Today's column shines the spotlight on oldies but goodies. Not 45 rpm records, Pure Gold or Porky Chedwick, but people who have been there, done that.

One of them is Jack Brannan, 83, of Upper St. Clair, a former Long Island Rail Road executive and transportation consultant.

I can always count on Mr. Brannan to give me a holler when he disagrees or wants to offer other comment. He phoned last week about the Port Authority.

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"I see buses going down Fort Couch Road with five or six people," he said. "They are nothing more than cheap taxi rides. You cannot afford to supply mass bus service where you do not have mass population."

He also wonders why buses are routed over Washington Road (Route 19) and Banksville Road to and from Downtown when the authority spent $1 billion to rebuild the South Hills light-rail system and, in essence, competes with itself for the same pool of riders.

What would Mr. Brannan do?

"What I recommended on Long Island, which is run the buses at right angles to the railroad," he said, describing a system used in cities such as St. Louis, where regular buses and mini-buses "feed" the light-rail line to maximize productivity.

Mr. Brannan expected more creative thinking from the Port Authority rather than just proposing to eliminate 124 of 213 routes based on a "Scorecard" that doesn't always realistically reflect ridership needs and patterns.

Sorry, Jack. No such luck.

Now comes the honorable Roy McHugh, of Mount Washington, from 1947 to 1983 a stellar sports reporter, sports editor and columnist-at-large for the former Pittsburgh Press.

He would not have written a note to me unless something important was on his mind.

He said what many people are saying about the Port Authority building a light-rail extension to the North Shore, mainly boring tunnels under the Allegheny River while proposing to raise fares and make devastating service cuts.

But Mr. McHugh says it eloquently:

"My interest in hockey is close to zero, but Pittsburgh needs a new arena more than it needs a hole under the Allegheny River, which is going to end up as a billion-dollar boondoggle. It's $420 million from the federal government, yes.

"But who's going to pay for the cost overruns? Who's going to pay for the never-ending cost of maintenance? Just because the federal and state governments are in the business of wasting taxpayer money, why should the Port Authority be an enabler?

"Now, a light-rail extension to Oakland and Squirrel Hill would make sense. We have legislators in Washington and Harrisburg. Isn't there something they could do to change the earmark?"

Finally, I want to resurrect a quote from the late John T. Mauro, a Post-Gazette writer many moons ago, who moved to the public sector and rose to become Port Authority executive director.

The authority was part of my newspaper "beat" in 1975 when Mr. Mauro, a transit visionary, penned the following prophesy:

"By this stage of the 20th century, with a lengthy history of transit failures to look back on, it would seem that our community and political leaders would have come to understand this one universal fact: The long-term answer to financial problems of public transportation cannot and will not be found in cutbacks in service and in the work force, nor in fare increases.

"These stopgap measures have been tried repeatedly in the past, and they have proved to be regressive and self-defeating. Such steps, if tried again, will certainly lead to the complete downfall of this and other public transport systems."

Pols opposed to a futuristic Skybus people-mover project ran Mr. Mauro out of town a short time later.

I visited him several years later in San Mateo, Calif., where Mr. Mauro beat out 215 candidates to organize the first public transit system in Silicon Valley, outside of San Francisco. Today, SamTrans is one of the nation's best.

After all these years, Mr. Mauro's quote still rings true.

Around here, some things never change.

Believe it. Improving driver response by just 1.5 seconds could prevent 90 percent of rear-end collisions, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Elsewhere. The American Public Transportation Association said mass transit ridership grew nearly 3 percent, to 7.8 billion rides, during the first nine months of 2006.

Plate du jour. Richard Roupe, of Bradford, recently spotted the Pennsylvania personalized license plate ICNTDRV. "Fortunately, I was behind the fellow, not in front of him," he said.