Comment by dmschulman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmschulman | Hacker News Reader

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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?

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.

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.

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

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

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