A local newspaper editorial laments that public transit agencies in Pennsylvania continually lack “a dedicated state funding stream” to operate.
“The General Assembly should create a dedicated stream of funding for Pennsylvania’s over-burdened transit systems, because leaving funds for this essential public service dependent on annual, and very political, negotiations will not provide the funds or the stability and predictability transit agencies need to plan for the future,” goes a Tuesday editorial.
But it glosses over Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s (PRT) overarching failures when it only briefly concedes that the agency could have managed its resources better.
No kidding.
The editorial notes that PRT “is in dire straits” because of still-lagging (badly) post-pandemic ridership numbers, operating costs continue to rise and it is strapped with “massive infrastructure upkeep and pension costs that can’t be cut.”
It also says PRT continues to pay off debt from building the North Shore Connector 20 years ago (a project we accurately called “dubious” from the start) and has more than $1 billion in debt-financed capital expenditures on the horizon.
But, and most unfortunately, the editorial ignores several of the largest elephants in the trolley barn, so to speak.
As the Allegheny Institute has consistently documented over the last three decades, PRT and its previous Port Authority iteration, have been plagued with a wholly out-of-whack cost structure for some metrics when compared with not only comparably situated transit agencies across the country but rivals those that are much larger, including New York City.
Simply put, it has never been sustainable, even with ever heftier taxpayer subsidies.
And compounding PRT’s (and that of Philadelphia’s SEPTA system) high-cost structure has been the high cudgel that government has steadfastly allowed unionized transit employees to hold over taxpayers’ heads: the right to strike.
That threat is a manifest threat to the public weal – and to the public purse.
As Allegheny Institute researchers Eric Montarti and Scott T. Cross recently concluded (in Policy Brief Vol. 24, No. 23):
“PRT should be examining ways to reduce its spending and its need for subsidies, dramatically lowering the burden on the taxpayers who are shouldering more and more of the cost of maintaining the system.
“PRT should eliminate routes with unsustainably low ridership and look to shift vehicles to smaller, more fuel-efficient and cheaper options,” the scholars remind.
“If these changes are not pursued [among others], the same problems of rising costs will persist. And taxpayers will have to continue bailing out their overly expensive public transportation system,” Montarti and Cross note.
While that long-elusive “dedicated funding stream” is the “seen” for which editorialists have become so regularly fond, it whistles past the graveyard of the “unseen” underlying, chronic, problems.
And until those problems are fully addressed, and corrected, “directing more tax dollars to PRT would not be prudent,” Montarti and Cross stress.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
