Playing bus-route roulette in Morningside

Ed, driver of the 75 bus coming down Morningside Avenue Monday morning, gets to the corner of Vilsack Street and looks eastward. He taps his horn and waits.

Noel Lau is waiting at the corner of Vilsack and Jancey, where the 75 is scheduled to stop. She sees that she’d better hustle up the hill or wait another 30 or 40 minutes for the next bus to Carnegie Mellon University. She makes the 70yard run in admirable time.

And that, gentle reader, is how the good people of Morningside have played bus-route roulette. The game’s been going on since construction season began a few months ago, and it’s about as much fun as dental work.

Commuters have been in this quandary because the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority is digging up streets to replace the lead pipes that have tainted our drinking water and has been replacing stormwater catch basins in the bargain. David Tessitor, a longtime activist currently house-sitting in the neighborhood, coined the term “bus-route roulette” for the slow-motion chaos that has been wrought.

He has gathered signatures on a petition requesting city council hold a public hearing on this matter, which has some residents walking blocks to Stanton Avenue, where all the buses eventually turn, to ensure they get a ride. He also stood before council Tuesday morning to say the city, the water authority and the Port Authority will face a federal suit for violations of the Americans

with Disabilities Act.

“I’ve learned as a rat in the maze that I need to go up there,” he’d told me Monday morning, pointing to Morningside Avenue as we walked away from the “Road Closed” sign on Jancey, the parallel street to the east that is on the 75’s usual route.

The replacement of sewer lines underneath Jancey Street in Morningside has brought bus detours and commuting headaches for months.

The Port Authority had been saying it hasn’t gotten enough advance notice from the water authority to post detour signs, and the nature of the work means the blocks under construction change daily. “If we put up signs, they’d be outdated within an hour or so,” Adam Brandolph, spokesman for the bus people, said Tuesday.

Au contraire, said the water people. “We have kept in close contact with the Port Authority to make them aware of where our crews are working on a day-to-day basis,” Mora McLaughlin, construction communications manager for the PWSA, emailed.

This has been an eminently fixable problem that nobody has bothered to fix because each authority could plausibly blame the other for putting commuters in a daily bind. I suggested to both parties that instead of doing that, they meet and figure out how to post temporary signs beneath the permanent bus-stop signs that could direct commuters where to go. (I’d never heard of any construction project that moves so swiftly it changes hourly, apart from that great road-gang scene in “Cool Hand Luke.” But that movie is 52 years old and most of its cast is dead.)

Members of the Port Authority met with water officials Wednesday morning, and shortly afterward Mr. Brandolph emailed a detailed detour route for the 75 and 87 buses through Morningside. It’s supposed to be used today and Friday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. So, busroute roulette fans, here’s the playbook (at least as of noon yesterday): Inbound, left on Morningside from Baker, left on Martha, right on Jancey, right on Wellesley, left on Morningside and left on Stanton, where the regular route resumes.

Evenings and over the weekend, the 75/87 will resume its regular route, and any changes to the detour will be posted on signs Monday, Mr. Brandolph said.

I guess just to keep things interesting, though, Mr. Brandolph said no signs will be posted before Monday. “The roads are closed and inaccessible by buses anyway,” he said.

Ah, but what may be clear to a guy in an office looking at a street map is not necessarily clear on the ground. One woman told Mr. Tessitor she watched her GPS for the bus, and only when it would disappear from the screen would she know it was not coming down Jancey.

On Ed’s bus Monday morning — “Just ‘Ed’,” he told me — he beeped his horn again when he reached the corner of Morningside and Wellesley Avenue. Terry Leigeber, 43, who’d been waiting on Jancey, came running, holding his coffee cup ahead of him as steadily as the flag-holder in a parade.

“I saw construction down on that end [of Jancey] so I thought I was good,” he said after he got on. Without the heads-up from Ed, he would have been late to work at the Fire Side Public House in East Liberty.

“It’s just confusing for the riding public,” Ed said, doing the best he could for his riders. “People don’t know where to stand.”

Those who don’t see the cheat sheet on the detour will have to make educated guesses until at least Monday. And there still could be three more weeks of construction and then repaving of the streets later in the summer, though both authorities promise more frequent communication going forward.

It’s the nature of governmental authorities to provide political cover to elected officials; there’s no obvious person to vote from office when the system goes awry. That’s how things stand.

As for where bus riders in Morningside should stand? For now, the best advice would be they wear sneakers and keep their eyes peeled.