SEPTA’s Capital budget hearings were sparsely populated and super depressing, largely because there just isn’t that much to be done. SEPTA’s capital budget is really small: $308 million (compare with $1.7 billion for NJ Transit). The federal government no longer gives 
much money to fund public transit. Neither does the state government.
I wrote a piece for Next City about five cool things SEPTA could do if they had money. When I become king, some things are going to change around here.
Last month I covered SEPTA’s Philadelphia operating and capital budget hearings for Next City. I’m not sure which were more depressing, but I’ll start with the operating budget 
hearings because they came first. They were packed with people, most of them pissed, most of them for good reason. But the policy choice that got the most flack, and for very goods reason, is the proposed trip limits on weekly (50 rides) and monthly passes (200 rides). And, yes, transfers count as a ride.
“Why call it a monthly or weekly card if it isn’t necessarily going to last that long?” one man asked.
“Installing a limited number of rides no longer makes it a viable alternative to a car,” said Jeff Kessler, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who attended high school in Center City and regularly rides regional rail. “They don’t limit rides in New York City, or in Washington, D.C., or in San Francisco, or in Boston.” The decision to install ride limits was not explained during my time at either hearing, despite the fact that more objections were raised to this than to almost any other issue.
I questioned SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch about this later and he told me: “The intent would be to prevent pass sharing – to avoid situations where, for example, there is a single TransPass shared by multiple workers in an office.”
There are about a million better ways to handle that issue. SEPTA could, for instance, just ensure that you can’t use a card twice within a certain time limit. It could even be five minutes. Most people who are rushing to get somewhere won’t want to wait. And even if a few do, who cares? It costs way more to alienate a bunch of your riders with limited ride passes than it does to lose a few fares. In fact, this is the kind of thing that inspires people to drive, thus losing fares while increasing pollution, congestion, and my chances of getting killed on my bike.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
Earlier today Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter test rode a bike share, well, bike around Rittenhouse Square. Now we’ll see if he can actually get the $3 million he needs from City Council, where the Mayor may face a much tougher challenge. 
In budget hearings this spring, some City Council members have referenced Nutter’s proclivity for bike programs as a symbol of what they see as unnecessary spending.
Such sentiments are, of course, absurd. Bike programs are incredibly cheap and, contrary to popular belief, are not just for yuppies and hipsters. Although it’s not shocking that it’s often framed that way, especially given that the Inquirer’s poll on the issue completely ignores the incredibly economic benefits of biking. The question is: “Should the city spend $3 million to launch a bike sharing program?” The only options are: 1) “Yes, it’s great for the environment” or “No, that’s a ridiculous amount of money.”
That’s bad framing. As my friend Dan Kobza writes on Facebook: “Its funny that the poll suggests the only reason you’d be for the program is that its ‘great for the environment.’ Like, what about “‘bikes are cheap and fast, and I’m poor and have to go to work.’”
Right. “The environment” is a very abstract concept and, sure, I want to save the Earth and whatnot. But for most people money is a whole lot less abstract. I bike everywhere because its convenient, fast, and cheap. I’ve spent less than $500 on my bike since 2009.
And bike share programs can be tailored to save even more money for low-income people, as I noted in a recent Next City piece.
In a city like Philadelphia it could be wildly successful, as it is in Boston,” says Nicole Freedman, director of Boston Bikes program. “One thing we’ve done well is making sure we have stations in low-income neighborhoods, making sure we have subsidized memberships available, and we’ve been very successful at making sure bike share is for every Boston resident regardless of income, ethnicity, language, etc.”
In addition to building stations in lower-income neighborhoods, Hubway offers $5 annual memberships to low-income people. Residents are eligible who receive any form of public assistance — from food stamps to the Earned Income Tax Credit — or have an income that is 400 percent of the poverty level. The program has a staff member who spends nearly all her time selling the subsidized memberships, explaining how Hubway works to low-income residents and signing people up who do have access to a computer.
I haven’t been focused on keeping the blog updated as my stories come out and now I’m playing catch up. Below you’ll find my Philly City Paper update on the Penn security guards struggle to unionize, which I first reported on in March, 2012. But as of April 18, more than a year after they voted overwhelmingly to unionize, they still do not have a contract with AlliedBarton.
The guards me with the company, again, the week after my story ran. We’ll see if this latest meeting is more fruitful than its predecessors. I’ll update if I hear anything.
Full story below.
The oxford American just published my article on Justified, the FX T.V. show set in Harlan County, Kentucky. It’s based on an Elmore Leonard story, so the source material is legit. And the writers and actors have worked wonders. It’s my favorite contemporary T.V. show, with Games of Thrones a close second. 
A taste:
One of the few contemporary shows that has made a real home in the South is FX’s Justified, which just finished its fourth season and is renewed for a fifth. Its characters are deeply rooted in Harlan County, Kentucky, and bound by complex webs of family, historical, and regional loyalties. It shares The Wire’s commitment to place, if not its interest in institutions and policy, and benefits further from basing its stories in rural and suburban areas, which are underrepresented in most fictional TV shows concerned with criminality.
In one week Next City will be publishing my long form article on Atlantic City in the wake of Hurricane Sandy and ever-increasing competition from surrounding states, especially 
Pennsylvania. Here’s the teaser for the article (with excellent photography from Paul Gargagliano):
Atlantic City casinos withstood the pounding winds and rain when Hurricane Sandy hit last fall. Much of the rest of the resort city did not. It was an incident symbolic of the stratification that has persisted since New Jersey legalized gambling in 1976, when fortress-like gaming complexes started rising above the Boardwalk as the city outside faltered. But lately, even the once-lucrative seaside casino industry is hurting: Profits have fallen since nearby Pennsylvania jumped on the gaming bandwagon in 2006, while a sleek and highly anticipated Revel Casino has proven a spectacular failure. As Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie trade barbs, everyone from executives to cocktail servers say that the gambling mecca needs to diversify if is to survive.
The Spring, 2013 issue of Dissent Magazine is here in all its glory and it contains my book review The Right and Labor in America Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, by Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer. (It’s a loosely connected essay collection 
containing some fascinating and obscure historical info, useful for nerdy cocktail parties.)
Unfortunately the review is behind a pay wall, but that means you should probably just buy a copy of the magazine.
Every year the Pew Charitable Trust releases its annual “Philadelphia: The State of the City” report, containing a vast array of data about the city and covering everything from poverty to real estate. Among the statistics included are the cost of city employee benefits which, along with public safety, crowd out other budget considerations: “in recent years, with revenues constrained, these two spending categories have grown at the expense of other city functions and departments.” Each absorbs about a third of the budget.
Such numbers are at the root of the images of greedy public employees that haunt our political discourse. But hacking into health benefits for government workers will cause a lot of pain for little gain. It’s true that public employee wages and, especially, benefits are a large and rising portion of most municipal budgets. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that around “55 percent of local government spending” goes towards employee compensation. But this isn’t a simple tale of poor management or political cowardice (pension underfunding is complex and the depth of the problem varies widely, although it is worth noting that before the recessions that opened and closed the 2000s most local pensions were in good health).
Municipal healthcare benefit costs are rapidly increasing because healthcare costs are rapidly increasing for reasons completely unrelated to public sector compensation at any level of government. In comparison with most advanced nations, the U.S. spends two and a half times as much on healthcare with worse outcomes and less insurance coverage because the government has little ability to negotiate with providers. So prices vary wildly, leading to inflation of these all important goods and services. Medicare and Medicaid can negotiate, but they are still tethered to the Wild West private market and it’s unsustainably rising rates. If the government offers a doctor or hospital a reasonable amount to care for a patient but a private insurance company offers an unreasonably larger amount, which plan will the provider probably accept?
Costs rise unsustainably across the board, but the pain is particularly acute in cities mired in deep poverty (more than a quarter of Philadelphians live below the poverty level) with tax bases to match. Municipal employees deserve good healthcare, just like everyone else, and they shouldn’t bear the burden of a poorly regulated healthcare system and cities that are suffering economic problems caused by macro-historical forces beyond their control.
Under the Affordable Care Act some states are experimenting with ways to contain healthcare costs in a just fashion (as opposed to slashing into public insurers as Paul Ryan prefers). Vermont is establishing a single-payer healthcare system under the law’s auspices, which would allow serious and equitable cost-control. If it proves successful the model could spread, just as the provincially-run, but essentially single-payer, Canadian healthcare system spread from the backwater Saskatchewan province to the rest of the nation. The best way to rein in municipal benefit costs is by taming the healthcare market, not brutalizing public employees. Perhaps the answer to one of Philadelphia’s budgetary problems lies in Montpelier.
About a month ago I wrote a long read for Salon about the difficulty of purchasing ethical apparel and the fact that moral consumerism is never enough. Although it can provide a 
good entry to the issue for the uninformed, especially when Anne Hathaway is lighting up the top of the article. (It was picked up and shared by the Economic Policy Institute and Andrew Sullivan.) Although the state of sweatshop production is grim, there have been important victories in one market.
The anti-sweatshop movement’s greatest accomplishments have been won in the multibillion-dollar market of college apparel. Universities contract with garment companies to produce their branded apparel and students have points of leverage that are unavailable to most consumers, allowing them to more easily hold companies accountable for abuses that take place within their supply chains. Student groups like the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) have been able to pressure universities and colleges to force their suppliers to accept independent inspections from organizations like the Workers Rights Consortium, and make the necessary improvements (or else lose a highly lucrative dedicated market).
My piece for Next City on the problems, and potential, of SEPTA’s regional rail network. There’s a lot of fun history and weird bits about contemporary labor relations. And there’s 
no doubt that the system is more oriented towards suburban riders than it used to be.
“When SEPTA took over commuter rail traffic in 1983, the vast majority of riders were making very short trips,” said John Hepp, assistant professor of history at Wilkes University. “SEPTA deliberately raised short-haul fares and closed most of the commuter rail stations in the city. Both Chestnut Hill locals [which only travel within city limits] used to run half an hour all day long, even in the off hours. SEPTA cut that with the idea that they wanted to take service away from those areas and assign them to long-haul services.”
Until 1976, a jumble of competing private operators ran the Philly metro’s regional rail. Fares were charged by station, as opposed to by fare zones today that encompass numerous stations. In 1960 Pennsylvania established the (Philly-funded) Passenger Service Improvement Corporation (PSIC) to help the two principal companies run their stations, which had been hemorrhaging money. Stations covered by the deal were almost all within city limits, and their prices were lowered to match city transit fares. The Merion stop on the Paoli line is equidistant from downtown as, say, Tulpehocken station in northwest Philly, but its prices were higher (the Paoli stop itself, 20 miles away from Suburban Station, is pricier still). In 1975 PSIC station prices were 20 percent lower than counterpart suburban stations at similar distances. But the next year the federally controlled Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) took over the private commuter lines. Prices went up 67 percent at the PSIC stations and 33 percent elsewhere between 1975 and 1980.
In 1980 the fare zone structure was implemented and remained in place when SEPTA took over in 1983. Price hikes continued apace, hitting city stations particularly hard. Between 1975 and 2013, prices at the Tulpehocken station, in Zone Two, have increased 650 percent, Merion by 500 percent and Paoli by 346 percent. In 1980 a peak-hours ride from Tulpehocken station cost $1 ($2.82 in 2013 dollars), while a ride to Paoli cost $2.10 ($5.92 in 2013). Today a ticket to Tulpehocken is $4.50, while a peak fare to Paoli is $6.25.
