Category: default || By jt3y

Erstwhile Almanac contributor Officer Jim notes that a number of newspapers, commenting on the Port Authority's ongoing disintegration, have argued that the transit agency should be dissolved. The Tribune-Review and its more cultured cousin, the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, have been among the loudest and most vocal proponents of privatizing PAT.

I'm not arguing that the Port Authority is perfect --- or even sustainable. But I don't think privatization is a magic cure-all. In fact, even if private companies wanted to take over the Port Authority (I'm not convinced they do), it's not clear that we'd save any money or get better service.

In 1993, the British government privatized British Railways.

Private Eye and other British magazines have documented the aftermath; while some things have improved (there are more trains being run), efficiency and reliability have gone down, and government subsidies to the private operators (adjusted for inflation) are more than double what the government paid to operate British Railways.

Under those conditions, privatization starts to sound a lot like corporate welfare, and not a good deal for Allegheny County or Pennsylvania taxpayers.

. . .

Port Authority was not created in a vacuum, or because local government wanted to muscle private companies out of the transit business, as the Trib has claimed.

Public transit in Allegheny County was run by private enterprise until 1964. For the most part, it was a mess, and private companies wanted out.

By the early 1960s, the biggest transit operator in the county, Pittsburgh Railways, was perpetually flirting with bankruptcy and was dropping bus and trolley routes on a regular basis. Other, smaller companies like Penn Transit in McKeesport, Ridge Lines in Port Vue, or Bamford Motor Coach in Homestead ran local inter-community service with varying degrees of success.

Some bus companies kept ridership high by keeping fares low; that prevented them from investing any money in maintenance or improvements. A few provided good service, but others were lousy, with buses that ran on no published timetables. Each had different fare structures and policies. There was some coordination of schedules and stops between different companies, but it was a hit-and-miss proposition.

Many of these transit companies started as shoe-string operations, and when automobiles became cheap in the 1920s, their already thin profit margins began to erode. West Penn Railways, a subsidiary of West Penn Power, dropped its McKeesport service way back in 1938.

I don't work for a fancy think-tank, but it sure sounds like private companies didn't necessarily do a good job running public transit in Western Pennsylvania.

. . .

Transit works best in densely packed metropolitan areas. Arguably much of Allegheny County has never been heavily developed; even in the glory days of the steel industry, urban areas like McKeesport and Clairton were separated by rural or "ruburbian" communities like Lincoln Borough and Mifflin Township (now West Mifflin borough). After World War II, the growth of suburbs like North Versailles and Pleasant Hills only spread people out even further.

But there are a few places where transit might truly make a profit --- the corridor from Squirrel Hill to Downtown Pittsburgh, for instance, is consistently busy.

The creation of Port Authority allowed profitable, heavily-traveled routes to subsidize less-traveled, money-losing routes. As a public agency, Port Authority also was able to issue municipal bonds, unlike privately-run transit companies.

. . .

Remember The Public Good?: If some bus routes have low ridership, why not discontinue them and just keep the profitable routes? Well, there's something called "the public good."

There are people in North Versailles or Glassport or Jefferson Hills who can't afford a car and need the bus to get to work, shopping, church and other activities. Telling them "move someplace else" isn't much of an option. Many are on fixed incomes and can't afford to move.

The Trib's editorial board has argued on more than one occasion that it would be cheaper to give them free cars than to subsidize public transit. Maybe they're being facetious; I sure hope so.

If someone can't afford to buy a car, they can't afford the upkeep, either; even if they could, we'd be dumping thousands of additional cars onto local roads, which requires more police, roads, and maintenance personnel. That only shifts the tax burden from one part of the public sector to another. (Never mind the environmental impact those cars would create.)

On the other hand, if you cancel the buses without any alternative, a lot of people are going to wind back up on unemployment or welfare. Again, we just shift the tax burden around; we don't reduce it.

Finally, I seriously doubt that any private company would want to take over bus service to Glassport or Clairton without hefty public subsidies to support the operations. Once again, that doesn't solve the transit funding problem --- it just moves the money around.

. . .

Start Over: Arguably, Port Authority needs to be ripped apart and put back together from scratch:

• Too many routes follow old pre-1964 transit lines; many, like the 56C from McKeesport to Pittsburgh, even bear their old Pittsburgh Railways route numbers. We all know that the population centers have shifted over the last 40 years. Transit routes haven't shifted enough to follow them.



• Too many buses still go through Downtown Pittsburgh. Why should someone who wants to go from Coraopolis to Ross Park Mall have to change buses in the Golden Triangle? This outdated way of thinking makes trips that should take 30 minutes stretch to an hour or more.



• Too many buses stop at the county lines. Communities like McMurray in Washington County, Hempfield in Westmoreland County, and Cranberry in Butler County were rural when Port Authority was created. Now they're de facto suburbs of Pittsburgh. We need an inter-county transit agency --- or at least one that's able to go further across county lines.



• Too many employees are making too much money. Everyone blames the drivers, and they are among the top paid in the country, according to the Post-Gazette. But who OK'd those salaries? Port Authority executives, who are getting richer much faster: The P-G notes that Port Authority pays health and dental insurance as well as a monthly $5,200 pension to one former CEO who is also collecting a half-million dollars in compensation from his current job. Another former CEO collects $8,500 per month from PAT while working as a vice president at a multi-national corporation.



• The blame for those salaries and retirement plans falls solely on the Port Authority's board of directors, which was appointed by Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato and his predecessor, Jim Roddey; the appointments were confirmed by Allegheny County Council. Allegheny County politicians created the problems; frankly, it's not fair for them to now point their fingers at the state. (Admittedly, I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to accept responsibility.)

. . .

Reconstruct, Not Demolish: I don't know how you clean up Port Authority piecemeal. I think it would be easier to start over with a fresh sheet of paper, tear up all of the existing transit routes and employment contracts, and design a new system from the ground up.

Rationalizing the Port Authority's operations requires politics to be removed from the process. It also requires people with a fresh outlook who don't drag along 40 years of history or their own biases and constituencies. Bringing in a private company to redesign the Port Authority makes a lot of sense for those reasons.

Outsourcing office functions and maintenance makes sense, too, if it's guaranteed to be cheaper. I can even see contracting with private companies to run certain routes --- transit authorities in neighboring counties do that with seemingly no ill effects; Westmoreland actually added more service in 1999.

But anyone who just says "privatize the Port Authority!" and "allow competition!" clearly hasn't spent any time looking at the issues or the history. Things are a lot more complicated than that.