After years of struggles, Port Authority seems to be making sustained improvements in its on-time performance.

For the first time in more than three years, the agency’s buses were on time more than 70% of the time for three months in a row for December (72%), January (73%) and February (72%). The performance for March was 76%, but the agency isn’t relying on that month or April because there has been substantially less road traffic, construction and ridership due to the stay-at-home orders related to the COVID-19 virus.

Buses are considered on time if they are no more than 1 minute early and no more than 5 minutes late.

“We’ve been doing pretty well,” said Phillip St. Pierre, who was hired a year ago as director of service planning and scheduling.

No agency will have a perfect on-time rating because of factors it can’t control, especially on routes where buses share roads with other traffic. An accident, construction and traffic jams often are beyond the authority’s control. 

But Mr. St. Pierre and two full-time schedulers comb through performance records to find chronic problems and talk to operators to find out what issues they run into driving a route. Then they adjust the times for that route and review any other route that is published on the same printed schedule so any changes can be made at the same time.

The goal for scheduling isn’t necessarily for buses to be faster but to be predictable and meet the schedule. Sometimes that involves realizing that a driver can’t meet the existing schedule because of traffic or other impediments and adjusting the time to be more realistic.

Mr. St. Pierre said Port Authority has made a number of changes in scheduling and reporting on-time performance that are starting to pay off:

• It now records the time a bus leaves a stop rather than when it arrives, which allows for stops that have heavy ridership.

• Setting a schedule for each trip rather than using four-hour bands with the same time allowed to complete a trip. “The 8 a.m. trip can be very different than the 8:15 trip for a lot of reasons, but our schedule had them taking the same amount of time,” Mr. St. Pierre said.

•  Bus stop consolidation, which showed positive results on the first two routes in November but the next round didn’t start until mid-March and now the program has been suspended due to the virus emergency.

Under the agency’s contract with Local 85 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, schedule changes only can be made every three months. That gives staff time to study routes to make schedule changes.

Mr. St. Pierre said buses that serve eastern and southern communities are most likely to see changes. One good aspect is those are among the busiest routes on the system, which means if a bus is slightly off schedule riders shouldn’t have a long wait for the next one.

When CEO Katharine Eagan Kelleman was hired in January 2018, she set a goal of improving on-time performance from about 67% to 73% within a year. The agency didn’t meet that time frame, but Mr. St. Pierre said he is convinced it is achievable and has asked for additional schedulers in the new budget that begins July 1 in an effort to bring changes sooner.

“There’s definitely opportunity here to improve,” he said. “We’ve got lot of tools but we need some more people to use them.”

Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470 or on Twitter @EdBlazina.

First Published: May 4, 2020, 11:17 p.m.