By SUSAN JONES
Members of the Pitt community who attended a briefing by Pittsburgh Regional Transit on its Bus Rapid Transit system had plenty of questions about the project, which is under construction in downtown Pittsburgh and will likely reach Oakland next year.
The BRT will have dedicated bus lanes on the right side of traffic lanes and improved stations along Fifth and Forbes avenues from Bellefield Avenue in Oakland to Liberty Avenue, downtown.
Amy Silbermann, the chief development officer for Pittsburgh Regional Transit, said the PRTX University Line, as it’s being called for now, will help speed up bus travel times and improve reliability.
“The buses (in this corridor), on average, are traveling about nine miles an hour right now, which is pretty slow for transit buses,” she said. “The corridor is pretty congested and fairly unreliable. … With the dedicated space for buses — and also the stations are further apart than the bus stops are today, so the buses will be stopping less often and we’ll be dealing with less traffic — they should move more freely.”
In the core area between Oakland and downtown, that should mean buses coming every three to four minutes during peak times and eight to 12 minutes during off peak. The lanes will be painted solid red, except in certain areas where cars can enter the bus-only lanes to make right hand turns, such as on Liberty Avenue, downtown. Those lanes will have dashed red paint.
The routes included in the BRT system are the 61A, B and C, 71B, and eventually the P3, which runs on the East Busway.
In October 2023, the 61D and 71A, C and D inbound buses began turning around on Craft Avenue in Oakland instead of traveling into downtown. Silbermann said those service reductions were partially the result of driver shortages. While the local buses will not go into downtown, they will still use the dedicated lanes while in the BRT corridor.
In the core area, new transit stations will have ticket vending machines and validation machines, signage with bus arrival times, shelters, benches, bike racks, security cameras and emergency phones.
There also will be new bicycle infrastructure starting around PPG Paints Arena through uptown and into Oakland. Near the arena and Duquesne University, there will be single-direction, sidewalk-level bike lanes, then in the area between uptown and Oakland these will merge on Fifth Avenue to a shared bike and pedestrian pathway that is extra wide. In central Oakland, the opposite direction bus lane on Fifth Avenue will become a two-direction bike lane.
Curb improvements will take place throughout the route and considerable sidewalk work will be done through the uptown area.
The $291 million project is getting just over half ($150 million) of its funding in a grant from the Federal Transit Administration. The rest of the money comes from the city of Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, PRT (with state support), the American Rescue Plan and the federal Congestion Mitigation & Air Quality Improvement Program.
There are discussions to expand the dedicated lanes and transit stations into Squirrel Hill and Highland Park, but those would require more funding.
After getting a brief overview of the project, people at the briefing in the University Club and online had some questions. (Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.)
When service was first reduced in October, one rider said she came in on a 71 bus and then had to get off and wait a long time for another bus, which was standing room only when it arrived. She said she did the same route a few weeks ago and it wasn’t as bad, and wondered if that problem had been fixed.
Silberman: I would not say we have fixed it. We have overcrowding on all eight of the 61 and 71 series routes. We had it prior to these changes. We actually have less of it now, but it’s in very different places. We have less crowding heading out into the East End because four of these routes are now empty when they turn around and start moving out toward Squirrel Hill and Shadyside. But the four routes that are heading into downtown are now experiencing overcrowding, whereas before we did not have overcrowding in downtown or in uptown. We have shifted where people are standing, but we don’t want anyone standing. Our ultimate goal is to continue to address that as we’re able to get more operators. For right now, that’s our biggest challenge, hiring more operators, which our teams are very hard at work on.
How will this impact other routes and will there be routing changes?
Silbermann: There are a lot of them proposed. We will come back out to the community, mostly the Oakland community. Some of these changes are very, very minor. We really haven’t got to the point yet where we are nearing the end post of construction to be able to implement these changes. … We will probably come out in 2025 or maybe even ‘26 to talk to the community about these proposed service changes. They are on the PRT website.
How does this project make it “rapid” transit?
Silbermann: Rapid is a difficult word for us. This is a fairly typical new way of having dedicated transit infrastructure at much lower costs than busways and light rail. Light rail, in general, is about a billion dollars a mile to build. So if we built this in light rail, we’d be talking about $4 billion. … Bus rapid transit has been fairly prolific over the last 10 years or so. Lots of cities have started doing on-street, dedicated bus infrastructure. I think a better way to call it is just really fantastic bus service. I’m not sure the rapid is really so important. It’s reliable. It is faster than the local buses stuck in traffic. You know when it’s coming, you have great amenities to sit and wait for it to come. And it takes you where you’re going in a reasonable amount of time at high headways (time between transit vehicle arrivals at a stop).
You describe all these buses coming outbound on Forbes, which is really crowded now. If it gets all of those extra buses, it seems like that’s going to slow everything down.
We have all the buses going inbound on Fifth now, so it’ll be similar to that, but it’ll be a dedicated lane on both Fifth and Forbes. So we don’t expect to be slowing ourselves down anymore. Will there be an impact to traffic? Yes, there likely will.
Will the Pitt/CMU shuttles, which have consolidated routes lately, be able to use the dedicated lanes?
Kevin Sheehy (assistant vice chancellor for auxiliary operations and finance): My understanding is no, which should speed up the actual BRT buses getting through. On the Forbes Avenue corridor, ... we do have stops there. UPMC has stopped there. ... But when this all comes through the Oakland corridor, at that point, our buses are not allowed to utilize those stops, which will have an impact for our internal shuttles. But we’ll work through some of that as this continues to progress.
What is the economic impact of this project on riders? Will there be changes to pricing structure?
Silbermann: We’ve not determined the fare process yet, but we have said that the fare policy will match our regular bus routes. Right now, that’s $2.75 per trip with unlimited three hour taps for no additional cost. This project will match whatever our fares are when the project opens.
Any pedestrian safety efforts with respect to the new lane configurations, particularly the extended or early greens for buses?
Silbermann: This project should only be an immense positive for pedestrian safety for many different reasons. Uptown, in general, has a pretty poor pedestrian network. We will be rebuilding most of those sidewalks. Every single intersection will have ADA compliant curb ramps. We also have several bump outs going in that will shorten crosswalks in certain areas. … The early or extended green for buses will just tie into the regular signaling, so it’s not like there will be an early bus green with a walk signal at the same time. … The other thing is the bus contraflow lane (on Fifth) is not particularly safe even with the fence. Getting rid of that conflict where people don’t expect that vehicles are coming from the left … we think will be a significant safety design improvement.
Craft Avenue being a turnaround, are there any efforts being put toward that being either bus only or shared, because I can see that making that left back on to Forbes, or even off Fifth, difficult.
Silbermann: We’re not considering any major design changes to Craft Avenue between Fifth and Forbes. The service change in October was our test case to see how that’s working. It seems to be working pretty well, although right now our buses are actually turning around at Robinson Street and then making a right onto Craft rather than making a direct turn onto Craft. That was due to some of our operators being concerned about traffic and congestion there, so we may slowly phase that out. Also at the West Oakland station — just after the buses from Craft Avenue turn left onto outbound Forbes Avenue — there will be a local bus stop behind the BRT station area that will allow the buses to skip around each other as needed, so that they aren’t queuing there trying to make that turn from Craft onto Forbes. That’s the only place where we have that.
With a dedicated bus lanes on Forbes and Fifth, is that going to reduce travel to two lanes for regular vehicles?
Silbermann: That’s correct. And for Fifth, it depends on where you are because it starts really wide and gets really narrow. But yes, we will be losing a general traffic lane on both streets.
Are there enforcement plans in place for delivery drivers? Because especially in the Forbes Avenue business district, it’s already clogged up as it is.
Silbermann: We are having active meetings with our police force and the city of Pittsburgh police force to talk about enforcement to make sure that we are ready to make sure those types of things don’t become major challenge.
Removing the Fifth Avenue contraflow bus lane shifts outbound riders, who would normally get off on Fifth, downhill relative to hospital and clinic entrances. This is sometimes people with low mobility. Are there contingencies for these folks?
Silbermann: We are mass transit. There may be people who can take fixed route transit today that will no longer be able to use fixed route transit because it is shifting one block over. The same condition is true if we move a bus stop one block. That’s something we deal with every day. It’s very important to us, we try balancing the spacing to make sure we’re maximizing access for folks but also minimizing the number of people who will be detrimentally impacted if they do have very low mobility. But I can’t promise that it won’t impact some people. I’m sure it already has.
Do you anticipate us losing any additional parking because of this project?
Silbermann: I believe Forbes Avenue has almost no changes to parking, with the exception of right in front of Schenley Plaza. On Fifth Avenue, there are places right now where you can parallel park just to the right of the right most travel lane. Those actually in many of the areas will remain so people will be parallel parking across the bus lane, which was a design challenge for us, but it was something that was important for Oakland stakeholders and the city to try and preserve parking where they were able to.
Some of the stops on Forbes currently are just a sign in front of a commercial space. For example, people just crowd in front of Starbucks at Atwood and in front of the law school. Will there be any station development in these places?
Silbermann: Yes, every single bus stop will have a shelter, will have places for people to be so that they don’t have to crowd under awnings or block business frontage. There will be glass for almost the entire backside of the space, also, to make sure that we’re not blocking business visibility with the exception of the map and the advertising panel.
How will you deal with transit stations in very near narrow sidewalk environments?
Silbermann: We have extra thin versions of stations and then regular versions of stations. Even the regular version stations are very slim by BRT standards. If you went to another city, you’d probably see a much more robust BRT station, but ours are Pittsburgh specific and ready for some of our narrow streets and narrow sidewalks to make sure people can still safely walk around.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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