Within the San Francisco Bay space, commuters face a collection of grim prospects in 2026: Bay Space Speedy Transit trains that run as soon as an hour, shutdowns of whole strains, no service on weekends.
The prospects for riders in and round Philadelphia are additionally bleak. Whereas a choose’s September order overturned large service cuts to dozens of Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) bus and rail strains, a 21.5% fare enhance survived.
However deliberate enhancements similar to station renovations, accessibility upgrades and the acquisition of recent electrical and hybrid diesel-electric buses have been postponed when SEPTA shifted $394 million in capital funds to its working funds as a way to cowl shortfalls for this fiscal yr and the subsequent one, which begins in July.
In the meantime, a long-term funding answer has but to materialize for SEPTA’s almost 800,000 every day riders, at the same time as Pennsylvania’s governor moved over almost $220 million in capital funding for security and infrastructure work.
“This is a story that transit agencies or communities across the country are all dealing with,” mentioned Stephen Bronskill of Transit Ahead Philadelphia, an advocacy group.
But in New York, North America’s largest mass transportation authority finds itself in an enviable and uncommon place: The MTA is financially steady within the close to time period, with years of projected balanced budgets and it’s including service, not reducing, on the subways and buses.
“This is a remarkable turnaround just from a few years ago, when we were staring down the COVID fiscal cliff,” Jai Patel, the MTA’s chief monetary officer, mentioned on the transportation authority’s November board assembly.
The A and L final month grew to become the newest subway strains to obtain weekday service boosts. A number of others — together with the G, J and M — have had extra frequent weekend service since July 2023, whereas the C, N and R strains are amongst these whose riders now spend much less time ready for the subsequent prepare through the noon hours on weekdays.
With these adjustments, New York is bucking the nationwide pattern.
“Imagine in New York, if you went out for dinner and the subways and the buses weren’t running anymore late at night,” mentioned Philip Plotch, principal researcher and senior fellow on the Eno Middle for Transportation, a Washington D.C.-based assume tank.
However that’s precisely what’s dealing with transit methods in cities and states the place huge funding gaps have but to be crammed.
“You have less money than you did just four or five years ago, and transit agencies across the country are hurting because of that,” Plotch mentioned. “They don’t have the revenue coming in from the farebox because there’s fewer people riding.”
The MTA has managed to dodge mass layoffs to its workforce of greater than 70,000 and maintain every-other-year fare and toll will increase at projected ranges, even because the authority spends much less cash now than in 2019 — all whereas really growing weekday subway service by 2% throughout 13 strains and weekday bus service by 1.6% since 2023.
That interprets, in line with the MTA, to 162 further weekday subway journeys — from 8,179 two years in the past to eight,341 now. On the buses, the variety of weekday journeys has climbed by 856 on weekdays, from 54,291 to 55,147.
How is all of this attainable for a historically cash-strapped transit system?
Janno Lieber, MTA chairperson and chief govt, credited Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers for serving to to place the authority in a extra steady scenario after ridership plummeted through the pandemic.
“They’re living the fiscal cliff, they’re going over,” Lieber mentioned of peer transit businesses after the MTA’s November board assembly. “We don’t have that because Kathy Hochul stepped up in 2023.”
The firmer monetary footing is the outgrowth of a number of elements that embody a post-pandemic ridership return that’s among the many highest within the nation and an array of income sources and taxes devoted to funding transit. These embody taxes on actual property, gross sales, ridesharing, automobile leases, gasoline and extra.
Then there’s the important thing 2023 buy-in from Albany lawmakers that considerably elevated the transportation authority’s revenues by mountaineering the payroll mobility tax on employers inside the MTA service space.
“Ridership is coming back and those dedicated taxes are now really making a huge difference for the MTA — you can’t say it’s just the payroll mobility tax, because there are so many existing ones,” mentioned Rachael Fauss, senior coverage advisor for Reinvent Albany, a fiscal watchdog group. “Taking them all together, plus that really significant operating investment in 2023, that’s why we’re at where we are, rather than in a really difficult place.”
The MTA can also be relying on at the very least $1.5 billion via 2029 in casino-licensing revenues earmarked for its annual working bills — with billions extra doubtlessly coming from taxes on three new playing palaces on the verge of getting licenses to function in Queens and The Bronx.
The potential for a wagering-driven windfall for the transit system has received over some who weren’t massive on casinos.
“We were definitely skeptics on that, but it is good for them,” Fauss mentioned.
However there’s additionally the potential of the MTA dropping income from bus ridership, ought to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani succeed on one among his signature proposals to remove fares on buses. Mamdani has mentioned that the no-fares program would carry an annual price of $700 million — whereas Lieber has countered that the misplaced income is more likely to be nearer to $1 billion and that the proposal “probably needs to be studied a lot.”
Patel, the MTA’s chief monetary officer, mentioned final month that the place farebox income as soon as accounted for 38% of the authority’s almost $20 billion working funds, that determine is now right down to 26%.
A Bay Space Speedy Transit prepare heads to Oakland Worldwide Airport, Oct. 06, 2019. Credit score: Sheila Fitzgerald/Shutterstock
Transit businesses and consultants have cited post-pandemic shifts in ridership as being tough for conventional funding fashions, with officers from BART warning that the funding construction for the five-county system “no longer works” in a area with the very best work-from-home charges within the nation.
“BART is really high on the farebox,” Plotch mentioned. “So that’s incredibly risky, too, when you have these changes in ridership.”
In accordance with BART, 71% of its working funds previous to the pandemic got here from fares, together with income from parking and promoting. That determine fell to 29% in Fiscal 12 months 2024.
Near 4 million folks now journey the New York Metropolis subway every day, about 84% of pre-pandemic ranges, whereas bus ridership is now close to 1.2 million, down from slightly below 2 million pre-pandemic. Mixed, the subways and buses account for about 80% of the MTA’s whole income from fares, Patel mentioned.
Paratransit ridership, in the meantime, is at an all-time excessive, with greater than 1 million journeys in October, in line with MTA information.
That degree of ridership, whereas nonetheless not at 2020 ranges, makes town and the encircling suburbs, by far, probably the most transit-dependent space within the U.S.
“In the period from January through September 2025, 47% of transit riders in the country were using transit in the New York urban area, which is, of course, far disproportionate to the urban area’s share of the nation’s population,” mentioned Yonah Freemark, a transportation and concrete improvement knowledgeable on the City Institute. “This means that elected officials in New York are particularly focused on responding to rider concerns.”
These elements have mixed to drag the MTA again from the brink of monetary calamity that’s dealing with different big-city methods, the place ridership has returned at a slower tempo and the place near $70 billion in COVID-era federal emergency funding to maintain trains and buses working is reaching the tip of the road.
“The federal operating money, that was brand new, because the transit agencies took such a big (ridership) hit,” mentioned Plotch, a former MTA supervisor of planning and coverage. “Policymakers wanted the buses to keep on running because if the buses didn’t run, how were those emergency workers going to get to work, how were people going to get to the hospitals, how were the home-care givers going to make it to senior homes?”
State Stepping Up
Transit methods in and round Boston, Chicago and Minnesota’s Twin Cities are amongst people who have averted falling off worst-case eventualities via legislative measures that shored up funding — at the very least for now — even whereas ridership is lagging.
Public transportation advocates say extra such measures are important for long-term sustainability of U.S. transit networks.
“We are seeing meaningful action from state and local leaders across the country who recognize the urgency of addressing public transportation’s financial challenges,” mentioned Paul Skoutelas, president of the American Public Transportation Affiliation.
“For the most part, states simply need to step in,” added Freemark, of the City Institute.
That’s the hope in Pennsylvania, the place Bronskill of Transit Ahead Philadelphia mentioned the state has “kicked the can down the road about a year and a half.”
“Our state leaders know that we averted a crisis in Philly, but it by no means solved a problem,” he mentioned. “We’ll be right back in this mess in about a year and a half if action isn’t taken.”
Ninety miles to the north, the outlook is considerably brighter — for now.
Neal Zuckerman, an MTA board member who heads the panel’s finance committee, praised Hochul for committing to the transportation authority’s fiscal sustainability, including that the company “always figures it out.”
He warned that relying on cash primarily based on elements past the MTA’s management — similar to actual property taxes or metropolis funding — might add stress with deficits projected towards the tip of decade.
“Do I worry about the fiscal health of the MTA over the medium term?” Zuckerman mentioned. “Heck yes.”
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