Pittsburgh Regional Transit(PRT) announced last week that it will have to raise its base fares to among the highest in the nation and reduce service by about 40 percent across the system because of a lack of state funding.
It’s a “crisis” situation, PRT officials say. They lay the blame squarely at the feet of state funders. The Post-Gazette says the cuts could take effect “as early as February 2026.”
“As early as”? A “crisis” and the cuts won’t go into effect for nearly a year? Management, long aware of this coming crisis, has moved about as fast as some of its buses and light-rail vehicles don’t.
PRT spokesman Adam Brandolph told WTAE-TV that “state funding, having not increased the share to public transit in more than a decade, does not meet the needs of public transit in Allegheny County.”
But PRT long has not met the needs of public transit in Allegheny County by its own design. Bloat. Slavish devotion to organized labor. To name but two.
“PRT would need a $117 million infusion of funding next year with compounding annual increases to support its current service levels for the next decade, said CEO Katharine Kelleman,” reports the Tribune-Review.
Please, let us know where we need to deposit the gold bars.
“This has been a long time coming, and Allegheny County deserves better than us constantly… shrinking down,” she said. “You haven’t heard us before — consider our voices raised.”
Well, consider the taxpayers’ voices raised for having their pockets picked too many times. Do remember this is the same agency that, during the pandemic, burned through half-a-billion dollars in federal aid, a time in which it was perfectly opportune to right-size PRT but in which PRT did perfectly little to effect such change.
PRT dare not wash its hands of its culpability in this mess. For as the Allegheny Institute repeatedly has documented, the mass transit agency’s cost structure has been ridiculously out of whack compared with peer agencies and, in some critical metrics, rivals those of much larger transit agencies, including New York City.
And dare PRT admit that, even though there has been a bit of influx in ridership post-pandemic, fewer people continue to not use what’s left of PRT services. Stories of quite sparse ridership on many routes, bus and light-rail, remain legion. Ridership remains 30 percent below what it was pre-pandemic.
It was last summer that Eric Montarti, research director at the Pittsburgh think tank, and Scott T. Cross, a research assistant there (in Policy Brief Vol. 24, No. 23), stressed that “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 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 researchers also argued at the time.
Finally and permanently. And not merely as part of a threat to extort more public money to cover its profligacy.
The same argument has been made many times in many years prior. It’s time to follow through on route elimination and cost-paring instead of pimping for evermore public subsidies that keep going down a rat hole.
Montarti and Cross reminded that if serious changes were not pursued, the same problems of rising costs would persist. “And taxpayers
will have to continue bailing out their overly expensive public transportation system.”
That that has come to pass was preordained. Thus, “Directing more tax dollars to PRT would not be prudent,” they concluded. And that’s being kind.
PRT’s long-running financial pickle is such the crisis that three years ago it spent nearly $800,000 on a total “rebranding” effort, transitioning the Port Authority of Allegheny County to Pittsburgh Regional Transit.
Talk about changing the shade of lipstick on the pig.
And PRT’s crisis is so deep that its latest plea for more, more, more money doesn’t seem to include any specific word of layoffs or job reductions through attrition, though one would have to assume that with such proposed service cuts, there would be many.
At least one would think, right?
And for all this continuing mess, PRT CEO Kelleman just last month not only was awarded a raise and contract extension through 2029 that now pays her $312,000 annually but was awarded an 18 percent bonus of $55,542 for her work in 2024.
The PRT board chairwoman said the board was not concerned about the optics of awarding such an extension and handsome compensation package in such difficult times because Kelleman had met the goals that had been set for her.
Need we say more?
So, weep not for PRT. But do weep for taxpayers, who keep being taken for a ride.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
