We’ve long advocated for a dedicated funding source for Pittsburgh’s mass-transit agency, now known as Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT). And while steps have been taken over the decades to provide for just that, some have come and gone.
Thus, “dedicated” has become a relative scheme. And some of those funding formulas indeed have been schemes.
Think of, for one, the hilarious – if it weren’t so addlepated – cluster cluck of forcing the state Turnpike Commission to help fund local mass transit, which, in turn, created an almost intractable debt for the commission while guaranteeing year after year (after year) toll increases.
Now comes the state Legislature in the latest in a long line of dedicated funding schemes to end all dedicated funding schemes for mass-transit operations.
As a Post-Gazette editorial opines:
“Bills recently introduced in the General Assembly would potentially boost transit in the state’s most populous counties, including Allegheny and Philadelphia, by giving them local tax options to improve or expand their transit systems. Local revenue options for transit projects include taxes on income, alcohol, rental cars, and real-estate sales.
“Allegheny and Philadelphia-area counties would decide which, of up to three additional, taxes to approve — or whether to use any of them at all. This flexible and sorely needed plan, now in the House Local Government Committee, should move forward immediately. …”
“Pennsylvania’s future depends largely on healthy and robust transit systems. The future of those system depends on local funding options unlocked by a House plan that should move ahead immediately.”
Sorry, but you’ll get no “Hear! Hear!” from us because there’s no there there.
In particular, sorely missing from the P-G’s “analysis” is any mention, let alone scholarly discussion of, Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s manifest expensive failings. And they are legion, as the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (AIPP) long has documented.
PRT’s cost structure long has been out of whack. Not only do those costs regularly exceed the cost structure of peer mass transit agencies around the country in a variety of metrics, in at least one metric, they rival the far larger New York City transit system.
Of course, things worsened in the pandemic. And in the post-pandemic recovery, “recovery” has become the relative term.
Ridership is a shadow of itself. Yet PRT’s budget has swelled. There are more bureaucrats. Layoffs? Nothing appreciable. There was a pricey “rebranding” campaign. There continue to be pie-in-the-sky expansion plans. To carry whom? We do not know. You’ll recall not long ago how PRT’s boss admitted the system will never see the kind of ridership it once had.
And lest we forget, there’s that contractual poison pill that hamstrings PRT’s ability to cut costs by using smaller transit vehicles to better match declining ridership.
For the latest PRT assessment, we commend your attention to AIPP Policy Brief Vol. 23, No. 25, in which Research Director Eric Montarti and Research Assistant Scott T. Cross recount the troubling situation and make action recommendations to the next county chief executive.
But past being prologue, their commonsense recommendations will fall on the deaf ears of blind pols whose only “vision” appears to keep coming through rose-colored glasses.
As for the Post-Gazette, in advocating for the possibility of new transit tax schemes, it reverts to the same kind of rhetoric it employed nearly 30 years ago in advocating for taxpayer-funded sports stadiums that surely would lead Pittsburgh to another great “renaissance.”
To wit:
“No city or state can become first-class without a first-class transit system. Systems in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia need to get better, as those regions will absorb most of the state’s additional 2.5 million people expected over the next two decades. Under the current funding system, however, significant improvements are difficult, if not impossible. Without the authority to raise more local money, large counties can’t secure federal grants that require local-funding matches.”
Dubious population growth projections aside, we would remind that no city or state can become first class without first-class public policy prescriptions.
Throwing ever more “dedicated funding” into an Alice in Wonderland-like looking glass without first taking steps to restore operational and fiscal sanity to the commonwealth’s mass transit agencies in dire need of a hard slap to the face is a fool’s errand and a hard slap to both transit users and taxpayers who fund them.
The P-G opines that “local tax option bills in the [state] House … should move ahead immediately.”
No, they should not. And only until PRT and other mass-transit agencies in Pennsylvania get their houses in order, should any consideration of new taxes be considered – and then with a jaundiced eye.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
