For those feeling whiplash about SEPTA’s financial situation, here’s where things stand. SEPTA had to implement large service cuts on Aug. 24 to cover the gap created by a lack of state funding and slow ridership recovery post-pandemic. A Philadelphia judge ordered SEPTA to reverse the cuts about a week later while allowing a large fare increase to go into effect. SEPTA still needed several hundred million dollars to restore service, so with no hope for a long term funding deal -- or state budget agreement -- from the legislature, Gov. Josh Shapiro allowed SEPTA to use capital dollars to fund operations.

This outcome is like putting a Band-Aid over a gunshot wound. SEPTA is still bleeding out, but at a slower rate, miles from the nearest hospital. To put it another way, would you celebrate if you had to use your retirement savings to pay your rent? So why are the Republican attorney who argued the case and misguided consumer advocates calling it a victory? Because this outcome obscures the real reason the legislature hasn’t solved the transit funding crisis: Wealthy out-of-state interests are blocking the most likely source of new transit funding, taxing and regulating “skill games.”

Despite reasonable bipartisan proposals, Senate Republican leadership is too divided and afraid of the skill game lobby to reach an agreement. Specifically, they’re afraid of Pace-O-Matic, a leading skill game company owned by a Georgia millionaire. They aren’t from Pennsylvania and could care less if the people they make money from are able to get to work. And despite Republican Senate leaders describing them as “bullies” for their aggressive lobbying this summer, skill games companies are major donors to the Republican caucus.

Transit systems in rural and exurban Pennsylvania are being harmed more than metropolitan transit systems by the skill games impasse. While SEPTA and Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) can use capital dollars to fund operations, smaller transit systems like Freedom Transit in western Pennsylvania don’t have this option and must implement large-scale service cuts and fare increases.

SEPTA and PRT are on life support, but working class people in rural Pennsylvania are experiencing the transit death spiral right now. For all of Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman’s talk about standing up for rural Pennsylvania, he won’t cross out-of-state money to help rural Pennsylvanians.

This is what Republican leadership in Harrisburg has wrought: Out-of-state millionaires and local billionaires use their vast resources to grow their wealth and gut public services while working people suffer. We all know Pittman isn’t talking to people who ride the bus at his $10,000-a-head fundraisers at the Indiana County Country Club. But it’s not just Republicans who advance the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class. After all, the Democratic judge who ordered SEPTA to bleed out more slowly also undermined the power of blue-collar city employees to strike for better wages this summer by ordering them back to work.

So don’t fall for the urban vs. rural framing that Pittman and Senate Republicans use to obscure their allegiance to out-of-state money. We must remind Democrats and Republicans that if they want to win in 2026, they need to fund transit across Pennsylvania and resist the influence of skill games money. Most importantly, we must remind folks that we are not here because SEPTA won’t settle for anything but their preferred deal. We are here because out-of-state money won’t settle for anything but a deal that maximizes their ability to extract profit from working-class Pennsylvanians. And for now, they’ll settle for continuing to pay zero taxes.

Joe O’Brien is an organizer and transit advocate in Northwest Philadelphia.