PA: Pennsylvania transit advocates and Gov. Josh Shapiro push for funding now, rather than next year

Last fall, Gov. Josh Shapiro allowed public transit agencies to use capital funds for the next two years to cover operating costs while the Legislature decides whether to increase the state subsidy for transit.

But the administration and advocacy groups don’t want to wait for the 2027 budget debate to deal with a funding crisis that could cause drastic cuts for Pittsburgh Regional Transit and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which serves five counties around Philadelphia.

Mr. Shapiro, who included his call for additional transit funding in this year’s budget proposal, and Transportation Secretary Mike Carroll met with legislative leaders last week, and Transit for All PA has hired local advocates to push the importance of transit in areas other than Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

The governor, Mr. Carroll and the advocates all are taking a similar approach to push legislative leaders to approve more money for transit — stressing the importance of service in all counties and the benefits smaller counties get from robust service in the state’s job centers. They face a tall task because the Republican-controlled Senate says residents if those counties don’t see how transit funding benefits them when more than 87% of the money goes to Pittsburgh and the Philly area and their areas need help with roads and bridges.

Speaking last week at the annual transportation forum at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, Mr. Carroll used the example of Sullivan County. With just over 5,800 residents Sullivan, in the northeastern part of the state, has the second-lowest population among the 67 counties.

“If you ask the people of Sullivan County if we should spend more money on transit, 99% of them would say, ‘No,’” Mr. Carroll told a crowd of mostly engineers and transportation officials Thursday. “They’re wrong.”

Mr. Carroll said every county has some form of public transit that is important to residents, whether it’s the extensive systems in Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia area that serve thousands of riders or the much smaller ride-share programs that may provide the only option for an elderly or disabled resident in a rural county.

Additionally, he stressed the symbiotic relationship among the counties — what goes on in one area of the state benefits another area. The economic activity around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, often staffed by people who use transit to get to work, generates tax revenue and purchasing power that in many ways benefit other parts of the state.

As a result, those heavy business areas generate far more tax revenue for the state than they get back, and that money is used to support the more rural areas that generate far less, Mr. Carroll said. In simpler terms, they depend on each other to get by.

“It would take forever for [rural counties] to raise the money they would need for some of those projects [without state help],” Mr. Carroll said.

More transit funding benefits rural areas by carrying people to work in busier economic centers, where they produce the tax revenue for many of the public services and projects in Sullivan and other counties, he said. Severe transit cuts would cause substantial economic problems across the state.

“When the economy of Pennsylvania is hindered, it is to the detriment of all counties,” Mr. Carroll said.

A big part of the funding crisis can be tied to the expiration of the state’s transportation funding package, Act 89, a 10-year funding program that ended three years ago. Since transit had emergency federal funding tied to the pandemic, the state hasn’t been in a hurry to grant more funds, but now that federal money has been spent and agencies are struggling.

Pittsburgh Regional Transit called for 35% service cuts and extensive layoffs before the plan to use capital funds emerged, and SEPTA was in the process of eliminating dozens of routes for transit trains.

Mr. Carroll stressed that it is important for the Legislature to fund another transportation bill for roads, bridges and transit, but until that happens, the state must continue to support transit.

“There’s no scenario I can envision in which a transit bill gets to the governor’s desk without roads and bridges,” he said. “There’s no scenario I can envision in which a roads and bridges bill gets to the governor’s desk without transit. It’s important to include transit in that conversation.”

Another conference speaker, Rich Fitzgerald, executive director of the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission and former Allegheny County executive, agreed.

“When we do another transportation bill, transit, transit, transit has to be part of it,” he said.

Laura Wiens, executive director of Pittsburghers for Public Transit and a leader of the statewide Transit for All PA, said advocates also aren’t waiting until next year to ensure long-term funding for transit.

“We strongly agree with the governor’s approach,” Ms. Wiens said. “There needs to be something in place before next year.”

In the past year, advocates have encouraged transit supporters to write more than 440,000 letters to legislators about the importance of transit. Ms. Wiens stressed that transit funding is a statewide issue because the service is just as important to the few dozen who need it in a rural area as it is in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Since that approach didn’t lead to more funding last year, the statewide group last month hired four local residents on six-month fellowships to push the message of how important public transit is in four less-populated areas: Lancaster County; Lehigh and Northampton counties; Luzerne and Lackawanna counties; and Westmoreland County. Those agencies face a fiscal cliff by the end of this year.

One area where Mr. Shapiro and the advocates disagree is the level of funding for transit.

After failing twice, the governor has proposed for the third year in a row using an additional 1.75% of funds in the Pennsylvania Public Transportation Trust Fund for the next five years. Currently, the fund gets 4.4% of the sales tax revenue in the state, and the governor’s proposal would increase that to 6.15%, generating about $300 million a year.

But advocates and transit agencies say that isn’t nearly enough, pointing to Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s $100 million deficit this year as an example of the need for more money.

Transit for All PA has proposed a funding plan that calls for raising the state’s car rental fee from $2 to $6.50, increasing the car lease fee from 3% to 5% and charging a 6% excise tax on rides provided by services such as Uber and Lyft, raising more than $500 million a year for transit.

That level of funding would allow rural agencies to restore service to the levels that existed before the pandemic.

More than two dozen legislators have signed on as co-sponsors of bills in the House and Senate to support that proposal.

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