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.
It’s Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties that will suffer the most from this.
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.
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.
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.
So Dush's voters aren't paying much in the way of taxes.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
> 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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
There are very few of these in the US. Chicago El, BART, but I'm unsure if there are any others.
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.
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 savage exponential here really puts into light one reason why freight trains continue to be such important logistical infrastructure.
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.
For example just this week, the light rail was shut down twice because people were stealing copper wire: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/wir...
That makes it a very good candidate for video monitoring to me.
Also we should compare like with like, a yearly salary vs losses per week isn’t the same time period. I do agree that enforcement is more expensive than the fare-only losses though.
This comes from a "Broken Windows" philosophy; and I would argue it's far more important to go after the damage and crime than it is wasting money gating at the door.
> a yearly salary vs losses per week isn’t the same time period.
Correct, but it can be extrapolated. It would take a single employee catching $1000/week worth (at what, $2.50 to $5 per ticket?) to meet that single employee's salary, minus benefits, on average. That doesn't seem like a good investment, to me.
> “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.
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.
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.
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).
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.