SEPTA Cuts to be Reversed, Fare Hike Still Looms

On September 4, a Philadelphia judge ruled that the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) must reverse all of its cuts to its services and halt any future cuts after a lawsuit was filed against the transit authority. The lawsuit argued that the cuts disproportionately impact Black, Latino, and poor riders, and that SEPTA manufactured the fiscal crisis in order to get more money from the government. Following the ruling, SEPTA management requested the state grant access to nearly $400 million in its trust fund to cover its debts and restore services. A few days later, Governor Shapiro approved the request, with the reversals to go into effect on September 14.

SEPTA had cut 20% of its services in late August and was planning an additional 25% cut on January 1, 2026, after Democratic and Republican lawmakers refused to pass a budget to fund the transit authority and cover its $213 million deficit. While the ruling will see service cuts reversed, the judge has allowed SEPTA to go through with a fare hike of over 20%. Furthermore, the funding will only temporarily restore services for two years by taking nearly $400 million from the PennDOT public transit trust fund—money set aside to expand and maintain services.

The few weeks since the cuts went into effect have already been disastrous for workers and their families. Philadelphia school district officials reported that 63% of Philadelphia schools had an increase in late arrivals, and 54% had more students absent in the first three days of the school year compared to last year.

Behind these acrobatics are ruling class politicians and the monopolists they represent trying to maximize their gains through attacks on workers. The decision is mostly aligned with the proposals of the Pennsylvania state Republicans, who sought to kick the crisis down the road by taking away SEPTA’s long-term funds used for expansion of services and maintenance.

The judge who ruled against the cuts, Judge Sierra Thomas-Street of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, is the same judge that ruled against striking city workers in July, issuing injunctions that made much of the actions of striking workers illegal.

The attorney who filed the lawsuit, George Bochetto, played a useful role in this game for the Republican mafia. Bochetto has political ambitions of his own, including a failed run for Philadelphia’s mayor and the US Senate as a Republican, and also contributed to the legal defense in Trump’s second impeachment trial. While Bochetto opportunistically traffics in people’s anger at the cuts’ disproportionate impact on poor and working people, the lawsuit’s claims of being a “manufactured crisis” is the exact wording used by the Republican legislators to pin the blame on the Democrat-aligned SEPTA management.

The aspect of truth to this claim is that the fiscal crisis is in fact manufactured—not only by SEPTA and the Democrats, however, but by the two party mafias and the imperialist class they represent.

The transit crisis—in Philadelphia and in cities across the country like New York City and Chicago—is part of the general imperialist economic crisis of overproduction, with austerity measures put into effect to redirect (i.e., pilfer) tax dollars from social programs to billionaires. Economic crisis is a fundamental and cyclical feature of imperialism, owing to the contradiction between socialized production and private capitalist accumulation. Transit authorities like SEPTA become indebted to finance capitalists because they are not funded enough by the government, with the finance capitalists making money off of this debt and perpetuating the crisis.

Photo: A bus stop in Philadelphia in the aftermath of the SEPTA cuts. Credit: The Worker.

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