Penn's answer for SEPTA woes

Transit riders in Philadelphia are bracing for a Perfect Storm. And if no action is taken soon, everyone in the city may feel the pinch.

SEPTA is facing a projected deficit of $62 million in fiscal year 2005 -- so far. And the agency is projecting that number will increase to as much as $209 million by 2009. That accounts for a $134 million increase in expenses over the next four years, due in large part to the rising cost of employee benefits.

And as if that were not enough, SEPTA met for the first time yesterday with the Transport Workers Union Local 234 to begin negotiations on what will likely be a four-year contract. That will not be anything short of a dogfight -- in fact, a work-stoppage shut down the system for more than a month in 1998.

As a result of the red ink, SEPTA has been threatening damaging service cuts and fare hikes. A round trip to Center City on the El could cost as much as $6 in a little over a month. And that will be particularly crippling to the thousands of Penn employees and students who rely on the system each day.

For all intents and purposes, this is a transportation crisis of grand proportion and is likely to get worse long before it gets better.

But that is not to say that we should sit on the sidelines throughout this process. Penn is the city's largest private employer and one of its largest constituencies. It is about time that we as individuals and as a university start making some noise about the SEPTA situation.

University President Amy Gutmann has sent letters to state officials advocating action. That's a start. "It's clear that keeping transit affordable is central to our institutional interests," she said earlier this month.

Lest we forget, many students came to this university specifically because it is located in a metropolitan area, and naturally, public transportation is part of that equation. Every student at Penn should be familiar with the transit systems in the city, and a majority of students use SEPTA frequently. University officials have done a good job of making a case for why students should explore greater Philadelphia, but making it easier to do is a challenge waiting to be met -- a challenge that will only grow larger if SEPTA's proposed fare hikes become reality.

No one is asking Penn to solve the problem -- that would be unreasonable -- but the University could make bold statement on the issue: subsidize transit passes for all students. It's a costly proposal. If Penn were to provide its PennPass -- a $250-per-semester unlimited ticket to SEPTA -- free to every student, it would cost roughly $9 million each year. Yes, this idea carries a hefty price tag, but considering that the University's budget is measured in billions rather than millions of dollars, it's chump change.

The current PennPass is just too expensive to be attractive to students, not to mention the mediocre job the University does promoting it. As a result, only a few hundred students purchase the passes, when that number should be in the thousands. Including the passes as part of our $40,000-plus tuition, or if nothing else, dramatically reducing the cost, would greatly increase usage.

And this is not a new idea. Similar programs that provide discounted transit passes to students have been well received at schools across the country.

The University of Washington offers students the opportunity to purchase a "U-Pass" for $37 per academic quarter; that's less than $150 a year. That system, which sold nearly 44,000 passes last year alone, gives students and staff unfettered access to Seattle's public transit. In 2004, 85 percent of UW students chose to buy passes.

In Chicago, DePaul University adds a mandatory $48.25 per quarter fee to student bills to cover the cost of a similar "U-Pass" program provided by the Chicago Transit Authority. CTA's plan is offered at 27 other schools in the Chicagoland area and is very popular. Schools in metro areas from Boston to Los Angeles have similar partnerships with their transit authorities.

If Penn wants to include a reasonable surcharge for transit in this year's round of tuition hikes -- it's just about that time of year again -- I'm all for it. The additional $9 million headed in SEPTA's direction won't erase $62 million worth of deficit, but it's a start. Bringing more riders to SEPTA -- as opposed to blindly funneling government money to it -- is the best way to get the beleaguered transit authority back to financial solvency.

In the five years since SEPTA's 2000 budget, expenses have increased $110 million to $875 million. At the same time, the amount received in federal, state and local subsidies increased less than $60 million. With ridership levels relatively stagnant, revenue gains from operations have been minimal, creating the deficit we see today and will be saddled with for years to come -- if immediate and lasting action is not taken.

Jeff Shafer is a junior marketing and management concentrator from Columbia Falls, Mont., and Editorial Page Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Par for the Course appears on alternate Thursdays.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.