Pittsburgh Regional Transit service report shows minor ridership drop

Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s ridership is stable, on-time performance is down, and the number of missed trips is receding.

The ridership numbers in the agency’s annual service report released last week are a bit deceiving because the agency had a problem with previous software overcounting passengers by 3% to 4%. When new equipment was installed in fall 2023 showed a substantial difference in ridership, PRT staff analyzed the numbers and determined the previous system had been overcounting bus passengers.

So the ridership numbers — including light rail, the Monongahela Incline and Access paratransit — for fiscal year 2024 were adjusted and show a 1% decrease overall. The agency’s official ridership numbers show 33.3 million passengers used the system, down just over 300,000 from the previous year’s 33.6 million.

Light rail use was up 5%, incline up 60% (because the system was closed for repairs for several months the previous year) and paratransit up 2%. Overall ridership was down because buses carry a much larger proportion of passengers.

That looks like a substantial difference from the 17% increase reported in fiscal year 2023, but Chief Development Officer Amy Silbermann said those numbers likely were off by 3% to 4% because of the software problem. That means the difference isn’t as large as it seems.

To Silbermann, the numbers reflect ridership settling into a long-term pattern after the COVID-19 pandemic. Traffic has rebuilt slowly after bottoming out in 2021 and now shows lower numbers on Mondays and Fridays, more on former off-peak hours and weekends.

Overall, ridership remains just over half its high point of 66 million in fiscal year 2019.

“I think people have stopped changing their post-pandemic ridership patterns,” Silbermann said. “I think this is what we’re going to get.”

Silbermann said the agency is using the information as it revamps its 95 bus routes to reflect the new patterns, stretch service throughout the day, extend service to new areas and substitute shorter trips between neighboring communities for trips that require riders to pass through Downtown to get to nearby areas.

The first draft of the revised service plan last fall would reduce the number of routes to 77, nearly double the number of crosstown routes to 19 and establish 20 transit hubs for suburban transfers. About 60% of routes would have changes, and most routes would change their identification numbers.

After listening to feedback from riders, the agency expects to present a revised draft in the summer and begin implementing the plan early next year.

In other areas, the 35-page report shows how the agency’s University Line under construction between Oakland and Downtown Pittsburgh could make substantial improvements to on-time performance on some of the system’s busiest bus routes when it fully opens in 2027. The Bus Rapid Transit system will create exclusive lanes for buses inbound on Fifth Avenue and outbound on Forbes Avenue with the Downtown portion scheduled to open in late June.

The report shows three of the five primary routes that will use the University Line have among the lowest on-time performances on the system. The 61A meets its schedule 55% of the time, the 61C 48% (lowest in the system) and 71B 53%.

Those routes also are three of the five busiest routes on the system, with the 61C second at 4,951 average weekday riders. The busiest is the 51 which operates from Carrick to Downtown Pittsburgh via the South Side and averages 5,436 weekday riders.

Using exclusive lanes is expected to improve the reliability of the University Line routes, which often get bunched up in rush-hour traffic.

The agency’s goal is for vehicles to be on time 75% of the time. For 2024, buses were on time 66% of the time, down 1 percentage point from 2023. The agency blamed the low on-time rates on road construction and detours on the system.

Another area where the report shows lower performance is the number of trips missed because no drivers were available. The agency’s goal is 1.5% or lower, but it ticked up from 1.6% in 2023 to 1.7% last year.

The agency has attributed that to a chronic national problem of a lack of operators, which caused the number of missed trips to rise about 3% at some points in the past two years and as much as 18% in March 2022 after the agency fired drivers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

In the past year, after the agency increased efforts to hire more drivers by offering bonuses, hiring more trainers and cutting service hours in some areas, officials believe that number is under control. In recent months, the number of missed trips has been about 0.7%.

This year’s report also has a major change, leaving out comparisons to other agencies. In the past, the report typically has compared PRT to nine comparable agencies across the country in areas such as on-time performance, cost per rider and percentage of time carrying passengers compared to driving to the route from the garage.

Silbermann said it discontinued those figures — where PRT often rated poorly — because typically the most recent figures from other agencies were 18 months old.