The year is 1914. Philadelphia’s already robust public transportation system is set to grow. The city has 600 miles of electrified streetcar lines running on nearly every major thoroughfare, but that isn’t enough for then-Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg, a reformist who took office promising to improve city services like mass transit.

Upon his inauguration, less than 15 miles of the city’s rail services were high-speed, a number dwarfed by New York and Chicago. Yet, Blankenburg’s pick for transit director, an experienced railroad executive named A. Merritt Taylor, came up with a plan. It called for an increase to nearly 60 miles of high-speed service, at a cost of more than $1.5 billion in today’s dollars, starting with the creation of the Broad Street Subway.

In a speech at the subway’s groundbreaking, Blankenburg promised Philadelphians they would soon be able to travel from one part of the city to any other in less than 30 minutes, all for the cost of a nickel (about $1.50 today). For his part, Taylor likened the city’s public transportation network to a human circulatory system and warned that without improvements, the “body as a whole must suffer.”

Here we are a century later and officials with the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) are warning of an impending “death spiral” for the region’s public transportation system. Stricken by the expiration of federal emergency COVID-relief funding and ridership levels that remain below pre-pandemic norms, SEPTA raised fares on December 1 and warned that far harsher increases, along with drastic service cuts, will come. Originally targeting the first half of 2025 for dramatic changes, SEPTA scrapped those plans after Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro in late November flexed $153 million in federal transportation funding to aid the beleaguered agency. However, SEPTA warns that is a fix with a lifespan measured in months, not years. Unless state lawmakers in Harrisburg develop a longer-term solution, the ax continues to hover.

Why is it so hard to make public transit work in Philadelphia, a dense city where hundreds of thousands of people each day shuttle to and fro on buses and trains? What happened after Blankenburg’s speech that led to such decline a century later? Can history tell us anything useful about where we are now and where we’re headed?

After all, as Erick Guerra, professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design pointed out, we have been here before. It was little more than a decade ago that SEPTA was also speaking in apocalyptic terms, releasing “doomsday maps” showing dramatic cuts to commuter rail and bus services if more funding wasn’t received. “SEPTA has financial crises that come up time and time again, every five to 10 years,” Guerra said. “This is probably the biggest one since 2013.”

Trains, Pains, and Automobiles

Anyone with a lick of knowledge about transportation modes has likely already surmised, correctly, that the advent of the automobile played a large role in the decline of public transportation over the past 100 years. Yet, the full picture is more complex.

John Hepp, a retired professor of history at Wilkes University, is a scholar of the history of Philadelphia’s public transportation systems. Its lineage can technically be traced all the way to 1688, when a ferry between Philadelphia and what is now Camden established the first fixed-route passenger service accessible to the public. Something resembling our modern system didn’t begin to take shape until the mid-19th century.

In 1832, commuter trains on the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown Rail Road began to shuttle passengers along that corridor with stops also in East Falls, Chestnut Hill, and other Montgomery County destinations. In the inner city, what started as private vendors pulling horse-drawn carriages along thoroughfares like Broad, Market, and Chestnut Streets began to modernize not too long after with the rise of the horse-drawn trolley car, explained James Wolfinger, a historian, Dean of St. John’s University’s School of Education, and author of Running the Rails, a history of labor relations in Philadelphia’s mass transit systems. Laying rails for such trolleys required professionalization. By the late 1850s, horse-drawn streetcars belonging to the Frankford and Southwark Philadelphia City Passenger Railway Company began operating.

Such streetcar services quickly expanded to other areas of the city. By the time Philadelphia hosted the nation’s Centennial Exhibition in 1876, it could boast “one of the finest transportation systems in the country,” Hepp explained. Further modernization occurred in the 1890s, when in just five years, electric trolleys replaced every horse-drawn counterpart (as well as some short-lived cable car lines) in the city and became the ubiquitous mode of transportation for Philadelphia’s growing middle class.

Early in the creation of these trolley lines, most owners were small-time outfits operating perhaps just a single line and often named after the street on which it traveled. With money rolling in, larger companies saw an opportunity. By buying up these smaller interests and combining services, they could both make the rider’s experience more seamless and, of course, gain market share. By 1902, virtually all of the streetcar lines consolidated under ownership of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit (PRT), a holding company formed by Peter A.B. Widener and William Elkins, and the commuter trains by the Pennsylvania and Philadelphia & Reading systems. However, this era of consolidation was built on a shaky foundation.

All of those acquisitions left PRT with a lot of sunk costs that it would need to recoup in the decades ahead. By the 1910s, the first motorized buses began to appear in the region and within a decade were replacing trolleys on some routes. While the private passenger car was at first much more a luxurious novelty than a utilitarian vehicle, that of course would change with the advent of mass production.

For a time, Philadelphia’s mass transit kept chugging along and further modernizing. Between 1905 and 1908, the PRT opened the elevated Market Street Subway line, giving the city its first rapid transit line. Yet, by the 1920s signs of financial and organizational weakness start to emerge. Public funds began to buttress the system, particularly evident in Philadelphia when City Hall paid to extend the Market Street line to Frankford in 1922 and for the construction of the Broad Street Subway shortly after.

The major turning point, as for so many other things in American life, came in 1929 with the onset of the Great Depression. In the ensuing years, commuter rail service was curtailed and commuter trolley lines abandoned, either taken over by buses or nothing at all. In 1934, the PRT declared bankruptcy and reemerged as the Philadelphia Transportation Company (PTC) in 1940. World War II brought a short reprieve as ridership rose, but suburbanization and the creation of the highway system in the post-war years further hollowed out public transit’s historic revenue base and siphoned off federal transit dollars. Successive companies would take on the city’s transit infrastructure, but none successfully.

“It’s cultural. People want cars. People don’t want to be riding around in old fashioned trolleys,” Wolfinger noted, adding that it is a problem compounded by a further transition to buses as the primary form of public transportation. “You can imagine who ends up riding on the bus. Somebody who doesn’t have any other options,” he said.

As early as the 1930s, cities across the country began to step in to take control of public transportation systems. Yet, it took until 1964 for Philadelphia to follow suit with the establishment of SEPTA, an intergovernmental agency overseen by a 15-member board composed of appointees from the surrounding counties and the state government.

At first, there was hope that such efforts might actually be able to make the math work, said Hepp. Earlier in the 20th century, cities such as San Francisco and London had successfully taken over public transit services. If Philadelphia could eliminate the profit motive of private industry and reinvest in services to make transit more attractive, the thinking went, perhaps it could at least break even on regular operations. “That was the dream of SEPTA,” Hepp said.

However, it never came to pass. Today, public transit systems in the United States remain heavily subsidized. Nationwide, even the most economically-viable transit systems like those found in New York City and San Francisco rely on public subsidies to cover at least 25 percent of their costs and often far more. SEPTA ranks among some of the most dependent of major agencies, according to a 2022 study from the Eno Center for Transportation, with total fares adding up to just about 35 percent of revenues, a number that fluctuates somewhat year-to-year, and the rest of the balance dependent on subsidies. Experts point out that building and maintaining highways also requires public subsidization. It turns out, there is no free ride for anyone in our modern era of transportation.

A Bumpy Ride for SEPTA

Public transportation in Philadelphia, as in many other big cities around the country, hasn’t been a profitable enterprise for about a century now. So why, as Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Thomas Fitzgerald pointed out last June, has SEPTA had a demonstrably more tumultuous time than most, including the most transit worker strikes for any operator in the nation over the past six decades?

“Welcome to Pennsylvania politics,” Guerra said. Regional counterparts such as Boston and New York City, along with their suburbs, tend to have outsized influence within state politics, for economic and demographic reasons, he noted. “Three-quarters of residents of Massachusetts are in metropolitan Boston. There are a lot more positive views about public transit,” he explained.

In Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are both geographically, and often culturally, isolated from Harrisburg. “At the end of the day, urban transit is not a priority for most of the Pennsylvania legislature,” said Hepp. “So, how you get urban transit paid for is you come up with a deal.”

At various times in its history, SEPTA has found a relief valve somewhere, whether that be through federal or state coffers. With federal money drying up and unlikely to turn back on soon under the Trump administration, Hepp suspects Democrats in Harrisburg will have to give ground on something significant in the next legislative session to unlock any lasting fix for SEPTA. “Are they finally going to let Republicans sell off the state stores?” Hepp pondered.

Regardless of the difficulties of keeping public transit afloat, Wolfinger pointed out that generations of leadership have seen fit to keep the trains running, however meagerly. In the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy, a transit supporter, found allies in politicians like Philadelphia Mayor Richardson Dilworth, who, in March 1961, testified to Congress in support of a federal mass transit funding bill. Key to Dilworth’s lobbying was his assessment that automobile traffic was strangling metropolitan areas like Philadelphia. “Philadelphia has gone about as far as it can on its own to preserve the high-speed transit and commuter railroads,” Dilworth testified. Meanwhile, New Jersey Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr. told the committee that an over reliance on highways had led cities to conclude that congestion was striking “at the jugular vein of their economic capability, choking central city commerce and business.”

While pleas to Washington for a time sufficed, with every president from Kennedy to Carter supporting some form of robust financial assistance for public transportation, it was never enough to fully rebuild the nation’s aging mass transit systems before rollbacks began in the Reagan era and continued through successive presidencies. That has left many systems, including Philadelphia, predominantly dependent on state funding and has led to the many clashes between City Hall and Harrisburg over the past half century.

Hepp added that he believes SEPTA at times hasn’t done itself any favors and has made some “moronic” decisions. He points in particular to the leadership of David Gunn, general manager of the system from 1979 to 1984, who he faults for failure to smoothly navigate the transition of commuter rail lines from private to public control.

“To me that was SEPTA’s greatest crisis because SEPTA proved it couldn’t handle a basic transition that every other transit authority in the northeast corridor had handled one way or the other,” remarked Hepp. “SEPTA actually had to be ordered by a court: ‘Do you job.’”

Despite all of the trials and tribulations, experts say they believe most politicians in Harrisburg generally have still understood the importance of mass transit, to keep the economic engine of the Southeast Pennsylvania humming along, even if they extract their pound of flesh to pay for it. “There are reasons to be hopeful about compromise, despite the kind of dire political situation,” Guerra said. “Despite lower ridership, the SEPTA system is still extremely important to the regional economy and local economy, and Philadelphia is extremely important to the tax base of Harrisburg.”

Guerra thinks SEPTA will indeed survive this most recent fiscal crisis. However, he does not downplay the challenging spot the agency finds itself in. In addition to regular funding obstacles, SEPTA also has to deal with recalcitrant social issues like the opioid epidemic as well as lingering effects of the pandemic including decreased ridership. In a worst case scenario where funding doesn’t arrive, the agency could protect some core services by maintaining service levels, but that would likely require entirely eliminating lesser traveled routes. “I think SEPTA will survive. I don’t think at the end of the day the agency is at risk of collapsing,” Guerra maintained. “That said, if you don’t get any new sources of funding, it will be a radically different system.”

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