For one year, some Allegheny County residents will be able to ride Pittsburgh Regional Transit at reduced prices, thanks to a pilot project announced Tuesday by the county executive’s office and the Department of Human Services. Officials will study how reducing the cost of transportation affects families with lower incomes.
Details about the program – including the number of riders who will be able to take part – are still being worked out, and likely won’t be available until the end of October. But to be eligible to participate, households must receive SNAP benefits, and complete an application. The application process is slated to get underway in November.
The cost of transportation can make it harder for people to seize opportunities and access services, County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said in a release.
“It’s one of the biggest needs we hear,” he said. “Our goal is to find ways to help the most vulnerable in our community connect with the resources they need to benefit themselves, their families and their communities.”
Community activists, who have long called for such a move, hailed the decision.
“This is not coming from nowhere,” said Laura Chu Wiens, who leads Pittsburghers for Public Transit. “This is a rider victory, this is a community victory. It’s the outcome of years of public demand.”
Many people have trouble scraping together the $2.75 for a one-way fare, said Ken Regal, who leads Just Harvest. “That’s a huge burden on people and it isolates them in profound and important ways that should trouble all of us.”
Regal said the pilot program, and hopefully the permanent fare relief policy it will lead to, has the potential to create broad societal benefit by reducing that isolation: the central question of the project is “whether people see concrete improvements in their lives when they don’t have to ration their bus ridership,” said Regal.
Pittsburgh Regional Transit officials signaled an interest in such a program in 2021, when they released the agency’s long-range plan. They identified the creation of an affordable-fare policy as their second-most pressing priority, saying it would be “crucial to increasing and maintaining ridership.”
Several cities in the United States already offer free transit, and those that do have seen dramatic increases in ridership, as well as other benefits for low-income riders. Those riders are usually a transit system’s most loyal patrons, but the cost of transportation can eat up a disproportionate share of a household’s income.
The head of DHS, Erin Dalton, said easing access to services is one of the department's top priorities.
“We expect that this program will go a long way in helping people get to services, medical appointments, jobs or healthy food, while allowing them to spend their money on other necessities.”
The 2021 American Community Survey found that the number of City of Pittsburgh residents who live in poverty jumped by nearly five percent in the last two years. The impact of COVID-19 pandemic simply added urgency to the call for a fare-relief program.
While fare relief programs are not unique, the potential rigor of the DHS pilot is: The agency has access to a broad range of data to see how the pilot may affect numerous aspects of people’s lives. At the end of the yearlong program, officials will examine whether discounted transportation increased ridership, access to jobs and services, according to county officials.
A permanent program could launch in 2023.
The advocacy groups who have long pushed for the program, called the Fair Fares Coalition, urged the county to continue to include community members in their planning and evaluation of the pilot.
“In order for this project to have a lasting positive effect on the region’s economy and individual well-being, it must ultimately transition to a permanent zero fare program for all county SNAP recipients,” the group said in a release. “Towards that end, we look forward to actively supporting this project to ensure that ACDHS utilizes best practices and can obtain continued funding.”
How to fund a permanent affordable fare program remains a major question. PRT CEO Katharine Kelleman has said the agency wants to extend more help to riders with low incomes, but raised the question of who pays for it. Passenger revenue does not comprise the majority of revenue for transit locally or nationwide, but it’s still an important source of income. In other cities, free or reduced transit has been supported by a separate tax. Other suggested sources of support in the U.S. have included a small increase to gas tax — likely a nonstarter in PA, which has dubious honor of charging the country’s highest gas tax — and philanthropy.
