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[Raffi Holoszyc-Pimentel/The Daily Pennsylvanian] A train on the Blue Line leaves the 40th Street station. SEPTA workers will vote on a new contract Thursday.

By settling the recent strike, SEPTA may have solved its biggest short-term problem, but plenty of challenges lie ahead for the transit agency.

Chief among them is securing a steady stream of funding from the state legislature.

"We are in the calm eye of a financial hurricane," SEPTA spokesman Richard Maloney said.

In June, with SEPTA lacking the necessary funds to continue operation, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell stepped in to save the transit organization from financial disaster.

He arranged for the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission -- which determines federal and state transportation spending -- to shift $215 million from federal road and bridge funds to SEPTA.

With the $215 million projected to run out in December 2006, however, SEPTA will need to find a way to keep itself afloat.

Key to that effort will be the findings of Rendell's Transportation Funding and Reform Commission -- which first met in June 2005 -- to audit the state's transportation network and make recommendations to improve its efficiency.

The findings of the seven-person commission -- which are due out by November 2006, just one month before the $215 million expires -- will have a large impact on SEPTA's long-term future.

"I pray what comes out of the commission will be a realistic formula for predictable, long-term, dedicated funding," Maloney said.

Transport Workers Union Local 234 spokesman Bob Bedard, however, hopes that the commission's findings will lead to an overhaul in SEPTA's management.

"SEPTA ought to start running a better company," he said. "They're incompetent."

The main problem, he said, is that SEPTA has a monopoly on Philadelphia public transit.

Transportation Engineering professor Vukan Vuchic, who will be meeting with the commission to offer his perspective in the next few days, agreed that SEPTA would operate more efficiently if it were not a monopoly. More cost-effective operations would make better use of state funds, helping to alleviate the transit agency's current financial problems.

Adding that SEPTA's current system has "a number of inefficiencies" and that many other cities worldwide have reorganized their transit systems, Vuchic said that the transit agency could benefit from "regulated competition."

"In many cities it has been found now that one agency operating all transit ... without any pressures to innovate and respond to the public" is problematic, he said.

Vuchic advocates a system in which everything is still coordinated by a central agency, such as SEPTA, but in which some functions are contracted out to independent bidders.

He gave SEPTA's suburban bus lines as an example of a service that could be more profitable for an outside company, aided by a SEPTA subsidy, to run. Such systems have been recently implemented in cities in both Germany and Scandinavia, he said, and are working well.

"If there is some competitiveness, it changes the atmosphere of SEPTA," he said. "SEPTA generally is a very large, good system of transit [but it] could operate more efficiently."

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