For more than 100 years, the one constant in Pittsburgh’s transit history has been the desire to give public transportation the right of way … and the inability to do it comprehensively.
A 1906 study proposed “a system of underground railways” including “a downtown loop with a radial line to the east and several intermediate stub lines extending north and across the Allegheny River.”
But where rail was once seen as the way to address the competing claims buses and cars have on street traffic, Bus Rapid Transit (or BRT) is gaining momentum.
The idea behind BRT takes the philosophy of rail and applies it to the bus: fewer stops, off-board fare collection, screens that show how far away the next bus is, and separate traffic lanes with signals that give buses priority.
And the Port Authority — which was among the first to borrow some of these rail-like characteristics on the East Busway — is looking to create a BRT system in the Oakland-Downtown corridor, at an estimated cost of $200 million.
“The goal has always been to link Oakland and downtown Pittsburgh, the two largest job centers in the region,” says Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald, an ardent supporter of BRT. The current system, he says, doesn’t make people want to forgo driving.
But some worry a BRT system between Oakland and Downtown goes too far, by spending scarce capital on one of the region’s most heavily served transit corridors.
“That’s a lot of money to invest in that corridor for the benefits that would result,” says Helen Gerhardt, a transit activist who writes for a blog called Buses Are Bridges. “We have so many communities that only have one bus per hour.”
Others worry planning hasn’t gone far enough, that the focus on BRT is closing off more thorough discussions about whether other corridors deserve upgrades, and whether rail should be in the mix.
The plan the Port Authority outlined last November would require converting an existing lane of either Forbes or Fifth Avenues to be “bus-only,” so both inbound and outbound BRT routes would have their own right of way. (Currently, only outbound routes have their own lane through Oakland on Fifth Avenue.)
That would render the several 61 and 71 buses, which currently run through Oakland along Fifth and Forbes avenues, unnecessary in a corridor that serves about 30 percent of the region’s transit ridership, Fitzgerald says. Instead, BRT could replace buses that often stack up behind each other.
BRT’s advocates also point out the project could be completed in phases, gradually improving service until completion. (Port Authority is considering whether the BRT could terminate in Shadyside or Squirrel Hill.)
The project could shave travel times between Morewood Avenue near Carnegie Mellon and Downtown to just over 14 minutes. That trip currently takes between 23 and 33 minutes, according to the proposal.
But the BRT project “[isn’t] just about the time,” Fitzgerald says. It’s about spurring development in places like Uptown, which has plenty of property close to Downtown that could be attractive to developers.
“We realized there would be a significant amount of development that will occur; property values will go up,” Fitzgerald says.
Ken Zapinski, vice president of energy and infrastructure at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, agrees. “It’s an economic development/transformation project that happens to have transit as a component.”
He says public-private partnerships will be crucial in funding the project, especially given increasingly competitive federal funding. “We cannot use Washington and their procedures or lack of money as an excuse not to improve our transit system,” Zapinski says.
And though the Port Authority is seeking federal grant money, it would likely get no more than $75 million — a reality, Fitzgerald acknowledges, that will require a “significant amount of local match.”
In late 2011, Wanda Wilson joined the stakeholder group tasked with assessing whether a BRT plan should move forward, though she says BRT in the Oakland-Downtown corridor was the only transit project up for discussion.
The Allegheny Conference, Hill District Consensus Group, Pitt and CMU are among the nearly 50 organizations that have participated in the stakeholder group.
“It’s a good group in terms of its makeup,” says Wilson, executive director of the Oakland Planning and Development Corporation. But “it kind of started from […] the assumption that bus rapid transit would be the best way to improve transit in this corridor.” BRT might be the right idea, Wilson says, or the answer “might be a [rail] line that goes underground.”
Members of the Uptown community have also expressed some skepticism over the value of BRT.
“Uptown hasn’t had a transit problem,” says Jeanne McNutt, executive director of Uptown Partners of Pittsburgh. “There are lots of buses,” she says, noting the BRT could lead to significant reductions in on-street parking.
Others argue there should be a conversation about development in corridors beyond Downtown-Oakland.
Ben Samson, who designed a Pittsburgh light-rail system for his master’s thesis, says it might be worth focusing on a rail project along the Allegheny River.
The Strip District and Lawrenceville both have development potential, he says, and wouldn’t require tunneling underground to extend rail service.
“If they’re going to all this trouble to spend $200 million to save six to nine minutes for three miles — that’s a lot of investment,” Samson explains.
Mavis Rainey, a former Port Authority board member and executive director of the Oakland Transportation Management Association, acknowledges that “some folks would like to look at a broader scope of ideas.”
But rail, she says, has been studied in the past and just isn’t feasible. “Given the financial resources right now […] I’m still kind of surprised that there’s still a conversation: ‘Let’s look at light rail.'”
It isn’t just costs that diminish the chances a light-rail project will be part of the conversation.
There’s also the political cloud left hanging over the North Shore Connector, according to Chris Sandvig, regional policy director for the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group. That project cost over half a billion dollars and drew national criticism.
“There was definitely [a] feeling among Port Authority leadership that because of just how much they were getting beat up over constant service reductions — and the cost of the North Shore Connector — that the only way they were going to get any project done here was BRT,” Sandvig says. “Why we didn’t build a subway to the East End during the heyday of steel is beyond me.”
Port Authority spokesman Jim Ritchie acknowledges the North Shore project’s fraught political past, and stresses the importance of getting buy-in for the BRT project, saying it wouldn’t go forward without community support.
“We know we can’t make everyone happy,” Ritchie says, “but we need to be smart about it — we haven’t been in this position in a long time.”
And even if BRT is no panacea, Sandvig says the area between Downtown and Oakland is ripe for transit-oriented development.
“You have a very transit-oriented corridor in terms of its built environment,” Sandvig says, noting its flatness. “You have strong market forces on either end that can leverage investment.”
But transit activist Gerhardt worries that communities like Greenfield or Penn Hills, which she says could use better transit options, will be left behind.
“I think we need to be looking carefully at equitable transit-oriented development,” she says. “Will the most transit-dependent people be served by this location? […] I would prefer to see that kind of investment.”
But PCRG’s Sandvig thinks it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to use transit as a way to spur development — and convince people to ditch their cars.
Even though buses are rarely filled to capacity between Downtown and Oakland, “Is that because we don’t need transit, or because we haven’t done enough with the land to create demand for it?”
And to Gerhardt’s concern about transit projects geared toward people who can afford to have cars in the first place, Sandvig says getting more people to ride public transit can help ensure its long-term viability.
“What makes Social Security hard to get killed by the government?” Sandvig asks. “Everybody has it.”
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2014.
How can it cost $200 million to turn a road that buses can use into a road that buses can use?
Great idea, because buses are so much the wave of the future. And because so much great development has occurred along the length of the East Busway. #PATisPathetic
Alex, thanks for such a strong article.
I’d like to clarify my position. I’m generally strongly supportive of BRT systems when done right, and in the places that need them most.
My own questions relate to whether the BRT specifically in the Oakland/Downtown corridor would qualify for the highly competitive New Starts grants, which have a very high bar for justifying such projects. The criteria below can be seen here: http://www.fta.dot.gov/12304_2607.html
Mobility Improvements
– measured by travel time benefits per project passenger mile, low-income households served, and employment near stations.
Environmental Benefits
– measured by change in regional pollutant emissions, change in regional energy consumption, and EPA air quality designation
Cost Effectiveness
– measured as the cost per hour of travel time saved.
Operating Efficiencies
– measured by system operating cost per passenger mile.
Transit Supportive Land Use & Future Patterns
– measured by existing land use, transit supportive plans and policies and performance, and impacts of policies.
Without an established local funding match, our eligibility for such a grant also greatly diminishes.
I hope that those concerns and qualification criteria will be addressed more fully by BRT planners and decision makers, with full inclusion of input by the communities and public transit users who need reliable, frequent service the most.
BRT is such a low bar. Bring back the Spine Line!
Light rail would be much better, and other cities like Boston have it. Oil always wins.
One crucial thing to understand about this proposal is that many different bus routes end up sharing this corridor, and all of those routes could benefit from the improved travel time, in the same way that the PXX routes share the East Busway with the P1, P2, and P3. In that sense this proposal isn’t just for the benefit of riders between Oakland and Downtown, but also riders into Oakland or Downtown from many farther-out points in the system (including in fact Greenfield, via the 61C/D).
Thank you for this article. The issues here are more complex than can be conveyed by just one report, though, even one so in-depth as this.
Working from the outside in, first consider that nowadays more people are moving into the City and the more walk-able and bike-able suburbs, because the general trend is back to the close-knit neighborhood, with shops, parks, restaurants, and neighbors (and trails) close by.
Next, consider what I’ve been saying since 1985 – to all the right persons, but to no avail getting anyone to move us toward this – that we really need to know where County residents WANT to go. The Port Authority will tell you that we already know where they are going, because they have smart cards, there is counting on the buses. But not counted is the woman who takes three buses from the South Side to Magee-Womens Hospital once a month or so for pregnancy exams. Not counted is the lawyer who buses to all business appointments, all over the County. Not counted are numerous individuals who cannot take public transit because it simply does not go where they need it to go, or at the times they need it. Not counted are the parents who drop their kids at school on the way to work, and pick them up on the way home. And I am just glossing over all the demographics – not detailing income levels, employment types, neighborhoods, etc. We need to find out comprehensively where the residents of the County need and want to go, and whether mass transit could fill the bill.
Now consider the words of the representative from the Allegheny Conference – which still apparently has its mind in the 1890s, feeling that putting transit somewhere will bring some sort of development. That’s how Kennywood got started, but that doesn’t seem like what Uptown needs. Where do the residents of Uptown need or want to go? How would BRT help them, and bring development? Do they want to be a tourist attraction, via the bus? Putting homes where there are now parking lots Uptown would be a better project to aid Uptown – maybe rebuilding old Soho with real architecture (not concrete block buildings), re-creating corner-store buildings, coffee shops, etc. – or as the neighborhood desires.
Now ponder why we ever deleted the trolleys (and whether it wouldn’t be great just to dig up the tracks again and run streetcars all over town). That’s a tourist attraction itself, trolleys! And the busway – it was supposed to be rail, even to storing the rail cars by the Pennsylvanian. But at the last minute, they made it solid concrete. I believe one of the reasons given was that they intended a route to extend to Oakland – the EBO – and it would have to be a bus, as there could not be rail lines in Oakland. (Some colleagues with better memories will please remind us what all they said.)
Additionally, and from another direction, the current bus routes are geared toward commuters heading into Downtown to work 9:00-5:00, and then heading right home. Does that even happen much anymore? Most of the corporations that run major industries are gone from Downtown, leaving the lawyers, accountants, architects, and other service professionals. Those remaining are more likely to need their cars to go to client meetings (to wherever those corporations have moved), or are support staff tending to work more hours of overtime than would make busing convenient, especially when so many bus lines are limited to 9:00-5:00.
Add to this mix the fact that all County residents have ownership in the transit system, but not all can or want to use it. In fact, it best serves small neighborhoods within a larger city rather than bedroom communities who are heading somewhere else for the day.
This is why I say that the matter is so much more complex than just one article can cover, comprehensive though it is. Maybe the City should have its own bus system. And we could survey the residents as to where they want to go.
Right on, Audrey! Yes. Deliberative, widely inclusive democratic input on crucial infrastructure, including bus drivers who know the practical operation of the system best, including people on the other side of the digital divide! Thank for your eloquent, savvy input.
As featured in Straphangers by Taras Grescoe, BRT planner Dario Hildalgo compared BRT systems all across the world to identify characteristics he considers crucial to success – his recommendations accord with conclusions of many other transit and city planners that I’ve read:
1. BRT systems simply don’t function as advertised when impeded by mixed traffic. Hidalgo strongly recommends -“dedicated bus lanes..physically segregated by curbs, rumble strips, guide rails, or other barriers” as most likely to succeed. Car-centric compromises, including priorities placed on parking, are usually highly detrimental to function, both in terms of speed of service, increasing ridership, and in terms of Transit Oriented Development features of density, walkability, and multimodal integration.
2. “…real stations with level boarding and prepayment…before going into station and, when the bus arrives, you just walk in like you do a metro…prepayment speeds up boarding and permits headways of as litle as as ten seconds.”
3. “…strong image..well-designed buses with their own colors..brand infrastructure.” Part of the purpose of such branding is indeed to to increase suburban and a range of occupational commuter ridership by style changes that increase “cachet.” In my view, the more “mixing” of Pittsburghers from all walks of life on transit the better, but I’d be wary of including high cost amenities that raise the cost in ways that exclude us hoi polloi.
4. information technologies to support system
Installation of technologies on buses that reliably allow broadcast of”…GPS locations to a control center, run by government agency,” allowing for planning and integrations of transportation system over broad region, with respect to diverse community needs, employment centers and multimodal traffic flows.
Contactless, prepaid fare cards allow even speedier loading, as well as collection of data useful for transit planning. Taras Grescoe lays out plenty of disastrous public-private partnerships in his book, but his observations accord with my own research – the development and management of such card systems is one type of PPP that has been highly successful and truly serves the public interest across the globe.
Jarret Walker, author of Human Transit, has a great website, with good articles on BRT. Certainly BRT can be just as functionally effective as rail systems, if the initial planning for community needs is done right. Especially recommend this article:
“the opportunities and dangers of incomplete bus rapid transit”
http://www.humantransit.org/2012/11/the-opportunities-and-dangers-of-incomplete-bus-rapid-transit.html
Re Mike Cherepko’s excellent question, “How can it cost $200 million to turn a road that buses can use into a road that buses can use?” — the key is that BRT is “transit”, but the ACE’s vision is TOD (transit-oriented-development) — in other words, he’s doing real estate development wrapped around transit, and that’s how it gets to 200M.
Now, TOD is great and it’s important and it’s the way to build sustainable communities. I’m on board with that. But there is a very good question to ask: if you’re going to spend $200M of public treasure on transit-and-real-estate-development, is it necessarily best spent on Downtown-Oakland? Because (1) there are tremendous economic benefits to the people that own the land along the BRT route and (2) there are many other things the ACE could be doing in terms of economic development for the citizens.
Alternatively, if you put the BRT route through a high-route-time, less-developed area – the time benefits are more significant, the project is cheaper, the economic benefits are more significant, and you’re introducing transit to an area that doesn’t have it.
So, do the rich get richer, OR do we use the TOD opportunity to develop a place that truly needs development, OR do we focus on the citizens or the real estate developers? Those are good questions. There is a man behind the curtain.
I’m sure that BRT works. I’m not sure which area BRT is right for. I’m not sure that doing real estate development under the figleaf of better Pgh-Oakland commute times is virtuous, when there are so many other underserved areas (in terms of transit) and so many other blighted zones.
But, hey: Walnut Capital.
Downtown does in fact remain a HUGE destination for transit commuters. And particularly after the TDP was implemented, a lot of the popular commuter routes were extended earlier in the morning and later in the evening to accommodate more Downtown workers’ schedules. The state funding cuts forced PAT to trim those extended hours back a bit, but hopefully with the new state transportation bill they can look at restoring some of those times.
In any event, study after study of the existing system has reached the same conclusion: by far the most pressing need is to improve service into Oakland. Oakland has become a regionally-important employment and service center, second only to Downtown, and yet it lacks any sort of direct rapid transit links. That costs many lower-income workers precious time, encourages many higher-income workers to drive and park, and indirectly devalues distressed neighborhoods that should be benefiting from proximity to Oakland.
Again, this is why it is crucial to understand that the proposed system would benefit not just riders BETWEEN Downtown and Oakland, but also riders INTO Downtown OR Oakland from a much broader network of points. It is in fact necessary to ask the sorts of questions Helen and Audrey are raising, but it turns out that given the full scope of what this system would accomplish, the answers to those questions are very likely to favor this project.
As long as we are speaking of payment methods, we should consider two things. First, there should be a way for all of us stakeholders (Allegheny County residents) to use transit as the utility it is, and have the (pre-registered) option to run up charges and then pay for them through a bill or an automatic deduction.
More individuals would ride transit if they did not have to have cash and change on them, if they did not have to worry whether they have re-upped their Connect Card, if they did not have to calculate charges in case they change their list of destinations during the day.
Of course, on the other hand, we must make certain that the general public – especially tourists – can access the system with cash and change. (We don’t want to be like the Florida toll roads which have recently barred cash payments, so visitors have to make broad detours.)
And then, of course, we have to do the obvious. We have to make the system easy to understand. I’ve been riding the 74 Sq. Hill-Homewood bus (previously 74A) alone since I was five years old, and I still couldn’t tell you its exact route. Similarly the 58 Greenfield, with its new inclusion of Oakland – I read and re-read the schedule, I’ve called the Port Authority (who advised me to take a different bus route when the Greenfield driver told me he did not go to Greenfield), and I still cannot figure out where it is supposed to be traveling. And I’ve asked bus drivers whether I can ride a complete circuit, and they have said no – they are not making the whole circuit.
And I am not a stranger to the region’s transit systems.
Obviously, we need more transparency and ease of access.
On costs, I believe the estimated $200 million includes all of the lanes, new signals, new stations, and the mainline vehicles themselves. It is also worth keeping in mind that it would really be going from Squirrel Hill/Shadyside to Downtown, not just Oakland to Downtown. In other words, I think when people hear it is between Downtown and Oakland, they are imagining something about the length of Uptown. But when you realize it is also supposed to go all the way through Oakland to beyond its eastern borders, you then have to imagine something over twice as long as just that Uptown-only corridor.
By the way, an extremely brief history on this concept may be worth reviewing. It was considered at least as early as the Eastern Corridor Transit Study, a multi-phase study conducted by the Southwest Pennsylvania Commission (our designated regional planning body). The ECTA was designed to study and compare a long list of possible major transit projects and winnow them down to a short list of locally-preferred alternatives, which could be the subject of further study and future federal grant applications. To make a long story short, a version of this BRT corridor made the final list in 2006:
http://www.spcregion.org/ECTS/pdf/ta-final/ECTS-TA%20Final%20Report.pdf
In 2007-2009, PAT hired Nelson/Nygaard to perform a comprehensive system redesign, known as the Transit Development Plan. Nelson/Nygaard collected what is still to my knowledge the most comprehensive data set on PAT’s system to date, and ultimately recommended a version of this BRT plan that they called “Rapid Bus” as a key component of their proposed new system. One of the distinctive things about their version is that it explicitly extended out well beyond just Oakland, although the farther reaches of the system would only get mild forms of BRT, at least initially.
Sustainable Pittsburgh then put together the Get There PGH group in 2010, which along with PAT has been overseeing the further study and advancement of the concept, including hosting community meetings and federally-funded planning studies. That coalition includes a variety of different transit stakeholders, and of course now has the support of the County Executive and Mayor of Pittsburgh:
http://gettherepgh.org/stakeholders/
So to summarize, this concept:
(1) Has been studied and selected as a locally preferred alternative by our regional planning commission;
(2) Has been further studied by professional consultants who determined it could be an important component of redesigning PAT’s overall system;
(3) Has since been able to sustain broad stakeholder and office-holder support as it has been advanced through further planning stages.
That’s actually quite a lot to be able to say in favor of a particular proposal. Again, by no means does that suggest people should not still be asking questions, but there have been a lot of people over the years looking at most of those questions, and the project has continued to advance.
If it is meant to head out through Oakland to Squirrel Hill, it closely resembles the Spine Line plan of even earlier vintage.
It is quite possible, though, that travel from Downtown to Oakland still exists in great volume because – and only because – so many bus routes terminate and reverse in Downtown, so those who want to get to Oakland have to travel through Downtown.
Therefore, a study of who is going where still is needed.
Audrey, if you haven’t already, you might want to check out this presentation:
http://gettherepgh.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Stakeholder-Meeting-8-2013-09-25.pdf
It certainly doesn’t answer all your questions, but Pages 18-25 in particular go into some of the things we have been discussing here. Page 19 has a chart of origins/destinations for the 61s and 71s which is pretty interesting. It doesn’t really address how many of the Downtown/Oakland specific people are transferring in Downtown from other routes (like you, I assume that is a big part of story there), but it does show there are a lot of people funneling into this corridor from a bunch of other locations. Typically the biggest destination is Oakland itself, but there are also people looking to get through Oakland to Downtown, and even some looking to get to Uptown.
Anyway, for topographic and cost reasons it is going to be very hard to provide rapid, direct service to Oakland/Uptown from a lot of places where there is potential demand (unless perhaps we look into aerial gondolas, which is a whole other subject). That’s a large part of why the Spine Line and this proposal have always scored well in project comparisons–not just because of Downtown/Oakland specifically being an important pair, but also because topography dictates that it will continue to be a shared route for many other riders.
Speaking of the Spine Line, the presentation goes on to look at three sorts of configurations. What they call “Main Corridor BRT”, discussed on Pages 20-21, would be the closest to a Spine Line-type plan. But as is sort of implied by the next few slides, that approach would be missing out on what BRT can actually do better than LRT, which is allow a variety of bus routes to share the same rapid transit infrastructure without transfers. So Pages 22-23 discuss an “Overlay Corridor BRT” approach, in which a very large portion of the service in the corridor would be provided by through-routes very similar to what exist today. Finally the “Modified Collector BRT” on Pages 24-25 does a bit of both, with some routes serving the full corridor and also extending out much farther, and some just using it for service through Oakland. That Modified Collector approach appears to me most similar to Nelson/Nygaard’s Rapid Bus plan, and you can see how it is being tailored to the origin/destination map on Page 19.
Anyway, that is all interesting material if you are trying to get some sense of how they perceive transit demand, and some different options for trying to serve it.
What a great conversation – thanks for sharing great information and thoughtful consideration of our options.
Wait a minute…weren’t we told that when dedicated funding was had that ALL the routes that were cut plus the Harmar garage be restored? In the words of the ex ceo and county executive all the cuts were temporary! Why hasn’t anyone brought this up??Let’s hold them to their earlier promises before expanding on something new.
Travelers to this city don’t want to climb steps into a bus, you need to make it wheels on wheels off. Yes even to Oakland from Downtown.