Hold the phone!
A local editorial opines that it’s acceptable for Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) to follow the example of Philadelphia’s SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) to raid uncommitted PennDOT capital project dollars.
That, to prevent service cuts and/or financial reserve drawdowns while the state Legislature continues its debate on a new, overdue, transit funding scheme.
While the editorial sensibly admits it is an “unsatisfactory solution” and, “in fact, no solution at all,” it also says such a move will offer PRT and SEPTA “a one-year buffer before they have to implement whatever longer-term solution state leaders come up with.”
Nothing like enabling the profligacy that has defined public transit in Pennsylvania for decades.
Truth be told, PRT and SEPTA have been “buffering” their way to irrelevance and insolvency for decades.
But the editorial appears to be more concerned about maintaining transit services for Philadelphia’s hosting of next year’s national 250th birthday celebrations, the FIFA World Cup matches and the MLB All-Star Game and Pittsburgh’s hosting of the NFL Draft.
There’s not a single word about PRT and SEPTA reforming their operations.
But no matter what short- or long-term “solution” legislators hatch, there should be no money for either transit agency until they enact meaningful and expansive cost-saving reforms — sensible and effective routing combined with right-sized vehicles — and advocate, strongly, for other reforms out of their direct control, such as lifting prevailing wage and union labor rules for capital projects and eliminating employees’ right to strike, a “right” that too often holds the public hostage and inflates costs.
As this columnist wrote in early 2024:
“Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s primary problem is that it has not been run like a business but as a government agency that treats the public money that sustains it as a bottomless pit.”
And as Steven Greenhut, writing in Reason magazine in 2023 (on California’s mass-transit mess but quite applicable to mass transit in general) put it:
“Instead of thinking like business people who need to meet the needs of customers … transit officials act like government bureaucrats who are married to high-cost government and union solutions and mainly want to impose their preferences on us—rather than lure us into transit by offering high-quality transportation alternatives.”
As it is now, public transit offers the public every reason to eschew it.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
