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SEPTA Isn’t Failing Because of Fare Evasion. It’s Failing Because We Are

The trains still come, mostly. But fewer riders are on them. SEPTA, the public transit agency that carries Philadelphia’s working class, students, and seniors, is heading toward a fiscal cliff.

The trains still come, mostly. But fewer riders are on them. SEPTA, the public transit agency that carries Philadelphia’s working class, students, and seniors, is heading toward a fiscal cliff. Within a year, it may be forced to make deep service cuts or raise fares sharply. In Harrisburg, the response has been tepid. In Philadelphia, the blame has been misdirected.

If you listen to local pundits or scroll the quote tweets of certain City Council members, you’ll hear a story that’s become common in austerity politics. That story goes like this: SEPTA is broke because people are stealing rides. Fare evasion, they say, is bankrupting the system. Turnstile jumpers, particularly on the El and the Broad Street Line, are robbing taxpayers and pushing the system into collapse. The problem, as always in these kinds of stories, is not structural. It’s moral. The wrong people are riding the train.

This story is convenient. It is also false. SEPTA’s budget shortfall is real and serious. But it is not the fault of the riders who don’t or can’t pay. In fact, SEPTA could eliminate fare evasion entirely and still be in a funding crisis. The problem is far larger, and much more political. Ridership has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Federal emergency aid is expiring. The cost of running a vast, aging transit system has gone up. And neither Harrisburg nor Washington is moving fast enough to step in.

What’s happening here is a political failure. But it’s also a moral test. Transit systems are one of the few public goods that people encounter every day. They are what make cities function. They connect nurses to hospitals, cashiers to grocery stores, kids to schools. In Philadelphia, they connect some of the country’s poorest zip codes to opportunity. Yet that connective tissue is fraying. If we want SEPTA to survive, let alone thrive, we will have to fight for it. And that begins with refusing to accept the fiction that fare evasion is the villain.

There are two pieces of data worth holding onto. First, fare evasion on SEPTA is not meaningfully higher than on peer transit systems. Second, even generous estimates of fare evasion losses fall well short of the hundreds of millions SEPTA will soon need. At most, the agency loses tens of millions per year to unpaid fares. Its projected deficit next year is close to $240 million.

The real problem isn’t theft. It’s abandonment. Transit has always been one of those strange things in American life that we pretend is optional. It is not treated like water or electricity, which governments fund because everyone needs them. Instead, we ask public transit to earn its keep. We measure it by how full the trains are. When those trains are a little emptier, politicians ask whether it’s still worth the investment.

But that is backwards. Transit is a public utility. The roads are not funded by tolls alone. The police are not supported by user fees. We do not charge extra to dial 911 during peak hours. SEPTA is not a luxury. It is the backbone of a city where nearly a third of residents live below the poverty line. If you gut the trains, you gut their lives.

The fare evasion narrative isn’t just wrong. It’s cruel. It focuses public anger on the poorest Philadelphians, the ones most likely to rely on transit and least likely to afford it. These are people making impossible choices. Skip the fare and get to work. Or stay home and get fired. Feed your kids. Or reload your Key card.

Of course we should want everyone who can pay to do so. But fare collection is not justice. It is not economic policy. It is not why SEPTA is falling apart. In Harrisburg, Republicans have been largely uninterested in increasing support for SEPTA, which they see as a Philadelphia problem. Some suburban Democrats quietly agree. They fear that investing in a city system might look like waste. But the region is only as strong as its core. And Philadelphia is a national engine for higher education, medicine, and innovation. Letting its transit system collapse is not fiscally conservative. It is economically suicidal.

Governor Shapiro, to his credit, has proposed a modest increase in transit funding. But modest is not enough. What’s needed is a new way of thinking about transit altogether. A recognition that ridership is not the only metric of value. That a train that lets a single mother get to class or an elder get to dialysis is worth funding even if it's not standing room only. That we don’t measure the value of public goods only by how efficiently they collect revenue, but by how fully they enable dignity.

The conversation around fare evasion is a warning sign. It’s what happens when we lose sight of what transit is for. When budgets get tight and priorities get blurry, it’s easy to find scapegoats. But the people jumping turnstiles aren’t the ones who broke SEPTA. And if we let ourselves believe they are, we will not only punish the wrong people. We will fail to solve the real problem.

Cities do not fall apart all at once. They erode. One lost bus route at a time. One closed subway station. One small lie about who deserves to ride and who does not. What SEPTA needs now is not a crackdown. It’s a choice. A choice to believe that public transit is worth saving.