If Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) spent as much time trying to right-size its out-of-whack cost structure as it has been trying to drum up support for more taxpayer bailout dollars, it might get somewhere on the road to reinvention.
What really struck us recently was this passage in a Post-Gazette story:
“Even if [a state legislative funding package] passes, [it] is more than $75 million shy of PRT’s projected $117 million shortfall for next year, and it is not clear where the rest of the money would come from to avoid cuts entirely, officials said.”
But as the Allegheny Institute has repeatedly documented, PRT could nearly wipe out that shortfall by reducing expenses to come in line with peer transit agencies nationwide.
Instead of siccing the public on the state Legislature to pour more and more funding into the proverbial rat hole that is PRT, the Legislature should be demanding that PRT first get its costs in line with those peer agencies.
Fast on the heels of the consummation of the Nippon Steel-U.S. Steel marriage, the Tribune-Review reports that environmental groups are demanding Nippon work to cut the joint venture’s emissions.
Despite Nippon’s intention to employ a technology to incrementally reduce emissions at its new Pittsburgh-area acquisitions, the envirocrats are pushing for the elimination of the blast-furnace methodology of steelmaking in favor of electric-arc furnace technology.
Sadly, and past being prologue, we expect more than a few pols at the county level, despite their professed support for the merger, working hand-in-foot-in-mouth with the ecocrats to interfere with the newly joined companies’ efforts to upgrade the Mon Valley Works.
We’re all for ecological stewardship. But too often the ecocrats can’t see true progress for their particularly pungent brand of “progressivism.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
