(The following article by Jere Downs was posted on the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website on June 14.)
PHILADELPHIA — Eliminating four Regional Rail lines and the C bus and reducing dozens of other routes is a bad idea. Instead, state and local governments could produce more funding, and SEPTA could restructure services, according to an independent but nonbinding report released yesterday by the public transit agency.
“It is outrageous that service cuts such as these even need to be considered,” the report says of SEPTA’s proposal to fill $25 million of its $55 million budget gap by eliminating the R1 Airport, R2 Warminster, R8 Chestnut Hill West and R6 Cynwyd lines and other services amounting to 12 percent of current service. “Eliminating entire transit routes is an extremely severe measure that should be undertaken only as a last desperate resort,” according to the report.
SEPTA officials would not comment on the report, produced under a state law that requires independent review of any proposed service cuts.
“It will be sent to the board for further action,” SEPTA spokesman Gary Fairfax said.
In calling for restoration of the recent $11 million cut in state funding and long-term funding reform, Ronald DeGraw, a transit consultant, and Murray C. Goldman, a retired Common Pleas Court judge, echoed many of the 1,000 people who testified and 800 who wrote to SEPTA as it conducted 10 public hearings last month.
“Without large and continuing annual operating subsidies, [SEPTA] simply cannot continue to expand or even survive,” according to the report, noting that seven years ago, the state “just about stopped the annual increases that make good public transit possible.”
If state funding had simply been adjusted for inflation each year, the report adds, SEPTA would not have a budget deficit.
But with little more than two weeks to go before the SEPTA board must act to balance the agency’s $888 million budget for the 2004 fiscal year, the report supports the proposal to collect $15 million by raising the cost of a token from $1.30 to $1.40 and the cost of weekly and monthly transit passes between 4 and 7 percent and another $15 million by trimming spending.
The report also suggests that an additional $10 million could be found without massive proposed cuts.
The report recommends items such as “staff reductions, and reduced ticket office hours.” Some rail service cutbacks are also suggested, including eliminating some trains that run every half-hour on the R8 Chestnut Hill West Line.
But the report also asks Philadelphia and its four suburban counties not to cut their annual subsidy by $4 million, simply because reduced state funding this year allows them to pare back local matching funds.
SEPTA’s fiscal problems will continue, DeGraw and Goldman warned, unless legislators find new revenue sources for transit.
“The need for a permanent long-term funding base remains an urgent requirement to assure that transportation services in the Southeastern Pennsylvania region will never again be endangered,” the report concludes.