2021 SEPTA Budget Breakdown

Published in July 2022

Every year Philadelphia's transit agency septa SouthEastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. publishes budget figures. The reports page with many PDFs for download including the 2021 budget: https://planning.septa.org/reports/ (archived link). There is a lot of information in the document, both a high level table and many further breakdowns.

I thought it would be interesting to read through the numbers and build a Sankey diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankey_diagram showing several levels of expenses and revenue broken down by category.

Starting at the highest level this is the top level budget for the entire organization:

2021 Budget Breakdown

Revenue	Amount in Thousands
Passenger Revenue	480,574
Shared Ride Program	16,250
Other Income	42,188
Investment Income	2,756
	---------
Total Operating Revenue	541,768

Subsidy
Federal	93,028
State	779,377
Local	112,451
Other	4,360
	---------
Total Subsidy	989,216

Expenses
Labor and Fringe Benefits	1,088,773
Material and Services	331,432
Injury and Damage Claims	24,711
Propulsion Power	27,313
Fuel	26,026
Vehicle and Facility Rentals	8,854
	---------
Operating Expense	1,507,109
Depreciation/Contributed Capital	23,875
	---------
Total Expenses	1,530,984

Note that the subsidies (mostly from the state of Pennsylvania) exactly cover the gap between expenses and revenue.

I found the high level table a little lacking in detail, so I read further and tried to pull out numbers from the various breakdown tables in the document and align them to the overview table so we can see more detail of where money is coming from and where it's spent.

Here is a visualization of the budget as a Sankey diagram:

Sankey diagram breaking down SEPTA 2021 Budget numbers by various catagories

Click the image for a larger interactive view.
Download the chart as an image SEPTA_2021_Budget_sankey.png

This represents my best-guess understanding at the data as-is from the PDF.