SEPTA needs more money. It also needs to be smarter with what it has. | Editorial

Examples of the transportation authority's poor stewardship of its limited resources complicate the case for more investment. That doesn't make that investment any less necessary.

SEPTA is looking to build a new fare collection system with more convenient payment options and more adaptable technology than its current Key card. That system's rollout has been troubled from the start and an example of poor decision-making at SEPTA.Read moreElizabeth Robertson / File Photograph

by The Editorial Board

Published April 27, 2023, 5:20 a.m. ET

The Philadelphia region runs on SEPTA, but public transportation in Southeastern Pennsylvania is in crisis.

The pandemic-era trend toward remote and hybrid work, along with broader safety issues that plague the city, has taken a big bite out of ridership, leaving the transportation authority short hundreds of millions of dollars in fare revenue.

With federal COVID-19 relief money running out by April 2024, SEPTA’s new fiscal year budget may be the last without service cuts and fare increases unless there is additional funding from state and county governments.

“We are doing absolutely everything we can to grow revenue through ridership growth and tighten our belts through efficiencies but those measures alone are not enough,” said CEO and General Manager Leslie Richards when the budget was unveiled earlier this month.

Richards is right to ask for more. SEPTA receives significantly less local support than peer transit agencies. While SEPTA’s local funding amounts to roughly $17 per person, peer regions — such as Boston, Denver, Chicago, and Seattle — are spending, on average, nearly $70. That’s a difference of roughly $330 million per year, more than SEPTA’s projected $240 million budget deficit. Service cuts and fare increases would only lead to fewer people riding SEPTA’s buses, trolleys, and trains, further eroding fare revenue and trapping the system in a doom spiral.

SEPTA, however, has at times been a poor steward of its admittedly limited resources. Those bad decisions complicate the case for necessary investments.

Most infamously, SEPTA tried to spend $3 billion on a rail line to King of Prussia that would have fewer riders than some of the agency’s bus routes. Given the lack of enthusiasm for the project outside of the King of Prussia business and development community, it was an odd choice. It shouldn’t have taken a hard no from the federal government for SEPTA to realize that it was time to back off.

SEPTA also failed to control costs for its Key card. Announced with much fanfare, the (delayed) 2016 rollout left many residents wishing the agency had remained in the analog age. The Key cards and their accompanying validators have been unreliable from the start, the vending machines that distribute them are slow and confusing, and SEPTA’s choice to utilize proprietary systems left the agency at the mercy of the manufacturer of the cards, Conduent Inc. The company has cashed in — to the tune of $285 million for upgrades and system maintenance, as well as the initial work. That’s more than double the project’s original budget.

The SEPTA Key card fiasco shouldn’t have been a surprise. There were early signs that SEPTA, which specializes in running buses and trains, wasn’t really equipped to handle implementing a new, digital payment system to replace tokens. As a SEPTA official said at the time, “[W]e didn’t know what kind of technology [the bidders] were going to propose.” Perhaps it should have enlisted the help of a technical expert on digital payments and technology before moving forward.

There’s also been a failure to procure quality and reliable vehicles for SEPTA’s rail fleet, something a transit agency should have expertise in. Despite being relatively new additions to SEPTA’s train fleet, structural failures and other issues have caused problems for the Silverliner V cars used by the Regional Rail system. Trains on the Market-Frankford Line are held together by something called the “hoagie of steel.” Replacement Regional Rail cars are also plagued with faulty wiring and repeated delays. The most consistently reliable trains SEPTA owns are used on the Broad Street Line, and date back to the days of the Reagan administration.

Some of the train issues are not SEPTA’s fault. Federal Buy America rules, which are meant to protect American industry, don’t work particularly well when places like the Budd factory are already closed. Instead, the rules have led to the IKEA-ization of transit, with train cars being built overseas before being broken down and shipped for reassembly here in America.

The agency also needs to stop wasting money on projects with little return on investment. While SEPTA wisely has suspended most parking garage projects, it is going ahead with a nearly $50 million garage in Conshohocken. With only 410 additional spots being created, that’s over $100,000 per rider, the same kind of bad math as the doomed King of Prussia rail project. SEPTA says it has grant support from PennDot to cover some of the costs. If so, both agencies are wasting money that could be better spent elsewhere.

Quality public transit in Philadelphia is a matter of need, not want: For SEPTA to thrive to the benefit of the entire region, it needs more local investment as much as it needs better decision-making.