Officials with the Airport Corridor Transportation Association and North Huntingdon will work with traffic experts at Carnegie Mellon University to develop solutions for very different traffic situations.
The airport area group is looking to expand its popular shuttle bus system that takes workers from a Port Authority bus stop directly to their job while North Huntingdon wants help with moving traffic through the area when a major reconstruction project begins on busy Route 30 in a few years. Those projects were selected last week from 11 proposals to CMU’s Smart Mobility Challenge, which uses faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students in its Traffic21 institute to help communities solve problems.
In the west, the corridor association already has two places that it operates shuttles from, IKEA in Robinson and the end of the West Busway in Carnegie. From those locations, riders pay 25 cents to ride from a Port Authority stop to job sites in a 1.5-mile area and then can arrange for a return ride later in the day.
Lynn Manion, executive director of the association, said the agency wants to establish a similar program operating from the Port Authority park-and-ride lot on University Boulevard in Moon. That area is part of the Moon-Findlay-Robinson-North Fayette quadrant the association serves using Pittsburgh Transportation Group minibuses, but it is too far away from from the other stops to participate in their service.
“We feel like we have a good fit for a third hub,” Ms. Manion said. Traffic21 will work with the agency’s existing data about the potential for the new hub over the next year, develop more information and design a possible schedule and operating plan.
In North Huntingdon, the township is looking for help to manage traffic in an already-congested area when PennDOT begins a major project to reconstruct the highway, said assistant township manager Mike Turley.
“We’ve identified an upcoming problem and they’ve expressed an interest in helping us figure out how to deal with it,” Mr. Turley said. “We’re hoping to use their help to manage the traffic demand. Hopefully we can coordinate this with the PennDOT work.”
In addition to alternate routes, Mr. Turley said, he expects Traffic21 to consider car-pooling, flexible work hours and other public transportation to ease congestion.
PennDOT is designing a project expected to cost more than $120 million to rebuild the highway from Route 48 in North Versailles to 10th Street in Irwin, a stretch where most of the road is in North Huntingdon. That project will include redesigned intersections, drainage to eliminate flood-prone areas and new traffic signals.
Lisa Kay Schweyer, program manager for Traffic21, said the program chose these two projects because the groups already had a substantial amount of data available. Program director Sean Quin expects to work with the groups for about a year beginning in July.
“It’s a team effort. It’s not done in a vacuum,” Ms. Schweyer said. “We want to do research and plan with them, then deploy the project.”
The program also will work with the nine other proposals, referring them to faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students for possible class or individual projects.
Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470 or on Twitter @EdBlazina.
Correction, posted May 29, 2019: In an earlier version of this story, the last name of Sean Quin was spelled incorrectly.
First Published: May 22, 2019, 4:27 p.m.
