“Whether you ride a bus, or hop on a trolley, a train, or the subway, every Pennsylvanian deserves a transportation network that gets them to work and home again in time for dinner safely,” the governor’s office proclaimed two months ago in its budget proposal summary.

Currently, the PTTF runs a $1.3 billion surplus. Shapiro has not proposed a major drawdown upon it, seemingly favoring a new allocation to mass transit, something Stelle criticized as unsustainable, adding that mass transit ridership has dramatically declined in recent years.

“Ideally, you want a system that is more like a user-fee system so that you’re paying for the infrastructure that you’re using,” she said. “In Pennsylvania, that’s not happening.” 

All the while, drivers pay hefty gasoline taxes — at 57.6 cents per gallon, the third highest in the nation — to fund their highways and bridges. (Some gas taxes go to other items like including the Multimodal Transportation Fund which aids construction of bike trails and walking paths.) 

Despite the governor’s one-time allotment of federal highway funds to SEPTA, the agency faces a structural deficit which totals over $200 million annually.

There’s no pain-free way out of that. SEPTA fares are currently $2.50 for buses, trolleys, and subways and minimally $4 for regional rail. SEPTA riders would of course hope to avoid higher fares, but Pennsylvania Motor Truck Association President Rebecca Oyler suggests lawmakers could use public funds to aid low-income commuters while asking more well-off riders to shoulder a greater portion of mass-transportation costs. The proper way to do so, she said, deserves further study. 

“My own personal theory on this is that you should target help for the people who need it most,” said Oyler, who served on former Governor Tom Wolf’s (D) Transportation Revenue Options Commission to examine potential funding changes in 2021. “I like the idea of helping the people who need the help more than [helping] the system.”

Downsizing of underused routes and other service changes are also possibilities transit agencies could consider, she added, observing that SEPTA’s current ridership is now about 75 percent of what it was pre-Covid.

“Clearly there is room for right-sizing, but I think that’s an audit that would have to be done in a very objective manner to figure out where that overcapacity is,” she said. 

Bradley Vasoli is the senior editor of The Independence.