Quote:
Originally Posted by daviderik
Pgh used to have many competing bus lines in addition to the trolley. In my opinion making an "authority" to anything is horrible. It's a kin to making Giant Eagle the only grocery store allowed in the county. It's privately owned and they can charge anything they want and the customer has no recourse. If it were entirely run by local government at least you could vote the bums out. But now they cut service raise rates and threaten Harrisburg for more funding.
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Without claiming the current situation is ideal, I think a few things are worth noting:
(1) the Port Authority is actually a County agency with a board appointed by the County Executive, and you can in fact vote out the County Executive if you don't like what Port Authority is doing and get a new Board (which is actually what happened to kill the Spine Line);
(2) my understanding is that the many private transit companies that existed before the Port Authority takeover were in fact failing financially. Generally, it is actually really difficult to make money off transit, and my understanding is that the early successes of private transit companies in the U.S. were mostly dependent on revenues that came from side deals (e.g., land deals). Once that sort of stuff tapered off they became increasingly subject to financial failure. Which doesn't mean their replacements worked out well, but the status quo was likely not sustainable;
(3) and in fact, state law allows private companies to supplement or compete with the Port Authority today, but there haven't been many companies trying to do that, even in cases where there is no competing Port Authority service.
So there really isn't much hope of effective competition in this area--private companies occasionally target a few select routes, but a comprehensive transit system is likely going to require a public agency of some sort.
As for state funding, Allegheny County pays an enormous amount of money to the state in transportation taxes, and gets a disproportionately small share back for state highway and bridge expenditures with the County. The same is true for other large urban counties in Pennsylvania--basically, they are providing massive subsidies to the rural counties to support rural state roads, bridges, and police. However, the large urban counties get a small portion of this money (by no means all of it) back in the form of state transit grants.
There are a lot of fundamentally anti-urban or anti-transit people who have made a habit of completing ignoring the massive subsidy Allegheny County is providing to the state in the form of state transportation taxes net of highway/bridge/police expenditures, and making it sound as if those transit grants are charity on the part of the state. Of course there is no doubt Allegheny County would be better off if there was NO state transportation funding system at all, and it could just keep all its tax money and spend it however it wanted. But you can't just cut off state transit spending and still make Allegheny County pay the same state taxes, since that would take an already unfair system and make it even worse.
No doubt, though, the Port Authority was not well-managed for many years. However, in the mid-2000s under Steve Bland, they really started getting their act together, with a system redesign, tougher labor negotiations, and so on. Operating efficiency increased greatly as a result, but they still had legacy problems in the form of retiree benefits (which state law protects), and rising gas costs also were a problem.
Meanwhile, the state for many years had kept its transportation taxes and fees fixed such that they were not keeping up with inflation, and there was a growing shortfall. They came up with a plan to toll I-80, but then the feds nixed that plan. When that plan fell through, it triggered an automatic cut in state transportation funding, including the state grants to the Port Authority.
The Port Authority then had to cut service--Rendell found a little temporary money, but it was not enough to prevent some immediate service cuts, and when that money ran out the Port Authority was going to have to do even more cutting. But it had no choice about this--it was using those state grants to provide service as it was supposed to, so when the state cut the grants, it had to cut the service. Ultimately, however, a new state transportation bill was passed and the Port Authority was able to cancel the future cuts and restore some of the first cuts.
Again, people who make a habit of being anti-transit described this as the Port Authority cutting service in order to extort more money from the state. But in truth it was just Port Authority responding to a funding cut, and then to funding being restored.
None of this is intended to be a criticism of daviderik's comment in particular. But it is a regrettably good example of how broken the politics of transit has become that so many people more or less accepted this framing of what happened.
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