Port Authority tried. They tried really hard. But they couldn't do it in the end. They couldn't take the big leap. So they ended up taking half a leap in the obvious winner of their three alternative plans -- Concept Two, the "Better Radial Plus."

In early 2007 on The Next Page, I called for Port Authority to take the "Brazilian Cure" to our tangled system of long, slow bus lines that were choking transit here with waste and inefficiency. The cure is based on creating "imitation subways" just by running buses above ground, but buses that run fast and frequent between widely placed subway-like stops.

Cities all over the world started implementing this concept at the turn of this century after discovering what modest Curitiba, Brazil, had invented years earlier. And the success of this Brazilian-style bus transit in drawing new ridership (including higher income social groups) has been nothing short of phenomenal.

But don't we already have an imitation subway -- the East Busway? Yes, the East Busway has the bones of an imitation subway. But for the most part, the local bus routes in the area ignored it.

Fixing this is where Concept Two shines. It "believed" the Busway was an imitation subway, and proposes all kinds of clever pass-offs from East Suburban routes to Busway routes when the former are mostly empty. Note that when they're full, the original suburban routes get to continue all the way into town. The savings from this kind of ingenious pruning enabled the Concept to dramatically boost service in the core of the East End around Oakland.

There's a problem, though. The BIG LEAP is most desperately needed where the largest concentration of bus ridership in the system is: the Forbes-Fifth corridors through Oakland. Concept Two only tweaks that part of the System, streamlining 14 overlapping routes to 11.

Read what it would be like if we remapped the Oakland-area system around an imitation subway, a remapping I developed with the help of some engineer friends. And play with the map ...

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Subways follow as direct a path as possible, they go fast, they run every few minutes, and they stop at stations that are at least thousands of feet apart. And because real subways are expensive, you just want to draw a line that links the biggest destinations along the busiest transit corridor. You do exactly the same thing for an "imitation subway."

The new Downtown-to-Oakland (and beyond) line below links the biggest destinations on the busiest single bus route, the 61C. But how can we make it persuasively fast if you don't have the money for a dedicated busway?

Easy: you figure out the fastest possible route you can take on regular roads. That's why we drew the line along the Boulevard of the Allies from town. And with our route, we're still able to hit all the big destinations (keeping the total down to eight or nine, just like the East Busway). It appears that this routing could easily cut eight to 10 minutes off the time of the regular 61C between Squirrel Hill and town, and considerably more at peak periods. Imagine how fun that would be with service every three or four minutes!

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The beauty of Brazilian-style bus systems is in the choreography of the local routings around the imitation subway. When you get off at a stop that is a hub, you want to be able to look around and immediately "get" what your bus options are. That's why we numbered them in order around each hub like a TV channel selector (in pre-cable days). We picture East End hubs with fine-looking pylons marking out each "channel," all readily visible from a single intersection and each just a few steps from each other.

Of course, we could hope for GPS-ed buses reporting to us their actual time-until-arrival via text messages or even electronic message boards on the pylons. But we'd settle for an 8.5-by-11 piece of paper with a current schedule on it. Concept Two calls for "Transit Centers," but mostly in the suburbs. To build a sustainable transit system, we should focus our biggest efforts where transit is immediately viable: the dense areas within an eight-mile radius of the Point (80 percent of ridership) and especially in the East End (50 percent of total ridership).

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Build it and they will come. And not just the poor and not just others without a car available. It happened in Los Angeles, it happened in London, it happened in the suburbs of Toronto, it happens in Washington, D.C., at night, for goodness sakes! Witness yuppies flocking to city buses. This is what then-London Mayor Ken Livingstone reported in The New York Times in 2007 about their BusPlus "imitation subways" instituted in advance of congestion pricing for cars: "With London's buses a more attractive alternative, the number of bus trips a day has risen to 6 million, an increase of 2 million from 2000 -- with ridership growing most rapidly among the highest-paid social groups."

Human beings are drawn to convenience and comfort. Give them efficient imitation subway transit, then stand back so you don't get run over by the crowds. And when you plan your choreography of local routings, you of course get rid of duplicating long, slow, squiggly line service. (Hey, you'll need the money to pay for the high frequency of the imitation subway service.) Concept Two claims to be BRT-ing the Fifth Forbes corridor (Bus Rapid Transit: the official term for "imitation subways").

Don't believe it: They have 11 lines duplicating each other for miles and miles and they have each of them stopping 20 or 30 times. Sure, that's an improvement over our current 14 or more duplicating lines each with 50 or 60 stops. But Concept Two is no way to run an imitation subway through Oakland! Design it so you believe it, and you'll have at most one duplicating line of service along most of its length, a line to provide for local service.

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Complexity kills (transit systems, that is).

Take a look at the Concept Two map (online at tdp.portauthority.org), then take a look at "The Leap..MAPPED" above.

Our map shows almost the same amount of coverage throughout the East End (except for three routes radiating out from Downtown that do not go through Oakland), but in ours you can readily follow each possible route, segment by segment. What's the secret? By breaking down routes into discrete segments by hub, it makes it easy to grasp transit options as they radiate into the surrounding landscape.

This is not to say that all local bus routes are short. This is where the fun really begins: A local segment entering a hub on one side would typically continue as another local exiting out the other side. This gives the system tremendous flexibility to create dozens of new nonstop service routings and to change which segment connects where easily as ridership dictates.

We could still have a 54C route like Concept Two, South Side to North Side (O-11/O-7), but we could also have Squirrel Hill to the South Side, for example. Just as Concept Two did with many of the Wilkinsburg hub routes (because it believed in the East Busway as a routing magnet), Oakland and Squirrel Hill hub routes could be designed to provide service straight through to town when a segment's bus is full (like at rush hour).

The current system has been wasting so much money on long routes with only particular segments of them full at particular times. With hub-based transit, Port Authority wouldn't have to waste money on empty segments (and the savings could be spent on boosting frequency of service where it's needed).

Port Authority claims this hub-segmenting would be too complex. But it's not too complex for the Des Moines bus system. And it's not too complex for Southwest Air. (You decide when you try out the board game below.)

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To give Port Authority credit, maybe it would have been too big a leap doing something this radical all at once. (Santiago had that problem when they implemented their "Brazilian" system all at once without enough planning and stakeholder feedback.) Even with all the planning that has happened, we still don't have all the data (and certainly not the ridership input) we need to implement a Brazilian-style system through Oakland with the kind of surgical precision that would make it fabulous.

I do give Port Authority an "A" for their efforts in half the East End where they treat the East Busway like a real BRT. But Pittsburgh deserves a Transit Renaissance, and that's going to happen only when the whole system is easy to grasp and fast and frequent, and new riders find it irresistibly convenient and comfortable.

But we can afford that kind of service only when we become experts in knowing where people are and are not going. Sustainable transit begins with being efficient in eliminating unnecessary bus-operating time. Only then can we get the service we deserve, like every 7 to 10 minutes on all the popular Oakland locals.

So how do we get to transit nirvana?

Let's do a test. Let's put in the Oakland "imitation subway" for nine months or a year on top of Concept Two's routings, and invite 120,000 of our transit friends to check it out. Let's make it a social networking extravaganza. Invite them to send in YouTube videos (from their new iPhones, say). Hey, we could call it Pittsburgh's Great Imitation-Subway Test. And all the while, we could be collecting the data and rider input we need (artery by artery) to begin implementing (segment by segment) one of the best Brazilian-style bus systems in the world right in our own East End, and beyond.

Don't our neighborhoods deserve that? Who knows, it could become so successful that one day we could see an irresistible momentum to turn it into a real subway (which happened to one of Vancouver's imitation subways, soon to reopen as their "Canada Line" subway, and which may happen one day with L.A.'s "subway to the sea" replacing their original imitation subway, the Wilshire line).

I don't think County Executive Dan Onorato would mind that!