Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s top planner leaves for job in London

David Huffaker, who led the development of Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s 25-year plan for the future, has left the agency for a job overseas.

Huffaker, who served as the agency’s chief development officer, worked his final day for PRT on Friday, authority spokesman Adam Brandolph said. He said Huffaker, who couldn’t be reached for comment, has accepted a job in transportation at Imperial College London, but he wasn’t clear exactly what Huffaker will be doing there.

Amy Silbermann, deputy chief planning officer, has been named acting chief development officer.

Huffaker joined the local transit agency in September 2018 as a key member of new CEO Katharine Eagan Kelleman’s executive team after 14 years with Sound Transit in Seattle. The agency hadn’t had anyone in charge of long-term planning for the previous four years because of a shortage of state funds, but when that changed, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald hired Kelleman to rejuvenate an agency that had gone through several years of service cuts.

Huffaker oversaw the two-year development of NEXTransit, the agency’s $3.8 billion, 25-year development strategy to expand service throughout the county. Released in September 2021, it identified 18 projects the agency should undertake, including expanding the light rail system to the North Hills and extending the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway from Swissvale to East Pittsburgh and Monroeville.

Early projects such as upgrading the Monongahela Valley bus corridor between Homestead and McKeesport and establishing a new transit corridor from the Strip District to the Hill District, Oakland, Hazelwood and Overbrook in Pittsburgh already are in the early planning stages. Huffaker’s team also is overseeing the $291 million Bus Rapid Transit system between Oakland and Downtown Pittsburgh that begins construction next week and the ongoing project to revamp the paths that bus routes take through the Downtown area beginning next year.