A Post-Gazette editorial last week again lamented the lack of a dedicated funding stream for Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT). That, it says, has created a dangerous cascading effect of both deferred service enhancements and deferred infrastructure maintenance that threatens the very future of PRT.
But it is not until the lengthy editorial’s penultimate paragraph that the P-G addresses (without acknowledgement of the original source), the elephant long in the room, one that the Allegheny Institute has been highlighting for years. That would be PRT’s out-of-whack cost structure, one that, in some metrics, rivals much larger public transit systems in much larger cities.
Per the end of the P-G’s Thursday editorial:
“The solution [to paying for PRT] begins with Harrisburg settling on a permanent transit funding solution, as we have insisted many times. But PRT must also recognize the seriousness of the crisis and take action of its own, which has to include trimming its overhead without service cuts. While much of the agency’s costs are fixed, such as significant pension obligations, PRT does have an unusually high cost per rider — a measure of the overall efficiency of its operations.
“We’d like to see visible efforts from PRT to tamp down these costs. While Harrisburg’s help is needed, it’s unlikely any compromise will solve PRT’s problems forever. It also needs to help itself,” the editorial concludes.
As Frank Gamrat, executive director of the Allegheny Institute, reminds, “We were the first — and only group — to expose these expenditures. Without us, no one would know anything about PRT costs when compared to other agencies.”
Now, this has nothing to do about blowing our own horn. But it has everything to do with the usual pimps for PRT – the transit agency itself, in concert with pols in bed with organized labor – turning a blind eye to such continually taxpayer-subsidized dysfunction, bloat and rot.
It starts with mass-transit workers having the right to strike, an incredibly blunt cudgel that might as well be renamed the Perpetual Right to Wage Increases Act.
That profligacy is reinforced by prevailing wage laws paid to union labor working on mass-transit construction. As the Allegheny Institute has noted previously, “The original intent of the prevailing wage laws may have been to protect local laborers from cheap migrant labor, but today the law simply shields union workers from having to compete with other qualified workers in their own community.
“The lack of full-throated competition for government contracts results in higher costs for taxpayers who ultimately pay for this excessive generosity to the unions—and to the companies who are union shops and get all the work.
“Indeed,” continued think tank scholars, “the prevailing wage law is cut from the same cloth as binding arbitration, teacher strikes, transit worker strikes and the lack of a right-to-work law. Pennsylvania is losing ground steadily as a result.”
And then there are the ridiculous contracts often awarded to PRT’s unionized workforce. Consider the current contract, a four-year deal soon to expire, and recklessly twice the term of the prior contract.
As Allegheny Institute analysts concluded at the time of its approval PRT-ATU contract is a missed opportunity
the deal with the Amalgamated Transit Union did not provide for employment cuts despite passenger counts remaining far below pre-pandemic levels (and as they continue to be)
And, based on a PRT news release at the time, the contract included pay raises of 12.75 percent and bonuses for employees who worked during the height of the pandemic, up to a maximum $4,000.
The starting wage for a new operator now is about $25 an hour and the top rate is more than $38 an hour, “keeping PRT employees among the highest paid transit workers in the nation,” the agency’s news release noted.
That’s something to brag about — ever-higher costs for less and less utilization? Good grief. Talk about having a hole in your head where the illogic flows in and non sequiturs flow out.
At the same time of the last contract approval, the Allegheny Institute noted how “policymakers at the state and county level should use the time between now and the contract’s expiration to make the changes needed to lower the high costs of the agency for the benefit of state and county taxpayers that subsidize the system.”
“The opportunities for change are there and the evidence is overwhelming,” the think tank’s study concluded.
But while we’ve seen little evidence of that, we have seen the ridership malaise continue. And we seriously doubt that PRT has any fortitude to stand its ground and make any serious changes.
Consider this:
The current labor contract contains language, in a renewal of language dating to 1997, that limits the use of small transit vehicles (24 or fewer seats) on fixed route service to 3 percent of the large buses in use, Allegheny Institute researchers noted.
“For an authority that should be significantly reducing service in response to the huge drop in passengers (some bus routes remain 50 percent below pre-pandemic levels), the limitation on the use of smaller vehicles is a provision that should never have been agreed to,” the think tank said at the time.
Can anybody predict with a straight face that the union won’t attempt to carry such a provision over into its next contract and that PRT won’t bow yet again to its labor masters?
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: PRT deserves no new dedicated stream of funding until it can produce a broad and deep stream of not merely cost containment but cost cuts. And that must include a wage freeze across the board for union and nonunion employees alike, if not job reductions.
PRT riders and taxpayers have been taken for a lousy ride for far too long – a bad carnival ride. If PRT can’t get with the program, it should be shut down and a new, functional and cost- and passenger-responsive system should be put in its place.
And that means finally embracing the concept of competitively contracting out public transit services to the private sector. The record is clear that contracting out results in better transit service at a lower cost.
The state Legislature must remove its monopoly-preserving barriers to such a move. And once it does, PRT must avail itself of a golden opportunity. The days of faux “reform” that has done nothing must come to an end.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
