Image Description: A group of advocates stands with Pittsburgh City Councilmembers inside council chambers. They smile and hold Transit for All PA! and Week Without Driving PGH signs, as well as a large proclamation bearing the City seal.
This year, the Pittsburgh City budget is proposing for the first time to include funding for the purchase of transit passes of all downtown City employees through Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s PRTner pass. This would be a huge deal, enabling 750 municipal workers to be given free transit passes as an employment benefit, and making the City of Pittsburgh a leader in modeling the benefits of the program for other regional employers and institutions.
However, the City budget is highly contentious this year, and many Pittsburgh City Councilmembers are eyeing different programs for cuts. Even though the PRTner pass purchase would be a great investment in our City workforce and in reducing Downtown congestion, and even though the cost to the City is low, there’s still a chance that these transit passes get cut in this final stretch.
What is the PRTner Pass?
At the end of last year, Pittsburgh Regional Transit rolled out the new PRTner pass program after receiving overwhelming support through its public comment period. It enables the bulk purchase of transit fares for employers, developers and school districts to pay for passes for their constituencies at the deeply discounted rate of $28/per person monthly.
The PRTner pass has the potential to provide low-income and working class people (renters, students, employees) across Allegheny County unlimited transit access—freedom of movement—that will both save money on their existing transit trips and incentivize more travel by transit. Moreover, it will increase the amount of dedicated operating revenue for PRT, through new transit fare payments by corporations and developers, large non-profits, school systems and now municipalities like the City of Pittsburgh.
In our challenging political climate, it’s hard to win new revenue for restoring and expanding transit service, particularly through progressive means. The PRTner pass is a unicorn funding opportunity- growing transit equity, transit ridership, transit revenue, and sourced from corporations and major institutions! Win win win win!
And there’s massive potential for growth – at SOUND transit in Seattle, where a similar program has existed for years, more than half of the transit agency’s total revenue is generated from a bulk discount fare program like the PRTner pass.
Send a letter to your City Councilmember to show your support for the City’s purchase of transit passes for Pittsburgh City workers, and to ensure that this benefit is preserved and solidified in this year’s budget vote in December, 2025!
Send a letter in support of the PRTner Pass
To affordable fares—and beyond!
Now, the PRTner pass purchase for City employees is only the first step. It’s important that more employers and developers are incentivized to participate. That is one piece of why we have been organizing in support of the Mayor’s Housing and Zoning Code Package, which include incentives for developers and employers to mitigate their commuter impacts through PRTner pass purchases.
This program has long been an organizing goal of riders! There is a big demand by employers, schools and developers to provide a benefit similar to the student pass programs at CMU, Pitt and Pittsburgh Public Schools. Since 2019 and the launch of our Fair Fares Platform, PPT has called for Pittsburgh Regional Transit to offer common-sense fare products (we called them “fare incentive programs”) that would increase both revenue and ridership for the agency.
We have envisioned opportunities for large employers like UPMC to purchase passes for their workers, helping ease some of the transportation costs on our region’s healthcare staff and reducing the need for shuttles and parking lots that increase congestion and disallow more housing or commercial developments in the city. For service employees like those at Giant Eagle or janitors in the downtown office buildings, monthly transit passes could be a substantial commuter benefit, but it could also be used for all sorts of necessary trips outside of the workplace- for recreation and childcare, for grocery shopping and healthcare appointments.
At the Giant Eagle Shakespeare site at Shady and Penn, we have organized since 2018 for bulk passes to be purchased for all renters in the future housing development, to reduce the demand for structured parking, and to increase transit usage in one of the most transit-rich corridors in the County. This demand was included in our 100 Days Transit Platform for Mayor Gainey in 2021 and our Riders Demands for the Next County Executive in 2023. And in February 2024, we made bulk discount employer fares- like this PRTner Pass proposal- a cornerstone of our goal to have elected officials play their part to fund transit at all levels, by calling on the City of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County to purchase passes for their employees.
We’re now seeing the fruits of that organizing- and we’re just getting started.