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Pittsburgh Regional Transit CEO Katharine Kelleman in 2023.
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Editorial: Reimagining transit in Pittsburgh

Commenwealth Media Services

Editorial: Reimagining transit in Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s permanent loss of commuter ridership due to the COVID pandemic, confirmed in the fiscal year 2023 Service Report released last week, should prompt a complete reimagining of public transit in Western Pennsylvania. Decades of managed decline, punctuated by encouraging bursts of ambition, have left the agency feeling in-between: neither the ubiquitous service — including a truly world-class bus network — it once was, nor a trimmed-down high-tech service responsive to 21st-century needs.

It’s neither Old Pittsburgh nor New Pittsburgh.

There are good reasons for this: Legacy infrastructure can’t be quickly or cheaply reconfigured; the city’s rugged topography limits cost-effective transit build-out options; and state and federal funding for transit, all around the country, is not proportional to its importance to urban (not to mention suburban and rural) vibrancy and prosperity.

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Still, even within these constraints, there are ways PRT can serve the Pittsburgh of today, and of the future, much better than it is now. And that will begin with effectively reconfiguring the system’s bus routes.

Be bold

PRT reports that in fiscal year 2023 (which ended on June 30th), overall ridership increased 17% over the previous year, but remains at only 57% of pre-pandemic figures. This represents a significant slowing of ridership recovery: At current trends, it’s likely system usage will top out at around two-thirds of 2019 levels.

The main reason is the same one behind Downtown’s nearly 30% office vacancy rate: work from home. Another reason is lingering fear of COVID and other airborne illnesses. PRT can’t do much about either of these.

The agency, however, should consider this an opportunity for liberation from its legacy Downtown-hub model. And that seems to be exactly what it’s doing in undertaking the first full-scale overhaul of bus routes in PRT (or Port Authority) history.

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PRT launched the Bus Line Redesign with public meetings last fall, and deliberations are supposed to continue through this year with preliminary new maps being released early next year. It’s impossible to underestimate the complexity of the task, and the amount of angst it will generate among transit users.

PRT leaders should seek significant public feedback, but should also be bold: The temptation for transit professionals is to try to minimize risk by minimizing the extent of reform, but any decision they make will have tradeoffs, and cause outrage. Better to err on the side of thinking too big than thinking too small.

Web, not wheel

PRT inherited a hub-and-spoke system with a single hub: the Golden Triangle. But job centers have spread out, and transit usage has shifted, since the city’s original network was cobbled together generations ago from private streetcar routes. PRT CEO Katharine Kelleman likes to point out that the route of the 91 Butler Street is basically unchanged since transit was powered by literal horses.

Specifically, there’s a lot more need for neighborhood-to-neighborhood service that bypasses Downtown. Right now, almost all transit connections must be made in the Golden Triangle, forcing people who need to get elsewhere to take an inefficient route — and keeping people who would use transit if it were more sensible and efficient out of the system. The new map should look less like a wheel and more like a web, with Downtown still dominant but with multiple additional nodes of convergence.

The most obvious candidates are between the rivers: Oakland on the under-construction University Line and East Liberty or Wilkinsburg along the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway. It’s also easy to imagine routes converging along the T in Dormont, Mt. Lebanon or Castle Shannon, or the West Busway in Crafton or Carnegie.

The point is to build a true network, where more destinations are available to more people using fewer resources. Such a system would be particularly responsive to the needs of lower-income riders, whose numbers have jumped under the county’s successful reduced fare program, and who often use transit for regular errands or appointments that don’t involve Downtown. It would also open up more job centers to transit — not just office jobs, but more spread-out service jobs.

Focus on strengths

It’s not a mistake the hubs proposed above are all along existing high-frequency, fixed-guideway lines. These are PRT’s greatest strengths, especially the East Busway, considered among the most successful bus rapid transit (BRT) lines in North America.

Conversations about the future of Pittsburgh transit often focus on extravagant new infrastructure: light rail to the airport, or a high-wire gondola between the Strip District and the Hill District. Meanwhile, PRT is looking at nearly $1 billion simply to replace its existing fleet of light rail vehicles. Realistically, capital projects will be modest for the foreseeable future.

That means maximizing the use, the quality and the reliability of PRT’s current assets. Make more connections between local bus routes and the busways and the T, which will get the most out of these existing systems. Invest in maintenance of and improvements to current infrastructure, with an emphasis on making transit stops, and especially new hubs, welcoming, safe and comfortable.

Focus on meeting the agency’s own benchmarks for reliability — fiscal 2023 was better, but not good enough — and ensuring real-time vehicle data is accurate. Produce a wayfinding system that makes the network more easily navigable for novices and newcomers.

Above all, make the service one people want to use. It doesn’t have to be flashy: It just has to work.

With those principles in mind, the Bus Line Redesign could completely reinvent how Pittsburghers think about transit — with the same infrastructure we already have.

First Published: January 25, 2024, 10:30 a.m.

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Pittsburgh Regional Transit CEO Katharine Kelleman in 2023.  (Commenwealth Media Services)
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