New BRT plans call for more reliable, not more frequent, service

As Port Authority moves ahead with the next step of design for the Bus Rapid Transit system between Downtown Pittsburgh and Oakland, one thing seems clear: There won’t be as many changes going forward as there were in the first 30 percent of the project.

Ten days ago, the agency submitted the revised $195.5 million project to the Federal Transit Administration in an attempt to get a Small Starts grant to pay for half of the cost. Later this month, new consultant AECOM Technical Services Inc. will begin work to design the next 30 percent of the project, which is scheduled to begin construction late next year and open in 2021.

Since the project was first announced in March 2017, it has gone through major changes as designers refined the proposal and the agency reacted to complaints from elected officials and neighborhood groups who would have had to transfer in Oakland and lose direct service to Downtown.

Initially, the system was proposed as a loop that would link Oakland and Downtown with electric buses on dedicated lanes between the second and third largest business centers in the state. Neighborhood and suburban buses would end their routes in Oakland, where passengers headed to Downtown would transfer to the BRT.

But two things happened: Neighborhood and suburban residents rebelled at the idea of transferring and designers realized it would be impractical to provide facilities for as many as 13,000 passengers to transfer every day.

“It just didn’t make any sense,” said Amy Silbermann, the authority’s manager of data and evaluation who has been working on the project with consultants and the city Department of Planning.

So rather than operating a separate loop from Downtown to Oakland only for electric buses, the refined proposal instead will allow five existing bus routes to use the exclusive lanes inbound on Fifth Avenue and outbound on Forbes Avenue. Those routes are the P3 that operates on the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway from Wilkinsburg and will use electric vehicles and