Doomsday Part II: Transit

The Philadelphia School District's perpetual crisis and "doomsday" budget has been with us for much of the year.

Now, because misery likes company, the schools has a rival in causing a local spike Xanax sales.

On Wednesday, SEPTA drafted its doomsday plan, as The Inquirer's Paul Nussbaum reports, or as it politiely put it "service realignment plan."

If the state legislature does not allocate appropriate funding this year, the mass transit authority plans to "eliminate 9 of its 13 rail lines and shorten two others, close a subway line, and convert trolley routes to bus lines."

SEPTA would barely be regional. Or a service.

"I'm just laying out reality," SEPTA general manager Joseph Casey testified Wednesday before a state Senate committee. "We can't maintain the infrastructure we have out there forever . . . this is the consequence of years of underfunding transit."

As Nussbaum astutely reports, "Faced with Gov. Corbett's proposal for $1.8 billion in additional funding, a $2.5 billion bill approved by the state Senate, or a $2 billion plan offered by House Republican leaders, state lawmakers recessed on July 1 without approving any of them.

And, voila, Doomsday scenario No. 2.

--Karen Heller