Whether we live in Philadelphia or Pottstown, Wilkes-Barre or Washington County, we all deserve an effective, affordable and safe means of transportation to access our jobs, our healthcare, our grocery stores and our schools. Over the past two years, residents across the Commonwealth have organized for Governor Shapiro and the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a budget that includes dedicated and expanded funding for public transit for all 67 counties, in order to restore and expand transit service that has been gutted over the course of the pandemic. Most urgently, hundreds of thousands of transit riders in the SEPTA region are facing 29% fare increases in January, followed by 20% service cuts in June if the state fails to take action by the end of this year to fund transit.
Governor Shapiro and the state legislature failed to include necessary transit funding in the budget they enacted in July. This Fall, the PA legislature has functionally ended their session without solving the problem. There is no more time left to wait: we need the Governor to use executive authority now to keep transit, our economies and our communities from failing on his watch.
Governor Shapiro has the unilateral power to prevent SEPTA from making serious cuts to transit service. He can direct PennDOT to allocate funding from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and “flex” it to the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to fund transit. This happened in 2005 under Governor Ed Rendell under similar circumstances, to avert a transit crisis. Rendell threatened to do it again in 2010, which was a tactic that successfully compelled the legislature to negotiate a ten-year dedicated transit funding bill, Act 89. Governor Shapiro has a clear template for how to shift the funding needed to ensure that deep service cuts and fare increases don’t affect nearly a million transit riders in the Philadelphia area beginning January 1st. He needs to act now!
Once Governor Shapiro directs PennDOT to allocate the highway funds to transit, the municipal planning organization of Southeast PA, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), must vote to support the effort. While the “flexed” federal funding is primarily available for transit capital projects, this process allows transit agencies internally to free up funding to address operational needs, including ensuring that transit workers in Philadelphia are provided a living wage and a safe work environment.
This is a stopgap measure, to manage the state legislature’s irresponsible delay in developing a sustainable, dedicated transit funding solution. Pennsylvania’s residents will still need the legislature and the governor to pass a long term funding solution in the Spring of 2025. Members of Transit for All PA! were part of Governor Tom Wolf’s Transportation Revenue Options Commission (TROC) in 2021 to identify long-term bipartisan transit funding solutions, and through that commission, put forward our own menu of progressive funding options, identified and supported by hundreds of transit riders and workers in a series of statewide meetings in 2020 and 2021. The Governor and the PA State Legislature should act on that information and ensure that our Commonwealth provides the resources to meet the mobility needs of residents in all 67 counties.
That said, “flexing” highway funding to transit isn’t something that should only happen in an emergency. Other states take advantage of this mechanism in order to keep transit on track- and even expand it- and not merely keep buses, trains, and shared-ride service from the brink of collapse every two decades. It’s also smart policy to allocate a more equitable share of transportation funding to transit. By contrast, the disproportionate amount of funding that our federal government and PennDOT allocates to highway expansion compared to funding transit worsens our infrastructure maintenance debts, deepens our climate crisis, and makes our roads more congested, not less.
Transit for All PA! has a set of principles that include stopping reckless highway expansion in favor of addressing our state-of-good-repair backlog, and funding transit equitably with roads and bridges. The Governor says that he is a champion for transit, on climate, and in keeping PA’s economy moving. Let’s ensure he fulfills those promises.