Harrisburg, PA (August 12, 2025) — Senator Lindsey M. Williams, Pittsburgh Regional Transit Board Member, issues the following statement following today’s Senate votes on transit funding and the FY2025-26 budget:
“Transit authorities and advocates across the state have long sounded the alarm that public transit is in a dire financial situation. As a Board member of Pittsburgh Regional Transit and a member of the Senate Transportation Committee, I have been clear that Pennsylvanians across all 67 counties deserve public transit that gets them where they need to go every day.
But with the Pennsylvania budget nearly six weeks late and transit agencies across the state facing catastrophic route cuts, Senate Republicans returned to Harrisburg for a one-day stunt that cuts public transit funding across the Commonwealth instead of supporting it.
House Bill 257 steals money from urgently needed and already committed transit capital improvement projects to fund daily operations, robbing Peter to pay Paul. Pittsburgh Regional Transit alone has a nearly $2 billion backlog of infrastructure projects, an amount that grows each year due to underinvestment. With the funding cuts in HB257, our transportation infrastructure will be impossible to maintain, let alone improve. Public transit will be less safe, less secure, and more difficult to run.
Moreover, this legislation mandates fare increases for multiple years. It punishes transit riders across the state – the same riders that help cut down on traffic, reduce wear and tear on our roads, and decrease air pollution.
We have revenue options on the table that will allow us to fund public transit operations without stealing from already underfunded capitol projects. They include the “Transit for All PA” package that I introduced with my colleague Senator Nikil Saval (D – Philadelphia), which would help fund transit by raising the state’s car rental and leasing fees and establishing a 6% fee on ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft. We also could finally tax “skills games”. The Senate Republicans are choosing to turn a blind eye to revenue options and claim they do not have the money to do what our economy needs to thrive.
The transit legislation that Senate Republicans pushed today does not provide the sustained, predictable funding that public transit needs to serve communities across Pennsylvania. Instead, it disregards the lives and livelihoods of Pennsylvania residents – students and workers, the elderly and our disabled neighbors – who use public transit every day.
But Senate Republicans did not just fail public transit today. By pushing through Senate Bill 160, their version of the FY2025-26 budget, Senate Republicans signaled their unwillingness to pass an agreed-upon budget that responsibly funds public education, food assistance, healthcare, human services, first responders, and other critical needs of Pennsylvanians.
The ongoing budget impasse means that many of our school districts, human service providers, and counties have already missed critical state payments since June – at the very time that federal funding is being pulled out from under them.
We cannot afford to wait. Students head back to school next week. Cuts to bus and train routes are imminent. Pennsylvanians deserve real solutions and meaningful negotiations towards a final budget agreement, not the political theater that they got today.