Oct 19, 2006 3 min read

If you want to know what’s wrong with the state’s two big public transit agencies, and why they have a perpetual craving for more tax money to subsidize their operations, you should digest the recently releases glimpse of salaries at the Port Authority of Allegheny County. The cash-strapped PAT system has 3,000 employees, faces a $31.5 million deficit next year and claims it could run out of money by January. Yet five of its managers earned more than $125,000 in 2005, while 58 of its union workers made more than $70,000. Another 229 union bustrolley operators and route foremen earned between $60,000 and $70,000. It’s nice work if you can get it.

The highest pay for bus-trolley operators at PAT is $22.18 per hour, only a half-cent less than their counterparts working for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in Philadelphia, which has a comparatively higher cost of living. That doesn’t make sense.

Any impartial student of economics could reasonably conclude that PAT’s excessive salary structure might be part of the problem. (We can only imagine what the retirement and benefits package looks like, but we doubt that it’s bare-bones.) In a private business, the solution would be fast and simple: streamline the operation, cut back on the number of employees and/or their compensation, and raise fares as needed to more fully pay for the operation.

But that’s not how it works in the public sector, where inefficiencies are too long tolerated and reliance on taxpayer largesse is too often imbued in the prevailing mindset. In early 2005, Gov. Ed Rendell flexed $412 million of federal transportation monies over a two-year period to bail out Pennsylvania’s financially troubled transit agencies, primarily PAT and SEPTA. The two got $68 million immediately, in what Rendell hailed as a short-term hedge against fare hikes, service cuts and employee lay-offs. It’s money that could – and should – have been used instead to fix the commonwealth’s crumbling roads and bridges.

Still needed, said Rendell back in February 2005, is a dedicated funding stream to further subsidize transit operations. “Legislative action in Harrisburg is the only way to achieve that,” said Rendell in a press release. “Make no mistake, the best way to fund transit is with new transit money. Highway money should be for highways. But we’ve run out of options and I have no other choice.”

That’s not true, governor. Instead of using highway money to bail out inefficient operations like PAT and SEPTA, those dollars should be used for their primary purpose, as you noted. And the option you did not use was refusing to come to their rescue with a pot full of state cash, thus feeding the addiction of these agencies to taxpayer money that isn’t always spent in the best manner.

Now PAT’s back, begging for more. Is anyone surprised?