Frustrations boiled over as Regional Rail lines were bedeviled by overcrowded, late, and canceled trains. Last summer, Regional Rail riders cursed SEPTA when a widespread defect put a third of its railcars out of service. In fact, Regional Rail has received a plurality of SEPTA’s capital funds over the last ten years: 37.66 percent of the $3.92 billion in total capital expenditures between fiscal years 20.* In the past decade, $1.48 billion has been spent repairing tracks, upgrading signal systems, fixing stations, maintaining electrical grids, overhauling old trains and buying new ones.Īll of this investment doesn’t stop Regional Rail riders from wondering why SEPTA isn’t spending more to improve their service. Given the comparative paucity of projects to improve life for bus passengers, it sometimes seems like Regional Rail gets all the new funds. Since its passage, SEPTA has launched a host of infrastructure overhauls, replacing the substations and catenary wires that power Regional Rail trains, increasing parking options at overstuffed suburban stations, and upgrading Regional Rail safety systems per a federal mandate other railroads ignore. SEPTA does not let a single groundbreaking go by without thanking Act 89. SEPTA didn’t get the $420 million a year it said it needed from the Commonwealth, but what it did get - around $330 million a year, up from $120 million a year before the act’s passage - has proven enough to keep the trains running and the bridges standing.
SEPTA’s most urgent current capital needs center on the Regional Rail system, and regional legislative support to meet that demand was instrumental in Act 89’s passage. “It was all about doing what’s right for this region,” and in turn the Commonwealth, said SEPTA Assistant General Manager for Government and Public Affairs Fran Kelley. To hear the authority say it, SEPTA-the entire region, really-was saved by those six representatives in the Pennsylvania House who switched from nays to ayes between the first losing vote on Act 89 and the successful second. If Harrisburg couldn’t pass a new transportation funding bill, the future looked grim: nine Regional Rail lines abandoned trolleys replaced by buses traffic-choked roads flooded by 90,000 former transit riders across the region. In 2013, SEPTA avoided a doomsday scenario by just six votes.
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