After years of maintaining, Port Authority finds small ways to add service
Some are as simple as a name change to avoid confusion. Others involve changing the path of bus routes against rush-hour traffic to expand service to other areas.
But make no mistake, Port Authority is making more service improvements beginning Sunday than it has made in about a decade.
The agency’s annual service adjustments include restoring some daily service to Community College of Allegheny County’s North Campus and Northland Library in the North Hills, the Cherrington Parkway business district in Moon and weekend service at other locations throughout the system. In many cases, the changes don’t cost a lot of money but have come about because the scheduling team assembled by CEO Katharine Eagan Kelleman over the past two years is taking a different approach when it looks at potential improvements.
“We’re excited about going down the path of providing additional services,” said Phillip St. Pierre, director of service planning and scheduling. “We explored all of our options. What could we do? How could we do something differently?”
As a result, the agency came up with “revenue neutral” or low-cost ways to serve neglected areas.
For example, the 012 McKnight Flyer and G3 Moon Flyer are busy commuter routes going into Downtown Pittsburgh via McKnight Road and the Parkway West, respectively, in the morning and outbound in the evening. But reverse trips outbound in the morning and inbound in the evening are far less busy, letting the authority reroute them slightly to serve another area.
So for 10 outbound trips in the morning and 13 inbound trips in the afternoon, the 012 will use Route 19/Perry Highway north of Three Degree Road.
That will provide service to the community college campus and regional library, which began lobbying for service to return more than five years ago after it was cut during a budget crunch in 2011.
On the G3, the normal route now will divert from the Parkway West to Cherrington Parkway seven times on outbound trips in the morning and six times on inbound trips in the evening. That will allow service to the mix of manufacturers such as HarbisonWalker International and Eaton Corp., medical offices and service businesses there.
“There are a lot of employers on Cherrington that seem really interested in this service,” Mr. St. Pierre said. “In this case, [adding service] has the potential for very important increases in ridership.”
In general, the authority’s options for expanding service are limited by cost and that it doesn’t have the capacity in its four garages to maintain more than the 720 buses it has now. That means planners can’t make major changes during rush hours because all vehicles are in service, but they can use staff and financial savings created through better scheduling on one route to provide expanded service on another.
With no peak rush hours on the weekends, it is easier for the agency to extend service there, said Chris Walker, manager of transit scheduling.
Laura Wiens, executive director of Pittsburghers for Public Transit, said it appreciates the efforts, but the limited changes underscore the need for additional transit funding. The weekend improvements, in particular, are important to ensuring poor neighborhoods have equity for others, she said.
“We really appreciate how they are thinking creatively to use the limited resources they have,” she said.
For the future, Mr. St. Pierre said, the agency is hopeful that its bus stop consolidation program can improve efficiency and allow drivers and buses to be shifted to other areas of need.
In addition, his staff is analyzing overcrowding and whether the system could move larger buses to carry more passengers on busier routes, making those routes more efficient and perhaps freeing smaller buses for use elsewhere.
“Next year, we are definitely going to ask for more money to add service,” he said. “That’s not going to stop us from looking at what we do and seeing how we can do it better. If we can better allocate our resources, that can be a big win.”
Other changes beginning Sunday include:
• Rerouting 38G Greentree from Mt. Lebanon via Greentree Road to serve the Ridgemont neighborhood, eliminating the last neighborhood in the system that was more than a quartermile from the nearest bus stop.
• Rerouting Route 2 Mt. Royal on weekends from Route 28 at Millvale to Penn Avenue in Lawrenceville so it passes through the Strip District on its way to Downtown Pittsburgh and back.
• Adding Saturday service on the Route 60 Walnut to the Crawford Village neighborhood in McKeesport.
• Eliminating Route 68 Braddock Hills on the weekend and replacing it with the P68 Express that extends service from Monroeville Mall to Downtown Pittsburgh instead of ending in Wilkinsburg.
• Extending the 67 Monroeville’s weekend route to CCAC’s Boyce Campus, which it serves on weekdays, so it also can serve shopping outlets along the way.
• The easiest change involves the former Blue Line Library route on the light rail system. Because that can be confused with the regular Blue Line that ends at South Hills Village, the Library route has been renamed the Silver Line, although it serves the identical area.
Details of all of the changes are available on the Port Authority’s website.