Regional Rail runs a little on the expensive side. Round trip from Philly back to the suburbs is $17.50. I take that to get to work sometimes. The bus, subway, and trolley are extremely affordable for what they are.
Can't find it right now, but I also remember a study that compared funding for other major metro transit agencies, and SEPTA ranked very highly for offering as many transit options for the amount of riders they handle given their relatively anemic budget (compared to NYC or Chicago).
> Regional Rail runs a little on the expensive side. Round trip from Philly back to the suburbs is $17.50.
Are you paying the surcharge to buy a ticket on board in one of those directions? Normally if you already have tickets, round trip to zone 4 (outer suburbs) is $15 on weekdays or $14 on weekends.
That's quite cheap in my opinion, considering zone 4 goes pretty far. For example Doylestown is 25 miles from Center City Philly as the crow flies.
Compare that to an equivalent trip in northern Jersey on NJ Transit rail: Morristown NJ is about 25 miles from Midtown Manhattan, and a round-trip fare is currently $32.20. And after next week's fare hike, it will be $33.10.
Pennsylvania could be so much more for its residents but we're a state bogged down politically by rural districts that do everything within their power to kneecap the our two major economic hubs/cities: Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Our governor backs mass transit, but state reps will not budge on funding as SEPTA only services Philadelphia and the counties immediately adjacent. One politician, Cris Dush who represents the 25th district in the upper most part of the state, released a letter to concerned citizens and characterized the issue as a preferrence for keeping tax dollars in his own district as there's no mass transit available to his constituents. In his view, he's not willing to pay for other people to be "chaffered" around on public transit: http://crossingbroad.com/news/trending/pennsylvania-state-se...
Until Pennsylvania's statehouse can overcome their misguided idea of what it means to levy and collect taxes, PA will continue to lag behind other states in the northeast in terms of basic services and economic competitiveness.
Uneducated question, seems like Philadelphia has around $5B of revenue a year, and the transit deficit is ~$200M. I understand the city has to provide services and a lot of the revenue will be restricted as to what it can be allocated to. But with these orders of magnitude, why is the default expectation not for cities to fund their own transit with city tax revenue?
Much of the service being cut is the regional rail that primarily services the collar counties. Philadelphia will lose bus routes but the core of their transit will survive.
It’s Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties that will suffer the most from this.
Well that just confuses me more, if the losses are spread out across all these counties each with their own revenue, why isn't that the default place where money is allocated from?
Probably due to the impossible complexity of coming to an agreement on proper funding allocation between the 7 different counties served by SEPTA, especially since 2 of those counties are not even in Pennsylvania... and then having to re-debate that on a periodic basis as ridership trends shift over time.
SEPTA was formed by the state, and its existence benefits the whole state by enabling economic activity (which then leads to more state-level taxes), reducing congestion on roadways maintained by the state, etc. And if my back-of-the-envelope math is correct, nearly 1/3rd of PA's population lives in counties served by SEPTA.
That's a very unsatisfying while probably correct answer. I wish voters stopped accepting this kind of stuff being "impossibly complex" for government.
I just don't think that's realistic when the number of stakeholders grows too high. How do you accurately determine how much each county should pay? How do you allocate funding for commuters who live in one county but work in another?
When a transit agency serves the state's largest population center and economic center, it seems reasonable for its funding to be a state-level concern. Especially when it also serves other states, and additionally ~40% of the tracks used by SEPTA are owned by Amtrak, which is Federal. County-level officials are just not the best layer to interface with all that.
Isn't it the norm for elected officials to want to keep tax dollars in their district? This Dush guy might be misguided somehow in the larger scheme of things, but wouldn't he just be reflecting his constituents' desire to directly benefit from the taxes they pay?
There are huge benefits derived from economies of scale that can be built at the appropriate levels of government. You can end up wasting a lot of resources by trying to do things too locally or not locally enough.
I live in a rural area and it would bankrupt our county if we had to maintain all the miles of road (far more per taxpayer than urban areas) if the state wasn't doing so much of it. The state uses expensive machines to do much of that work efficiently. It wouldn't make sense for our county to buy that equipment and have it sit unused much of the time. So the county would be less efficient at it. And that's before we get to things like duplication of administrative roles around that work.
Sometimes that means urban areas are helping fund some of my local roads. And sometimes that means I'm helping fund their public transport. When done well, we all get far more for less tax money.
The most affected counties (Bucks, Montgomery, and Delaware) have average incomes twice that of the counties Dush represents (Crawford, Erie, Washington, Greene).
So Dush's voters aren't paying much in the way of taxes.
For a similar situation to Trump bombing Iran and only notifying a few members of Congress:
1983 Granada
1989 Panama
2011 Libya
2012 Syria
The 1990s actions in Yugoslavia were done without fall declaration of war, but Congress was more fully engaged in saying no at least.
The 1991 war against Iraq was approved, in part, because the administration allowed a witness to flat out lie to Congress about the horrors of the Iraq invasion of Kuwait.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was approved, in part, because the administration lied to Congress about weapons of mass destruction.
I mentioned these last two because they make a mockery of the act itself, or of the US congress, or both...
He didn't add sanctions on Russia, but on people dealing with Russia - that's a different thing.
But notice how people talk now - Trump might say he is "planning" something against Russia and people take it as a proof that he is not an asset. They forget about concept of sacrificing something to gain advantage. If heat turns to much on Trump, they might let him disrupt something and then run propaganda that Trump isn't bent. Until he makes next move massively benefitting Putin.
Seems like they can be doing this over and over and general public will see it as Trump just navigating difficult geopolitical landscape and that we should "trust the process". etc.
I am not sure why you are calling this out seeing how many people are hypothesising what is going to happen in this thread (economy destroyed, USD no longer reserve currency, etc). At least we have actual words to base what I wrote unlike all the other theories being thrown out in this thread.
hmm what could have happened in the last 3-4 years that would impact US life expectancy? also a huge part of that decline is preventable death due to drug overdose.
Like every smart device, the Snoo isn't actually that smart. We have a 1 month old and bought a Snoo second-hand in anticipation and way before they changed the terms of their app.
Where you'd expect the Snoo to dutifully monitor the baby and gently increase the intensity of the motion to soothe the baby, it rapidly goes from a baseline to the highest level of motion and sound within a minute or so, which is both annoying for the parents and stressful for the child.
The motion locking feature was how we got around that poor excuse for engineering, but now that pretty basic feature is now behind the paywall. We just use it as a standard bassinet.
I haven't signed up for the added features yet, our kid is a pretty good sleeper at this point, but those features are a necessity to operate the Snoo properly, so I'll end up paying the premium (begrudgingly). As a parent I know companies are doing everything they can to get my business, so I'm not surprised by this behavior, but it's just a disappointment and annoyance.
Bell Labs, the historic headwaters of so many inventions that now define our digital age, is closing in Murray Hill, its latest owners moving to more modern headquarters in New Brunswick. The Labs should be preserved as a historic site and more. I propose that Bell Labs be opened to the public as a museum and school of the internet.
This is common in reporting "human interest" stories. If you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who is up to something unique, is that any different than getting a tip from your community?
This is not a story of consequence but it does speak to an important issue of our day. It's not as though this is the only kind of reporting NY Times does.
Over 1/4 of the residents in Philadelphia live at or below the poverty line so services need to reasonably priced. Some data from Pew: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2019/07...
Can't find it right now, but I also remember a study that compared funding for other major metro transit agencies, and SEPTA ranked very highly for offering as many transit options for the amount of riders they handle given their relatively anemic budget (compared to NYC or Chicago).
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