In a letter to the editor of the Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Regional Transit boss Katharine Kelleman uses the current high gasoline prices to exhort the public to use mass transit.
But she employs a few sleights of facts in the process, the kind the folks at PRT long have favored.
Not only does Kelleman blithely note that “systemwide ridership is up from last year,” she claims PRT is an economical and efficient option.
Two points of order:
While PRT ridership is up over last year, it continues to pale by comparison to pre-COVID days, still down by about 40 percent.
And given PRT’s continuing out-of-whack cost structure, it’s far, far from being economically efficient for taxpayers who keep footing the bill for a service that in some metrics rivals the cost of much larger systems in much larger jurisdictions.
“At a time when every dollar counts, [PRT is] an option worth considering,” Kelleman concludes her letter.
Indeed, every dollar does count. And if Kelleman wants to be taken seriously, she must get serious about right-sizing PRT and better counting the public dollars it takes in.
As Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, noted just last month (in Policy Brief Vol. 26, No. 34), Pittsburgh Regional Transit is facing a dilemma of its own long-term making.
“It has allowed costs to escalate in the face of a slow-growth or no-growth economy,” he concludes. “Elected officials have failed to exercise due control and oversight out of political expedience.”
Low-cost air carriers Allegiant Air, Breeze Airways and Frontier Airlines could all be in play to bring one or more taxpayer-subsidized routes to Arnold Palmer Airport in Westmoreland County, the Tribune-Review reports.
The Unity Township airport, just expanded to two gates through a $22 million project, has been without regular commercial service since Spirit Airlines went belly-up in the spring. Officials hope an $850,000 federal subsidy can lure (bribe?) a new airline, or airlines, to Palmer.
But there are a few kickers associated with such a development.
First, all three of those named airlines already fly out of Pittsburgh International Airport, a relatively short bus ride from the Greater Greensburg/Latrobe area. Flying out of Palmer would be a wholly uneconomical endeavor. Being made whole by taxpayers only leaves a hole in taxpayers’ pockets.
Second, taxpayers already had been paying staffing costs for Spirit’s Palmer operations. Per the Trib:
“This year, the county allocated nearly $2.6 million to cover the airport’s debt payments and cover costs — about $750,000 — for the airport authority to hire and pay for personnel to man Spirit’s ticket and reservation desks, as well as handle baggage.”
It’s likely those kinds of public subsidies would continue. But why should taxpayers help foot the bill for what clearly is a private cost?
Then there’s that $850,000 federal grant, from the Small Community Air Service Development Program.
As the Trib notes, “revenue guarantees subsidized by the grant are drawn down by local airports over a three- to five-year period. It’s money that is only paid out if revenue projections related to the number of passengers who travel fall below estimates.”
But that’s an incentive to keep passenger numbers below the projection threshold to gain the taxpayer subsidy. Sweet, eh?
Palmer could not pay its own way before. And it’s being set up to not pay its own way in the future. That’s not a public benefit. That’s a public drain.
It’s past time to call out PRT and Palmer for the money pits that they are.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
