There wasn't an empty seat in the Gold Room in the Allegheny County Courthouse yesterday, when Allegheny County Council members set transit as the topic.

The only legislation to touch on the proposed 24 percent transit cuts to the Allegheny County Port Authority had to do with requesting that the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation look at opening the HOV lane on the Parkway north to all vehicles.

County Councilwoman Jan Rea, R-McCandless, had proposed the measure to deal with the added congestion from people not taking buses.

The meeting became something entirely different from a discussion of the HOV lane. More than 150 people, brought together to protest the transit cuts, came to hear Steve Bland, chief executive of the Port Authority, justify the cuts to the County Council. They were holding signs with slogans such as "Don't transfer me to welfare," "No buses, no peace," "Voters rely on buses" and "Don't stand for cuts." And they did what Pittsburgh protesters often do: They listened politely.

Later, when Mr. Bland finished speaking, they went to the hallway and started chanting "Stop the cuts" but quieted right down when a guard told them they were disturbing other speakers who were addressing County Council.

During Mr. Bland's testimony he answered a question from the chairman of the transportation committee, Councilman John DeFazio, D- at-large, by saying that even if Gov. Ed Rendell comes up with funding for mass transit, he still intends to cut service.

But he heard from members of County Council how their constituents would be affected.

"My district will be totally devastated," Councilwoman Joan Cleary, D-Brentwood, said.

She said a lot of the buses that are slated to be eliminated run full of people, and so, she asked, what that would mean for the buses that are left.

Mr. Bland said they cut some routes all together instead of decreasing frequency on others because, if every 10 minutes that bus is full and the frequency is decreased to every half hour, then "you may be waiting while two or three go by." He said if that's the case people might wait two or three hours to get to work.

In response to a question by Councilman Jim Burn, D-Millvale, about the economic impact of the cuts, Mr. Bland said they will have a huge ripple effect. He said while public transit saves a lot of money, it doesn't receive the money it saves.

Councilwoman Susan Caldwell, R-Plum, said the Port Authority would have to work harder to figure out a way to save some routes. "People need to get to work. People need to get to the doctor," she said.

Patrick McMahon, the president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 85, which represents Port Authority workers, said his union leadership was developing a plan to produce some savings and not affect service. For instance, he said, when a driver takes lunch now, he has to drive all the way back to the garage to go to lunch and then drive back to the start of the route rather than stopping at the end of the route, which is often a mall parking lot, eating lunch there, and then starting to drive again.

He also said the Port Authority could save money by taking over the maintenance of the Wabash Tunnel, which is currently being outsourced, and moving the administrative operations out of Downtown, where the authority has to pay rent, to a vacant building it already owns.

Mr. McMahon said the union will present it's ideas to the Port Authority board on Friday at 3 p.m.

Barney Oursler, co-coordinator of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, said "This is the destruction of the bus system, this isn't saving it."

He said he found it odd that the political leadership immediately gave up instead of fighting for the bus service. He also asked County Council to help the people who ride the buses persuade county Chief Executive Dan Onorato to intervene.

He said there are 11 neighborhoods in Pittsburgh which, under the plan, will no longer have bus service and 80 communities in the county that will lose service.

Jonathan Robison, the founder of Save Our Transit, said the plan lost credibility because the 28X, the bus that runs from Oakland, to Downtown and out to the airport is still on the list to be cut.

"Everybody knows this bus is heavily used," he said, but before it started, Pittsburgh Limousine used to run a similar shuttle to the airport for $15 or $20.

"It's a plot to privatize," Mr. Robison said about the loss of the 28X. "This is something some people think they can make money on if they can charge $20 or more.

He called the current plan "cruel and stupid" -- cruel because of what it does to people who need the buses, stupid because it undermines years of effort to save mass transit.

"Why would anybody vote for a new tax when the county executive says even if we get the money we're going to go ahead with the cuts anyway?"