Take a look at the past to see the future

Pittsburgh PA - The Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAT) has more advice coming in from people than it can handle these days, myself included in the offering of opinions.

One thing I have noticed in many of the various commentaries on what PAT should do is this. Everyone is busy looking at how other cities run transit and nobody looks to PAT's past to see that their advice has already been tried and it failed, multiple times.

There have been many "proposals" from concerned citizens that PAT should use a multiple hub and spoke system with local community routes feeding main trunk routes to maintain local service while cutting down on the perceived duplicate service along major corridors. It sounds logical but guess what? It's been tried at PAT for decades and the concept has never done well.

Bellevue, Coraopolis, Monroeville, McKeesport, the LRT line and the list goes on. From the first day of operation in 1964, PAT has had various routes that were feeder routes that circled the local community to feed the main trunk routes yet most are history today for one simple reason: Few people would ride the local community routes.

A recent article in the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (file is in PDF) that was more or less made into a cartoon strip urged PAT to adopt a circular route set up to save the system and presented it as though it was some kind of new idea. The authors of this strip failed to look back to the past. If they did, they would see that it has been tried in Pittsburgh many times and failed just about every time it was tried.

The Pittsburgh area has a unique topography and road layout that literally funnels everything through narrow corridors. It is impossible to eliminate the duplicate service on the main trunk routes within the city limits. The city residents are the main complainers about duplicate service within these corridors and that is because they fail to understand that once out of the city limits, these "duplicate" routes branch out to various suburban communities.

I will always maintain that PAT needs to look at each route uniquely. They need to extend running times between various trips on many routes and eliminate individual trips if they are not being utilized. The topography and road layout of the region makes it so you can't just eliminate a route because the next nearest bus is only a half mile away as the crow flies. In reality, that half mile translates to miles when having to walk to the nearest route due to the twisting and winding roads.

So please, all of the people that trumpet what works elsewhere as the cure-all to PAT's problems, do some research on PAT's history first. In most cases, you'll find that it has already been tried and failed.