SEPTA buses sit idle at the the Frankford Transportation Terminal in Philadelphia. Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

In September, the suffering of Philadelphia’s mass transit system appeared terminal. Saddled with a capital budget one-third the size of comparable agencies, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) declared defeat. Its crumbling infrastructure and Cold War–era rail fleets could no longer be operated safely. If at least $5 billion in funding was not quickly provided, the agency warned, nine of 13 regional rail routes would be closed, all trolleys — which in Philadelphia are well-integrated with the rest of the transit system — replaced with buses and one of the city’s two subway lines truncated. In late November, after two no votes, a transportation bill scraped through the state legislature. It allows for baseline repairs and vehicle replacement, including, finally, trolleys that are accessible for handicapped riders. SEPTA pleaded for $454 million in 2014, with increases to follow. Instead, the bill will ramp up to giving the agency $345 million annually, an amount that will not be reached until 2018. The message from Harrisburg was clear: Preservation, not expansion, is the name of the game. Philadelphia’s brush with disaster is typical of the perpetual crisis of public transit in the United States. Ridership levels spiked during and after the recession, but local and state budgets were forcibly contracted, forcing almost 80 percent of the nation’s transit systems to raise fares or cut back operations. In 2012, Boston suffered fare increases and service cuts, and ridership fell, and Pittsburgh faced a transit crisis similar to Philadelphia’s. In 2013, Detroit lost $7 million in funding for its buses. The national government is not limited by balanced-budget provisions and could be used to counterbalance forced austerity from state and local governments. But new federal funding provisions in 2012 tend to favor road infrastructure, reifying Washington’s disinclination for transit funding. (Salon’s Alex Pareene has argued that this is the inevitable result of a government that structurally favors rural and suburban interests and a wealthy political class that does not tend to include, or acknowledge, those who depend on public transit.) According to the American Public Transportation Association, the feds provided 65.2 percent of mass transit capital budgets in 1988 (the earliest available year), compared with only 39 percent in 2005 and 44 percent in 2011. Given the federal preference for road infrastructure and the inconstant attention of state government, it is essential that local communities find new revenue sources, preferably from a source closer to home.

Repairs, not expansion

The effects of shrinking federal funds are palpable in Philadelphia. The new infusion of state funds is unlikely to lead to SEPTA’s expansion, even though ridership has increased dramatically, Philadelphia’s population has started growing and car ownership is declining. SEPTA’s capital budget will double but will still be hundreds of millions of dollars smaller than its comparably sized counterparts (PDF) in Boston, northern New Jersey and Washington, D.C. And growth is desperately needed. Huge swaths of the city are untouched by affordable rail lines, including some of the poorest neighborhoods in northern and southwestern Philadelphia. Two large job hubs are untouched by rail service of any kind, even though the Navy Yard, home to a diverse array of industries, is within easy range of one subway line’s terminus and commuters headed to the vast King of Prussia Mall by bus or car must sit in soul-crushing traffic. But these are not projects that can be tackled with the existing funding. Despite the desperately needed new revenue from Harrisburg, SEPTA is in no position to pursue such long-term projects. “This is primarily capital funds that will allow us to rebuild the system that we have,” Joe Casey, general manager for SEPTA, said in an interview. “If an expansion isn’t (eligible for at least 50 percent federal support), I would find that difficult — to spend our slim state dollars on an expansion project.” System expansion was never likely, given the magnitude of SEPTA’s crisis. It is home to the oldest rail fleet in the nation, with an average vehicle age of 33 years and infrastructure inherited from private transit companies that invested little in their holdings after World War II. The AEM-7 locomotives, which assist the regional rail fleet, fail at a rate of three times a month, while the trolley fleet’s reliability has declined by 50 percent in the last five years. Some of the power substations date back to the 1930s and use technology so out of date that no other transit authority still uses it.

If adequate federal and state money is not forthcoming, another source of funding is needed. Local taxation for transit is a viable option.

There are similar state-of-good-repair backlogs in transit systems all over the country. In 2010 the Federal Transit Administration estimated a national mass transit repair deficit of almost $80 billion. Cities ranging from Atlanta to Kansas City, Mo., are focusing their scarce transit dollars on streetcar lines, which are useful for incentivizing downtown development but often seem to be too short and run too infrequently to be useful for most residents or commuters. (Easy, cheap fixes are often ignored, like ensuring that buses run more than twice an hour and making route maps legible to the uninitiated.) In California’s booming Bay Area, tech companies have decided to opt out of fighting for greater investment in public transportation and are instead ferrying (literally) their employees around in privatized mass transit that, until recently, utilized the existing network’s infrastructure without contributing to it. For those not employed by Google, the fight for public transit options continues.

A half-cent sales tax?