3 of America’s Biggest Public Transit Systems Are Teetering on the Brink

Three of the country’s largest public transportation systems are facing severe budget shortfalls that have left them near a breaking point. Transit riders in Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area of California could see severe service cuts as soon as next year if their representatives don’t secure funding to fill significant gaps in their operations budgets, the result of dwindling ridership and federal aid.

Should these lawmakers fail or fall short, they could kick off what transit advocates refer to as a “death spiral,” where higher fares and worse service leads to lower ridership, which leads to more cuts, etc., until there’s effectively no service left.

“I think that in a lot of cases, the public, legislators, governors are maybe not aware of just how high the stakes are right now,” David Weiskopf, the senior policy director for Climate Cabinet, a nonprofit that helps to elect climate-minded politicians, told me.

Public transit is a uniquely tricky, political issue, as it requires convincing elected officials from across a given state to address an issue that primarily affects people in one concentrated region — even if that region happens to be one of the main economic engines of the entire state economy. And yet transportation is the No. 1 way Americans contribute to climate change. While electric vehicles get a lot more attention as a climate solution, expanding public transit can also reduce emissions with the added benefits of minimizing the raw materials extraction and electricity demand that come along with EVs.

But that’s just a part of what Weiskopf is talking about in terms of the stakes. Millions of people rely on public transit to get themselves to work and their kids to school. Public transit also reduces local air pollution and traffic. Losing the services that already exist would surrender all of those benefits — worsening affordability and quality of life just as they have become top-tier political issues.

There’s a clear chain of events that led so many major transit systems to the brink of collapse this year. In the late 1990s, Congress eliminated federal funding for public transit operations in major cities, instead allocating all of its financial assistance to capital transit projects, such as new or improved infrastructure. Buses and metros began to rely more heavily on revenue from fares to cover operating expenses like staff and fuel. That became disastrous when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and cut ridership dramatically.

Congress passed a series of pandemic relief laws that provided substantial funding for transit operations, keeping them afloat to shuttle essential workers. But that money dried up, and in many places, ridership has remained stubbornly below pre-pandemic levels for reasons including the rise in remote work. Meanwhile, transit systems continued to age, and the cost of labor and materials rose.

State lawmakers have been slow to act, allowing their biggest cities’ transit systems to inch dangerously close to the edge of a fiscal cliff. In Illinois, the legislature has just a few days left in its session to find the money to prevent layoffs and service cuts across Chicago’s three transit systems next year. In California, the state is hammering out a stopgap loan to keep Bay Area operators funded through 2026, while betting the longer-term health of the system on a ballot measure next fall. The split Pennsylvania legislature is at a total impasse on the issue. Governor Josh Shapiro recently authorized transit agencies to dip into their capital budgets to prevent immediate service cuts, but there’s no longer-term solution in sight.

These three states are not entirely unique — almost every public transit system in the country is dealing with the same challenges. But they’re useful case studies to illustrate just how high the stakes are, and what kinds of solutions are on the table.

Bay Area

Prior to the pandemic, two of San Francisco’s regional rail systems — Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, and Cal Train — were covering upwards of 70% of their operating costs with fares, Sebastian Petty, the senior transportation policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, told me. In 2024, however, fare revenue was roughly half of what it was in 2019, covering just under a third of the cost of running the system, with the rest filled in by emergency federal assistance. “There’s no real, obvious path to financial sustainability that doesn't involve some longer source of sustained new public funding,” Petty said.

BART now projects that its COVID relief funding will be gone by spring of next year, after which it will face a deficit of $350 million to $400 million per year. The implications are catastrophic. The fixed costs of operating the system are so high that service cuts alone can’t make up the shortfall. BART estimates that even if it cut service by 90% — including closing at 9 p.m., cutting frequency from every 20 minutes to once an hour, shutting down two full train lines, laying off more than 1,000 workers — that would not be enough to close the gap.

The legislature decided on a regional sales tax as the best way to fund the system, but has left the final say in the matter up to voters. In September, lawmakers passed a bill that authorized a ballot measure in five Bay Area counties next year. Voters will be asked to approve a sales tax increase of half a cent — or a full cent, in the case of San Francisco — for a period of 14 years.

Regardless of whether the ballot measure is successful, however, the transit system still faces a fiscal cliff next year without some kind of bridge funding. A separate bill requires the state Department of Finance to propose a solution for short-term financial assistance for Bay Area transit agencies to bridge the roughly $750 million budget gap for the next year to prevent immediate service cuts. The department has a deadline of January 10, after which the legislature will have to vote on the proposal.

“To be frank, this is not a great position to be in,” Petty said. “People are really, really worried.” But he said this still seems like the best path forward given how large the scale of money needed is. “I say this as someone who’s worked in transit for a while,” Petty told me. “Transit seems to be in some degree of perpetual funding challenge, but this one really is different.”

Chicago

Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority, which governs the area’s three transit companies, says that it faces a $230 million budget shortfall next year, which could increase nearly fourfold in 2027 without new funding. The agency has warned that it will begin cutting paratransit service for people with disabilities as soon as April, which will expand to main line service and layoffs over the summer if the legislature can’t agree on a new revenue source this month.

Amy Rynell, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, a Chicago-based nonprofit, told me the uncertainty alone has hurt the transit operators’ ability to plan. “The agencies are having to spend a lot of time putting forth multiple budgets to figure out what to do in this moment,” she said. “That’s detracting from the ability to build for the future and develop new projects. People are having to look at keeping the doors open versus making transit better.”

Lawmakers in Illinois spent much of the first half of the year trying to nail down a deal, but they prioritized working on reforms to the regional transit system before figuring out how to fund it. On May 31, during the final hours of the regular legislative session, the state Senate passed a bill that would create several revenue raisers for public transit, such as a statewide $1.50 “Climate Impact Fee” on retail deliveries, a statewide electric vehicle charging fee, a real estate transfer tax, and a tax on rideshare services like Uber and Lyft. But lawmakers in the House claimed they didn’t have enough time to review the implications of such measures. An earlier idea to increase tolls died in the face of opposition from lawmakers representing the suburbs as well as labor groups.

The legislature has just three days left — October 28 through 30 — in a special veto session to reach an agreement on transit funding. Rynell was optimistic that it would get there. “It remains a priority of the House, Senate, and governor’s team,” she said. “People have put a lot of time and effort into getting a good package because the legislative leaders don’t want to be back in the same place in five or 10 years.”

Philadelphia

For two years in a row, the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, or SEPTA, has narrowly avoided a fiscal crisis with stopgap solutions from the governor’s office after the legislature failed to secure any transit funding. In November 2024, Governor Shapiro got approval from the Biden administration to transfer $153 million in federal capital highway funds to SEPTA, preventing immediate service cuts and postponing a 21% fare hike. But the agency still anticipated a $213 million gap, and said it would have to implement both the rate hike and service cuts this fall unless it secured additional funding.

The funding never came. The Pennsylvania legislature, paralyzed by a one-seat Democratic majority in the House and a Republican Senate, let a June 30 state budget deadline come and go. “Five of these funding bills, sort of different permutations, passed the State House that would have given sustainable revenue for transit,” Stephen Bronskill, the coalition manager at Transit Forward Philadelphia, told me. “All these bills were bipartisan. They failed in the State Senate.”

Weeks of uncertainty and chaos followed. In late August, SEPTA followed through with raising fares and began cutting service. Just two weeks later, however, a court sided with consumer rights advocates who argued that the cuts disproportionately impacted people of color and low-income riders, and ordered SEPTA to restore service.

During those two weeks, residents got a taste of what the future could hold: workers late to work, students late to class, overcrowded buses and trolleys, confusion about which routes were still operating. After the court order, SEPTA turned to a desperate measure — a request to use up to $394 million of state funds designated for capital expenditures on its operations, instead. The move would preserve full service for two years, but at the expense of infrastructure repairs and upgrades. Governor Shapiro approved the request.

“It’s a Band-Aid solution, and no new money for transit has been allocated,” Bronskill said. It’s also a particularly terrible time to deplete SEPTA’s capital budget, as its aging railcars are becoming dangerous to operate. There have been five fires on SEPTA railcars in 2025 alone. A recent report from the National Transportation Safety Board found that the Authority’s 1970s-era “silverliner” cars, which make up about 60% of the fleet, predate federal fire safety hazards and require either extensive retrofits or replacement.

The money will also only benefit transit systems in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Bronskill noted. “Every other transit agency across the state faces the same cliff of having to cut service in the face of the deficits. So we are continuing this fight.”

Pennsylvania lawmakers have proposed some of the same ideas that have been floated in Illinois to raise money for transit. They’ve also considered a car rental and lease tax, diverting funding from the state sales tax, taxing so-called “skill games” common at bars and convenience stores, and legalizing recreational marijuana.

To Justin Balik, the state program director for the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action, the challenge is not so much about coming up with revenue options as mustering “political will and urgency and prioritization.”

But more than anything, Pennsylvania suffers partisan politics and total paralysis due to its split legislature, which is now more than 100 days past the deadline to set even a basic state budget for next year. “I think once that is done, we all have our work cut out for us to tell the story in a compelling way of why the problem isn't solved and why we need faster action on this,” Balik said.

Evergreen is part of a new coalition of environmental and transit advocacy groups and think tanks called the Clean RIDES Network, which stands for Responsible Investments to Decrease Emissions in States, that’s trying to engender the political will for and prioritization of clean transportation solutions in statehouses around the country. The group is advocating for “a more holistic plan for transportation advocacy” that brings together ideas like avoiding highway expansions, improving transit access and efficiencies, and investing in vehicle electrification. Over 100 organizations are involved, including national groups like RMI, Sierra Club, and the NRDC, as well as state advocacy outfits like the Clean Air Council in Pennsylvania and Active Transportation Alliance in Illinois.

Advocates like Balik and Weiskopf, of Climate Cabinet, argued that it’s the right time to put transportation at the front and center of the climate fight. While there’s little state leaders can do to counter President Trump’s actions to weaken U.S. climate policy, public transit is one of the few areas they control. “This is a place that all of these lawmakers have the opportunity to do something meaningful and effective,” Weiskopf said, “even if it is just to prevent another thing from becoming much worse.”