Without Well-Funded Public Transit, Philadelphia’s Climate Future Looks Bleak

PHILADELPHIA—Three days a week, Daniel Blazek takes the train from his Center City neighborhood to his job in supply chain management in Malvern, Pennsylvania. He’s relied on public transit to get to work for the past eight years. 

But next year, he may not be able to take the train anymore. The SEPTA line that he and many of his coworkers use regularly is slated for elimination in January, a casualty of massive system-wide cuts meant to offset a $213 million funding shortfall caused by an impasse in state budget negotiations. With Amtrak’s service in the area also facing cuts, Blazek sees few options. “I literally would have to either move or purchase a car,” he said.

If Blazek is forced to drive to work come January, he won’t be alone. The transit cuts could mean an additional 275,000 cars on the road each day, according to an analysis by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. WHYY calculated that this traffic could generate an additional 300,000 metric tons of carbon in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties every year. 

Transportation experts say that the reductions in service—which include cutting five train lines, ending 50 bus routes and closing 66 stations—won’t just impact the region’s short-term climate projections. It could also inflict lasting damage to long-term efforts to achieve net-zero emissions and a sustainable, walkable and less polluted future.

One reason for the dramatic increase in traffic is that SEPTA’s 13 regional rail lines cover a lot of ground. The agency’s network services 2,200 square miles, stretching from Trenton, New Jersey, in the north to Wilmington, Delaware, in the south. Blazek’s station is 25 miles from his Center City neighborhood. 

“Longer-distance commuting trips can be pretty difficult to substitute with anything besides a private car,” said Megan Ryerson, the chair of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. For shorter trips within the city, walking or biking might be possible alternatives to SEPTA, but driving is the only other option for commuting to most of the city’s vast ring of suburbs. 

More cars on the road means more time sitting in traffic, which amplifies the negative impact on the climate. 

“Increased congestion has a compounding effect, because stop-and-go traffic is less fuel efficient than traffic moving at a constant rate,” Ryerson said. 

The Delaware Valley commission’s analysis found that commute times will increase and speeds will slow significantly for drivers across the region. The destruction of the Paoli/Thorndale line, the one Blazek relies on, would result in a 40 percent increase in delays on U.S. 202 in Chester County.  

In a statement to Inside Climate News, SEPTA said transit is “not only a mobility solution—it’s a climate solution.” Increased traffic forecasted by the commission “will not only add to congestion, lengthen travel times and worsen air quality,” a spokesperson said. It “will also reverse years of progress toward regional climate goals.”

Before the pandemic, the Paoli/Thorndale line was one of the most heavily used in the SEPTA system, carrying more than 6 million passengers in and out of the city in 2019. Ridership cratered in 2020, and it has not fully recovered, in part because of remote work. The other reason is that service has not returned to 2019 levels. 

That makes trains less convenient and more crowded. The more SEPTA cuts, the less appealing public transit will be, driving ridership down. The fewer paying riders it has, the more cuts it has to make. This is the merciless cycle SEPTA says it cannot escape without more funding. 

“As fare increases and service reductions push our region toward gridlock, Southeastern Pennsylvania will enter its own death spiral, pulling the rest of the state down with it,” the agency said in a statement. The cuts will trigger billions of dollars of losses to property values, tax revenues and potential earnings in the region, SEPTA said.

SEPTA is not the only transit system floundering because of a lack of state funding. Pittsburgh Regional Transit has a $100 million budget deficit and has proposed raising fares and cutting service by 35 percent. “Without a permanent funding solution, PRT will be forced to take drastic steps to irreversibly shrink the system,” the agency wrote on its website.

People decide how to travel based on accessibility, reliability and time; few of us consider the climate impacts of our travel, Ryerson said. “We’re making our choices based on the cost that we’re facing today,” she said. For many workers, SEPTA’s decline in service since the pandemic has already shifted those considerations, and further cuts will alter them entirely. 

Jennifer Bedigian, a flight attendant who lives in Center City and does not own a car, takes SEPTA’s airport train line to work. Frequent delays and cancellations have pushed her to leave for work much earlier than she needs to, just in case she has to order a last-minute Uber. “I still do take the train, I just try to make adjustments,” she said. 

SEPTA’s phase 1 cuts to regional rail, currently on pause, would reduce airport service from every 30 minutes to every hour. That schedule will change her calculations, Bedigian said, especially when she’s coming off work. “If I’ve just been flying for 14 hours, and I just missed the train by a minute, I’m not going to wait another hour,” she said. “I’m going to take a cab.”

If phase 2 goes through, the airport train would stop running at 9 p.m., further narrowing the choices for travel. Then Bedigian and her colleagues will have to resort to other measures, like carpooling for cabs and driving. Buses run from the airport, but Bedigian said they are more difficult to navigate with luggage and less comfortable to wait for in bad weather. 

“The 9 p.m. curfew is beyond ridiculous. The airport is open 24 hours,” she said. “This is a huge hardship on passengers and employees that work at the airport.”

Reducing public transit encourages people to make less sustainable choices, Ryerson said. That’s not limited to small, daily decisions about whether to drive or take a ride-share to work. It’s also about bigger choices, like deciding where to live, where to attend school and whether it’s necessary to own a car. 

If you can’t count on the city bus to get your kid to school, maybe you’d rather send them to a school that is easier to drive to. If the train barely runs, why would you buy a house near the station? If people no longer value living near stations, why build there in the first place?

“More compact developments, especially compact developments in larger cities, tend to cluster in areas that are well served by transit,” said Xiaoxia Summer Dong, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the Weitzman School of Design. “If people are no longer able to take advantage of convenient transit in these areas, we could see fewer compact developments around transit stations.” 

Building more sprawling housing has implications for energy consumption, and it encourages more driving. With more cars on the road, walking and biking in densely populated areas will likely become less safe, which could mean even more people driving.

Transit is also key to “any and all accessibility and mobility for large populations that don’t have access to a private vehicle, or can’t afford to just fire up a ride share app whenever they need to get somewhere,” Ryerson said. “For many, it’s their only option.” 

That’s why economic opportunity is constrained without robust public transit. Public health suffers, too, as air pollution increases and people struggle to get to medical appointments. 

Public transit is a “lifeline for the city, the region and the state,” said Elizabeth Lankenau, Philadelphia’s director of sustainability. 

Before the funding crisis, transportation contributed about 28 percent of Philadelphia’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the agency was seen as essential for helping the city to reach its goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Philadelphia’s 2025 climate action update listed increasing the accessibility of public transit and the number of trips per capita by 80 percent as targets for the next few years. SEPTA has its own climate goals to reduce vehicle emissions and improve energy and water efficiency.

SEPTA and PRT are also important for the state’s climate action plan, which recommends increasing the frequency and number of public transit stops, increasing public transit’s reliability and efficiency and expanding reduced-fare options for low-income passengers. 

Climate change is already impacting Pennsylvania, causing more heat waves, rainfall and flooding. Both the state and city are working on adaptation efforts. In 2023, the Center for Climate Integrity estimated that Pennsylvania municipal governments would need to spend more than $15 billion by 2040 to protect residents from climate consequences.

Lankenau acknowledged that the SEPTA cuts represent a serious setback when it comes to lowering transportation emissions. But she’s focused on initiatives in other sectors, like weatherizing buildings, and broader challenges, including creating a more effective climate action plan that incorporates metrics and tracking so the city has a clearer roadmap for the next 25 years. “It’s a long game,” she said.

Ryerson knows that, which is why she worries about the effects of the cuts on the region’s ability to shape a sustainable future. “I think a lot about the habits that we’re building in people,” she said. Compared to other American cities, Philadelphia is transit-friendly, with about 24 percent of commutes taking place on public transportation pre-pandemic. But that muscle memory can be lost. 

The Paoli/Thorndale route is almost 200 years old. The train first ferried wealthy Philadelphians to country homes and summer resorts and then helped to facilitate the construction of middle-class housing developments that swallowed old farm towns and fields. The railroad was an engine of the area’s growth and the reason for its name: the Main Line. Later, the expansion of office buildings, hospitals and colleges attracted reverse commuters to the train. 

The 1950s saw the birth of the Schuylkill Expressway, connecting the western suburbs to the city. City planners hailed the highway as a modern “traffic solution” that would end Philadelphia’s congestion by 1970. Instead, I-76 was plagued by safety problems and delays from the start. 

“If we don’t improve, we’re going to have mass slaughter on these highways that will frighten all of us,” Philadelphia’s mayor said in 1958, days after a new roadway section opened. Drivers called it the “Surekill Distressway.”

Decades later, the expressway is still one of the most dangerous roads in Pennsylvania. “I hate driving on 76,” Blazek said. “It’s soul-crushing.” Avoiding the expressway’s inevitable traffic jams—which will worsen if the cuts move forward—is one of the reasons he and many others prefer the train.

For the first half of the 20th century, shoppers and commuters had another option to reach the city. A trolley line owned by the Philadelphia and Western Railway ran alongside part of the Paoli/Thorndale route. 

When the expressway was being built in 1956, the line was closed down and replaced with buses. Its abandoned right-of-way became a popular walking trail, a remnant from an age in American transportation when electrified public transit was ascendant. 

Today, the most visible reminders of its past are a handful of historical signs posted along the path, each one a marker for a station that no longer exists.

This story was updated Sept. 4, 2025, with a new statement from SEPTA.