{"id":394116,"date":"2025-11-21T07:19:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-21T07:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/394116\/"},"modified":"2025-11-21T07:19:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T07:19:10","slug":"philadelphia-leaders-host-transit-centered-town-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/394116\/","title":{"rendered":"Philadelphia leaders host transit-centered town hall"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to cover? <a href=\"#Section1\">Let us know!<\/a>\n<\/p>\n<p>State and city public officials hosted a town hall Thursday to address transit funding, or the lack thereof, included in Pennsylvania\u2019s budget, which was approved last week after a stalemate that lasted more than <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/article\/pennsylvania-budget-josh-shapiro-greenhouse-gases-climate-change-power-plants-6c4c5ad0f5408ff4c289c990cc2ecd5d\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">four months<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.palegis.us\/senate\/members\/bio\/1921\/senator-nikil-saval\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">State Sen. Nikil Saval<\/a>, D-Philadelphia, Philadelphia City <a href=\"https:\/\/phlcouncil.com\/nicolasorourke\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Councilmember Nicolas O\u2019Rourke<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.transitforwardphilly.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Transit Forward Philadelphia<\/a> invited transit riders to the <a href=\"https:\/\/friendscentercorp.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Friends Center<\/a> in Center City to learn about the challenges they\u2019re facing and to discuss what can be done to support additional legislation.\n<\/p>\n<p>Transportation fell off the state\u2019s priority list for the budget after SEPTA and Pittsburgh Regional Transit opted to <a href=\"https:\/\/whyy.org\/articles\/septa-service-pennsylvania-budget-stalemate\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">cover operating costs with money from a reserve fund usually meant for capital projects<\/a>. Saval said the region could see \u201csome of the ramifications of this\u201d going forward, including service cuts and more projects being postponed. However, he said there still are some positive takeaways.\n  <\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe did not win everything this round, but our fight for fully funded transit was known across the state, and frankly, known nationally,\u201d Saval said. \u201cAnd our demands for long-term funding reverberated in every corner of the commonwealth, to thousands of riders, to hundreds of elected officials and to the nearly 100 people in this room tonight.\u201d\n        <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From Philly and the Pa. suburbs to South Jersey and Delaware, what would you like WHYY News to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":394117,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,149384,76689,1448,2830,84126,1311,15940,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-394116","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-nicolas-orourke","10":"tag-nikil-saval","11":"tag-pa","12":"tag-pennsylvania","13":"tag-pennsylvania-budget","14":"tag-philadelphia","15":"tag-septa","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-united-states-of-america","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115586476752099275","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}