Philadelphia Transit System Votes to Cut Service by 45%, Hike Fares | Hacker News Reader

Philadelphia Transit System Votes to Cut Service by 45%, Hike Fares

bloomberg.com

54 pointspetethomas66 comments

Pennsylvania could be so much more for its residents but we're a state bogged down politically by rural districts that do everything within their power to kneecap the our two major economic hubs/cities: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Our governor backs mass transit, but state reps will not budge on funding as SEPTA only services Philadelphia and the counties immediately adjacent. One politician, Cris Dush who represents the 25th district in the upper most part of the state, released a letter to concerned citizens and characterized the issue as a preferrence for keeping tax dollars in his own district as there's no mass transit available to his constituents. In his view, he's not willing to pay for other people to be "chaffered" around on public transit: http://crossingbroad.com/news/trending/pennsylvania-state-se...

Until Pennsylvania's statehouse can overcome their misguided idea of what it means to levy and collect taxes, PA will continue to lag behind other states in the northeast in terms of basic services and economic competitiveness.

Uneducated question, seems like Philadelphia has around $5B of revenue a year, and the transit deficit is ~$200M. I understand the city has to provide services and a lot of the revenue will be restricted as to what it can be allocated to. But with these orders of magnitude, why is the default expectation not for cities to fund their own transit with city tax revenue?

Much of the service being cut is the regional rail that primarily services the collar counties. Philadelphia will lose bus routes but the core of their transit will survive.

It’s Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties that will suffer the most from this.

Well that just confuses me more, if the losses are spread out across all these counties each with their own revenue, why isn't that the default place where money is allocated from?

Probably due to the impossible complexity of coming to an agreement on proper funding allocation between the 7 different counties served by SEPTA, especially since 2 of those counties are not even in Pennsylvania... and then having to re-debate that on a periodic basis as ridership trends shift over time.

SEPTA was formed by the state, and its existence benefits the whole state by enabling economic activity (which then leads to more state-level taxes), reducing congestion on roadways maintained by the state, etc. And if my back-of-the-envelope math is correct, nearly 1/3rd of PA's population lives in counties served by SEPTA.

That's a very unsatisfying while probably correct answer. I wish voters stopped accepting this kind of stuff being "impossibly complex" for government.

I just don't think that's realistic when the number of stakeholders grows too high. How do you accurately determine how much each county should pay? How do you allocate funding for commuters who live in one county but work in another?

When a transit agency serves the state's largest population center and economic center, it seems reasonable for its funding to be a state-level concern. Especially when it also serves other states, and additionally ~40% of the tracks used by SEPTA are owned by Amtrak, which is Federal. County-level officials are just not the best layer to interface with all that.

Isn't it the norm for elected officials to want to keep tax dollars in their district? This Dush guy might be misguided somehow in the larger scheme of things, but wouldn't he just be reflecting his constituents' desire to directly benefit from the taxes they pay?

The most affected counties (Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware) have average incomes twice that of the counties Dush represents (Crawford, Erie, Washington, Greene).

So Dush's voters aren't paying much in the way of taxes.

There are huge benefits derived from economies of scale that can be built at the appropriate levels of government. You can end up wasting a lot of resources by trying to do things too locally or not locally enough.

I live in a rural area and it would bankrupt our county if we had to maintain all the miles of road (far more per taxpayer than urban areas) if the state wasn't doing so much of it. The state uses expensive machines to do much of that work efficiently. It wouldn't make sense for our county to buy that equipment and have it sit unused much of the time. So the county would be less efficient at it. And that's before we get to things like duplication of administrative roles around that work.

Sometimes that means urban areas are helping fund some of my local roads. And sometimes that means I'm helping fund their public transport. When done well, we all get far more for less tax money.

Much more background for the Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) funding crisis here:

https://www.rideprt.org/2025-funding-crisis/funding-crisis/

> Commuters in the Philadelphia area are now set to lose access to 50 bus routes, 66 rail stations, five regional rail lines and Sports Express trains. Service will be cut by 20% starting August 24, with a further 25% reduction on January 1, 2026. In September, a full hiring freeze will go into effect and fares will rise to $2.90 from $2.50.

> The downsizing is a stark illustration of the fiscal reckoning that mass transit systems in some of the nation’s major cities are facing as they deal with a collective $6 billion funding shortfall. Agencies in Chicago, Boston and San Francisco have been scrambling to raise funds for their operations before the start of the next fiscal year on July 1.

It does seem right that the article refers to a "death spiral" here. Once transit becomes insufficient to get from place to place you stop using it and pivot to cars, and then there's even less justification for funding the transit system.

I wonder if American society will ever come up with a solution for this since the problem is so widespread. More cars on the road doesn't seem sustainable, traffic is already really bad in many places.

The solution is to get past the idea that public transit needs to be profitable, along with any other public or government service. The idea is just asinine.

The US's obsession with profit via public service -and everything else- is asinine and embarrassing.

Yes. Very few profitable roads.

Not true. In the early 20th century, the American automobile industry fought aggressively to divert public funding away from public transit and towards building roads, precisely because it increased their profit margins.

That’s a profitable middleman due to roads, not a profitable road.

Especially since we don't make any assumption that roads are profitable. It is just insane. Cars can lose as much money as it takes but god forbid a train lose 5%.

Doesn't that get balanced by the fact that it will take forever to get places in cars, if everyone starts using them instead of public transit?

I honestly do not think I've ever heard someone say that taking mass transpo is faster. Even if it does take "forever" in a car, people do not mind sitting in their car "forever" compared to sitting with strangers "forever"

Obviously a very different view, but public transport in London (UK) is very much seen as faster than driving. The only reason someone would choose to drive is if they needed to transport something difficult to take on public transport.

Do other cities not consider buses as part of public transport? Are we limiting our discussion to trains/subway?

In Seattle proper and anywhere its transit is good, transit and walking are definitely preferable to cars.

It's called "rapid transit". That's exactly what the "rapid" part means - faster than a car.

There are very few of these in the US. Chicago El, BART, but I'm unsure if there are any others.

Maybe I'm conflating my town's DART--Dallas Area Rapid Transit--with other cities' rapid transit, as DART includes buses which use the same city streets as cars, only the cars don't have to make stops at the bus stops like the "rapid transit" buses (which is their entire point of being).

The DART train stations are few and far apart that they are really only useful for getting to/from the outskirts into town. For me to drive to my local rail station is roughly the same distance/time as to just drive downtown.

Boston MBTA, NYC subway, LA metro, DC metro. Atlanta MARTA.

You definitely hear this regularly discussed in NYC, where for many corridors transit is dramatically faster than driving.

Almost all.

Maybe in New York City, during rush hour, it takes longer to get somewhere by car than it does using public transportation (I don't know); but, that's usually not the case. When I lived in Arlington, VA with regional and county buses, as well as a subway, waling and public transportation took over an hour to get to work in Washington, D.C. By car, it was maybe 20 minutes.(I biked to work, which took longer than driving, since I had to take a less direct route.)

Now, I work from home and I'm a 20 minute drive from the office; but, public transportation is a two-hour trip, one way. (Either 1:55 or 2:05, depending on the bus.)

The solution is to stop subsidizing cars. We build roads for cars without a strong link to usage to charges outside of some minor gas taxes.

Link the cost of driving on a road to usage based on the weight of vehicle (proxy for the damage it causes) and this would be an entirely different equation.

The history of the american road infrastructure was really pushed early on as a military requirement, to be able to move troops, equipment everywhere, even land planes on roads if necessary. Military purposes can be the 'undeniable' justification for almost anything.

And what a proxy it is. The damage caused to pavement by a vehicle's axle load is proportional to the quartic of its axle load. A 2 ton car actually causes roughly 2^4 = 16 times more damage than a 1 ton car of equivalent make does.

The savage exponential here really puts into light one reason why freight trains continue to be such important logistical infrastructure.

Living without a car is much easier when the places that are lived are less car-focused. Walkability would also improve overall health because people would be burning 500-1000 more calories a day just from moving about more regularly, and it could help the obesity epidemic.

That requires transitioning from the suburb layout style we use to increase places that can be gone that are walkable, and that requires more car-hostile, human-safe places… the transitional stages are very, very unpleasant for all involved, like growing one’s hair out and struggling until you can get your hair in a ponytail or braids.

    That requires transitioning from the suburb layout style we use

That sounds good in the abstract, but this is a major metro area. You physically cannot cram all of the population and economic activity from the suburbs (major pharma companies, etc) into the city limits.

Even if you could -- like if you could just fire up a time machine and move stuff around like a Sim City hacked save game editor -- you'd have a very large condensed urban area (comparable to NYC proper) that would still require robust public transport.

You want to link adjacent population/economic centers with affordable transportation.

The solution is obvious as it is practiced in the rest of the world. Motorcycles.

The person who downvoted me has obviously never visited the continent of Asia

I love motorcycles. Alas, winter is a thing in Pennsylvania. And it frequently rains in the prime riding season.

True.

I strongly support public transportation (specifically, rail), but:

> I wonder if American society will ever come up with a solution for this since the problem is so widespread.

I think the answer will be something having to do with self-driving cars.

If you look at companies like Glydways, they're starting to provide transit-like services to governments.

The reason I think self-driving cars will perform better in the USA is that it is high in OpEx, but low in CapEx, which I think translates better to how Americans fund things (immediate results, no big investment that can unravel)

Just thinking out loud here, but the Third World also works like that. (High OpEx, low CapEx.)

America makes more sense if you think of it as a developing country that happens to be rich.

Self-driving cars only look like high OpEx/low CapEx because there are a trivial number of them on the roads. At scale, they require vast investment in road infrastructure to manage congestion. Adding many more vehicles to roads that are already congested will not work.

So in practice, they will be high OpEx/high CapEx. Which makes sense in a country fully captured by Capital.

Unless autonomous cars are accompanied by step-function changes in the ability to build new roads cheaply, they are not the answer.

America has and likes roads, so the marginal capex here is low.

Half of the country lives in suburbs and that's not going to change overnight. So roads are an unfortunate reality of keeping America functional.

Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads, though, because they don't gawk at accidents and potentially could drive in denser formations with less separation.

This isn't about the suburbs, where by and large people don't take transit today. Shutting down transit entirely wouldn't affect most suburbanites directly. But when folks talk about transit, they generally are not trying to tell suburbanites or rural residents to live differently. They should keep their cars and drive or let self-driving get them around.

But places where people take transit are a different animal. These places are characterized by higher density and higher levels of road congestion.

> Self-driving cars should enable higher throughput on existing roads

Yes, in the suburbs and exurbs. A gridlocked highway in a city does not have a much higher throughput possible; cars are generally tightly packed and/or stopped.

Remember that for all the gawkers at an accident on one side of the highway, there are also drivers on the other side of the road who are physically blocked by the accident. Autonomy does not help this either, for medium-term penetration levels of autonomous vehicles. (Making the great assumption that at near 100% penetration, accidents could be nearly eliminated.)

I think the suburban angle does matter because the general life cycle of a suburb is that they start rich because they have 0 maintenance costs, but after 20-30 years require money to pay for road + sewer + water maintenance.

So they start with a massive budget surplus which creates well-funded schools that attract rich people. But after 30 years, they cannibalize education to fix potholes. And the socio-economic landscape changes to reflect this.

We're starting to hit a lot of suburbs in the USA around that 30 year mark, and they're attracting progressively lower income residents for whom transportation costs become an increasingly important factor in their home buying decisions.

The "self driving cars" are the future prediction is probably correct, but it makes me so very sad. A self driving centric city is still a car centric city, and it's not really a city. It's just a sprawling space with moving adult strollers.

The optimist in me says there will be less parking which opens up land for housing and 3rd spaces. I also think that the self driving cars will eventually create self driving private bus lanes. And then cities will probably realize they can just build a permanent line there.

One interesting thought experiment to do: what happens if private car ownership went away tomorrow and everyone took Waymos instead? Let's assume there's enough waymos to handle the load. It would be mayhem. There would be waymo depots everywhere and there would be an outbound traffic spike from the depots on their way to pick people up in the morning. It's simply not scalable unless you shared routes. So I don't think car ownership is going away. I think people will own waymos. At that point you might as well buy 5 waymos so that each kid can be "independent."

I'm optimistic, but the future of the American city is grim (with some outliers who are embracing urbanism)

I agree, but based on my daily encounters with Waymos in San Francisco, they leave me far more optimistic than human drivers. They yield to people in crosswalks, they don't honk and create unnecessary noise because they're having an emotional reaction to something they can't control (like a person jaywalking). They don't get drunk and smash into things.

And biggest of all, they don't take up a ton of public space for parking. Yes, they do require depots, but they don't require the continued existence of things like minimum parking ratio laws.

A "pivot to cars" might be feasible in a small city but in a larger city there are just so many cars you can handle. Robert Moses's plans to make it easy to drive from Queens to New Jersey would have required bulldozing a lot of midtown.

In a place like Tompkins County which has good bus service threatened by management problems you could have a "death spiral" that only affects transit but for Philly, NYC or Washington it would be a "death spiral" for the whole city.

The only solution to traffic I can see happening here realistically is a sudden dramatic increase to gas prices.

As for public transit I can't imagine a solution. It probably won't ever be solved and thinking about such things will probably be very far from everyone's minds if the gas thing happens.

I know it's not as futuristic as self driving cars or VR living but that's my honest assessment.

Death spiral is unfortunately a very correct term for this. I really can't express how different the conditions of public transit in SF and Philly are. Riding the L in Philly is unbelievably sketchy at night (passes through K&A) and I would not ride it alone if I were a woman. This is one of the main intra-city commuter rail lines in Philly. At this point, there are so few viable options that I can't really recommend public transit in Philly to anyone. Compare that to SF, where I literally take public transit everywhere, every day.

The last two paragraphs provide relevant context (as is often the case in news articles), which makes clear that this is another step in a series of political maneuvers, so wait and see how this pans out. The vote means service is "set to" be cut, but in the immediate term, it's SEPTA pulling a lever to put pressure on state lawmakers who are already negotiating a financial package for transit.

> “This is a vote none of us wanted to take,” SEPTA Board Chair Kenneth Lawrence Jr. said. “To be clear, this does not have to happen — if state lawmakers can reach an agreement to deliver sufficient, new funding for public transit.”

> Earlier this year, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro proposed a $300 million mass transit bill to help fund the system that was passed by the state House of Representatives on June 17. Negotiations on the bill are still underway.

SEPTA's total budget for last year was $2.6 billion against a metro population of 6.2 million.

Seems like an obvious place to generate returns for the population given a total annual cost of ~$400 per resident in the metro area. I doubt SEPTA could do this, but it also sort of implies that you could add a ~$100/mo tax to all households in the area and provide the service free at the point of use, which might make it cheaper to operate.

I took SEPTA for work for 5 years, and its overall a pretty good system. But SEPTA is in my view not hampered by anything more than Philadelphia's city government. There are arguments around the state not supporting SEPTA more. However until Philadelphia gets rid of their asinine resident and worker tax, and business REVENUE taxes which push middle class and wealthier residents, workers and companies to the suburbs. If more businesses are in the city, then there can be more efficient trains. But most of the big businesses are in KOP, Blue Bell, Malvern, etc.

When a company can at any point leave the city, and get a 2% revenue tax break, and give all of their workers a 4% raise, its stupid of them not to. Only Universities, Hospitals, Lawyers and non-profits are actually in the city (Or a few big companies that have massive tax breaks and hand outs).

This policy pushing businesses to the suburbs and incentivizing the suburbs means people are just going to drive from Lower Merion to Blue Bell or whatever, and not take the train to work.

Alan Fisher has a good video on this and why Septa is actually one of the most efficient transit agencies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTo82C4JIWo

I guess it's nice to occasionally hear that California isn't the only hopelessly messed up state.

Philadelphia SEPTA is already priced HIGH in my opinion

Regional Rail runs a little on the expensive side. Round trip from Philly back to the suburbs is $17.50. I take that to get to work sometimes. The bus, subway, and trolley are extremely affordable for what they are.

Over 1/4 of the residents in Philadelphia live at or below the poverty line so services need to reasonably priced. Some data from Pew: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2019/07...

Can't find it right now, but I also remember a study that compared funding for other major metro transit agencies, and SEPTA ranked very highly for offering as many transit options for the amount of riders they handle given their relatively anemic budget (compared to NYC or Chicago).

> Regional Rail runs a little on the expensive side. Round trip from Philly back to the suburbs is $17.50.

Are you paying the surcharge to buy a ticket on board in one of those directions? Normally if you already have tickets, round trip to zone 4 (outer suburbs) is $15 on weekdays or $14 on weekends.

That's quite cheap in my opinion, considering zone 4 goes pretty far. For example Doylestown is 25 miles from Center City Philly as the crow flies.

Compare that to an equivalent trip in northern Jersey on NJ Transit rail: Morristown NJ is about 25 miles from Midtown Manhattan, and a round-trip fare is currently $32.20. And after next week's fare hike, it will be $33.10.

It's not always sunny in Philadelphia.

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