Tayveon Kevin Smith of Whitehall understands the limitations of public transportation.
That’s because he has lived with them every day, whether it was struggling to get to a job in West Mifflin by 6 a.m., taking three buses to help care for his 90-year-old grandmother in Garfield, or using buses to make child pickups at school or shared custody exchanges for his two children.
“It has become a hardship in many ways,” Smith, 40, said of his dependence on public transit.
Pittsburghers for Public Transit announced a goal Wednesday of smoothing out those problems through a concept it calls the Allegheny County Campaign for Visionary Transit Service. It calls for Pittsburgh Regional Transit to ensure everyone in the county has weekday transit available within walking distance at least every half-hour (every 15 minutes on busier routes); service hours at least from 4:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.; and weekend service on most routes.
Right now, the agency has service from 4:30 a.m. to 2 a.m. on only a few routes and limited weekend service.
Executive Director Laura Wiens said the advocacy group is offering the visionary service concept as an alternative to the agency’s bus line redesign. The redesign has been in process for more than a year with a goal of improving service between local communities and expanding coverage without increasing costs or the number of operators, which Wiens called “shifting the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
The transit agency is part of an effort to establish dedicated funding for public transportation and the state Legislature committed to discussing the issue this fall as part of the budget adoption process in July.
“I think we appreciate the limited amount of money available,” Wiens said in an interview before the kickoff event. “We think by not offering an operations plan for growth, they are not going to get anywhere. There’s no pressure if there isn’t a plan for how they would use the money.”
The group released a 16-page report that recounts decreases in transit service, not just since the pandemic in 2021 but since the turn of the century. It claims service hours dropped by 575,000 (about 25%) from 2001 to 2022, and passenger trips declined 16% to about 63 million from 2000 to 2019.
Right now, the study claims, 48% of Allegheny County residents have transit service available within walking distance. Only 25.6% have service every 30 minutes or less.
Wiens claims those numbers won’t change much when Pittsburgh Regional releases its redesign of bus routes. That’s why she wants the agency to consider her group’s concept.
PPT’s recommendations don’t have a price tag yet, but Wiens said the transit agency has agreed to conduct a cost analysis that is expected to be available next month.
Adam Brandolph, a spokesman for Pittsburgh Regional, said the agency agrees with many of the advocacy group’s ideas if funding is available.
“Our plans have to be grounded in reality,” he said. “We’re just excited to hear about everybody’s input. More service is better, but it has to conform to the resources available.”
Currently, the agency is extremely limited in how much it can expand because it needs another service garage and a new long-term maintenance facility, each costing several hundred million dollars. It also is struggling to hire operators, which the advocacy groups said could be helped with higher starting wages.
Smith only understands all of that up to a point. He knows he lost his job as an electric testing technician because he consistently arrived 5 to 10 minutes late, even when he tried walking part of the way. And he has to dodge child custody conflicts when a bus is late or doesn’t arrive to take him to meetings with his wife or children.
“It was a really good job. They make it hard, man,” he said.
Ed covers transportation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at eblazina@unionprogress.com.