PPT welcomes Connor Descheemaker to our team as the Statewide Campaign Manager for Transit For All PA.
For over a decade, Pittsburgh for Public Transit has been a democratic member-led organization that fights for change in our community. We have won campaigns for improved bus service, fare accessibility, affordable housing, and transit equity. These successes are fueled by our local members and volunteers across Allegheny County.
Over the last several years, recognizing the impact of state policy on the Pittsburgh area’s transit service, we began organizing at the state government. This ramped up in 2021 with the founding of Transit For All PA, a statewide coalition of riders, workers, and organizations who collectively built a platform to advocate to win dedicated, sustainable, progressively-funded money for public transportation across Pennsylvania.
Joining together with riders from Pittsburgh to Philly, Scranton to Harrisburg, and everywhere in-between, we staved off COVID catastrophe, created a vision for funding transit operations and capital after Act 89 (the last dedicated transportation funding bill, expired in 2022), and pushed Governor Shapiro to take executive action and stop imminent cuts for SEPTA in the Fall of 2024.
Until now, that work has all been done on borrowed time and staff from several organizations across the commonwealth. At the end of 2024 we had the immediate opportunity to hire a statewide staffer to lead our organizing to win critical state funding before the fiscal cliff hits transit agencies across the state starting July 1.
So, we brought in Connor Descheemaker, formerly the Coalition Manager of Transit Forward Philadelphia, for the next year to lead these efforts connecting riders, workers, and organizations in rural and urban communities to win needed funding for our public transportation. Let’s win the funding we deserve and end austerity for transit in 2025!
Learn a little more about Connor by reading their bio and some interview answers below.
Connor Descheemaker arrives with over a decade of experience building and facilitating diverse coalitions to achieve policy change, support local communities, and provide professional education and development. Born in Phoenix, they came of age just as that famously-sprawling metro opened its first light rail line in 2008, and their exploration of a changing downtown ignited their interest in mobility and community in urban areas. There, they ran multiple all-ages art and performance spaces, and founded a business coalition to support walkable, sustainable, and affordable urban development. After four intermediary years in Seattle supporting architects in their professional development, and housing and transportation advocacy, they arrived in Philadelphia in 2022 to manage the Transit Forward Philadelphia coalition. There, they grew the group to 35 community-based organizations covering environmental justice, immigrant and refugee support, community development, political advocacy, and elder and disability rights.
Their organizing and political ideals are rooted in punk and DIY culture, building community with marginalized people in places left behind by capital. Now when not organizing, you’ll find them picking around a record store or at an underground show, hoping you’ll join them at a dive bar or on a bike ride soon.
The Transit For All PA team is excited to have you on board! What drew you to the work Transit For All PA is doing?
I have admired the work of Pittsburghers and T4All since right after I moved to PA! It’s been a huge privilege to learn from Pittsburghers and T4All’s organizing model of rider- and worker-led advocacy, and support one another at the state capitol in Harrisburg. When the opportunity arose to focus my work exclusively on knitting together the struggles of riders and workers in communities all across the commonwealth, I jumped at it.
What’s your experience with transit? What routes have you ridden during different parts of your life? How has the experience varied between cities where you’ve lived and visited?
I started a bit late with transit – like I mentioned above, I’m from Phoenix which is one of the physically-largest metros in the country, which only grew because of the invention of air conditioning, the federal highway system, and single-family home development across “virgin” desert. To have light rail finally arrive felt game-changing, and I rode it at every opportunity because it felt so different from the deadening, polluted wastelands along our ten-lane highways connecting every suburb.
What started as novelty became necessity as my car was totaled at my first job out of college, and I chose to pocket the dismal insurance payout to have a way out rather than invest in a crummy car I’d spend even more money insuring and repairing. I’ve since ridden Amtrak across the country twice, and ridden buses and trains in Chicago, LA, New York, the Bay Area, Philly, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Atlanta, Orlando, Portland, Seattle, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, New Orleans, Austin, Vancouver, and throughout England and France. While riding a bus or train is mostly pleasant and the easiest way to get around in cities like Seattle and New York, it’s a brazen marker of segregation and disinvestment, or gentrification and displacement in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, and New Orleans where transit is either explicitly designed for tourists, or barely held together for the working class, depending on whether it’s a bus, or a cutesy streetcar or light rail going between attractions. Riding the system has taught me more about how transit works and doesn’t work for riders than any video or study I’ve ever read. It has radicalized me to mobility and transportation being perhaps the most intersectional issue – touching environment, housing, healthcare, community safety, and disability, all held together by its role as one of our last “public spaces,” where all are (supposed to be) welcomed, regardless of background or means.
What work are you excited to do? What victories do you think you’ll help us win in the coming months?
I am extremely excited to ride transit in the boroughs, cities, and townships across PA, and learn directly from riders and operators about what works and doesn’t work in their communities. I’m ready to use that knowledge to connect our rural-to-urban communities’ struggles, and show legislators who say “our voters don’t care about transit” that their constituents depend on it, whether they realize it or not. I’m ready break us out of the managed decline of transit, and into restoration and expansion of service, starting with sustainable, dedicated funding for operations across the commonwealth.
What inspires you? What gives you energy that you want to share with others?
I am inspired by meeting anyone and everyone through organizing. It’s the people and information sharing that makes me most immediately excited. But most notably, I find myself invigorated by those who have been in the struggle for their whole lives. It is their resilience and clarity of purpose that keeps me going every day, regardless of how good or bad one particular fight might be going.
What is your favorite pump-up song?
I’m so bad at choosing favorites! I choose for a mood; all of ‘em are uh….very political haha.
-ANGRY – Paint It Black “Safe”
-INSPIRED – Latterman “My Bedroom Is Like For Artists”
-COMMUNAL – Lee Bains III & Glory Fires “Breaking It Down”
**This blog was published in slightly different form on the Pittsburghers For Public Transit website.