She points to ridership numbers that show that Baldwin's 50-Spencer route "had an average ridership of 500 per day before it was cut, and now they don't have that service at all. It's a question of what you prioritize."
According to a December 2013 ridership report, there are several routes that tend to operate with fewer than the 50-Spencer's 500 average weekday rides, including the 18-Manchester (454), 60-Walnut-Crawford Village (386), 68-Braddock Hills (400) and the 78-Oakmont (219).
"Where did we fall?" asks Patricia Davis, property manager at Churchview Garden Apartments, a Baldwin complex whose units have been harder to rent out after the cuts. "Was it 600 people we had to have?"
Port Authority's Ritchie explains that deciding how to reduce service is more complicated than merely lopping off the routes with the lowest ridership. "Cutting service is not necessarily a scientific process. [...] It's more driven by the financial necessity. That's why you see what you see in communities like Baldwin."
Few Baldwin residents know the issue like Mike Harms, a driver who's been with Port Authority for 17 years. He acknowledges there's no promise of restored service, but thinks the campaign has a good shot at succeeding if they're realistic.
"A lot of people want service from 6 in the morning to 9 at night — that's just not going to happen," he says, adding that he doesn't speak for the transit union, or Port Authority. But he says there should be enough rush-hour demand to bring some limited service back, especially since the community is only a couple miles from transit centers like the West Mifflin garage and the South Busway.
"My argument has always been it makes sense to restore routes that are closest to Downtown," Harms says, "If this community keeps the pressure on, they're going to do it."
But some observers contend that if routes can be added, it should be done on the basis of hard numbers, rather than on who exerts the most pressure.
"It should be based upon looking at maps that tell you where the zero-car households are and where the sidewalks are, where the concentrations of poverty are, where the concentrations of walkable properties are," says Chris Sandvig, regional policy director at the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group.
But while Costa says he wants to see some service restored, it's not clear how the Port Authority would go about it. "If you're going to have public hearings, everybody is going to say their route is most important," he says.
And for his part, Ritchie notes, "there's no requirement to hold public meetings on route restoration," adding Port Authority would not hold those meetings on its own accord.
But after years of cuts, hardly anyone has much experience with adding service.
"We spent the last decade fighting like hell to keep the system from disappearing," Sandvig says. "There's no road map to know how to put service back."
