By SHANNON O. WELLS
During the 2022-23 academic year, members of the Pitt community collectively tapped their identification cards 3.5 million times on Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) fare readers. Since this past July, that same cohort has taken nearly half a million bus rides around campus and through the greater Pittsburgh area.
To help optimize Pitt’s transportation needs, Matthew Sterne, vice chancellor for business services, and his team strive to maintain a solid and cordial relationship with PRT. Challenges arise, however, when multiple entities relying on the same services have informational and service-related needs — some that overlap, and some that don’t.
“We also recognize that (PRT) has a lot of interests they need to serve within the broader community. There’s equity issues,” Sterne said while addressing the Campus Utilization, Planning and Safety (CUPS) committee on Oct. 10.
“We see the needs are not just for Oakland — it’s not just Pitt employees. There’s also Carlow, CMU, UPMC,” he added. “There’s a lot of people with similar needs that are coming into Oakland. And a lot of these different groups are also advocating for the same information. I would say (PRT responds), but it takes time.”
Sterne visited the CUPS committee to share public transportation-related updates and how Pitt is working with PRT to address issues involving crowding, construction-related slowdowns on campus and elsewhere, scheduling changes and other logistical challenges.
Committee co-chair David Salcido said he invited Sterne to take part based on questions and concerns he’s heard. Pitt’s campus plan, he noted, emphasizes a move away from personal automobiles to public transportation.
“Public transportation is sort of a de facto infrastructure maintained by a third party, but one that Pitt staff, faculty and students depend on,” Salcido said. “And there have been changes recently to schedules, and there are planned changes for building the Bus Rapid Transit. I was hoping that we could … start a discussion on a central Pitt perspective on how Pitt is advocating for our faculty, staff and students.”
Helpful and accommodating
Bus schedule changes that started Oct. 1 because of construction on the BRT system have raised questions about who monitors changes to the PRT and how they impact Pitt.
“Historically, several departments have had a relationship with PRT,” Sterne said.
These include Kevin Sheehy, assistant vice chancellor for Auxiliary Operations and Finance, as well as the government relations team, which interacts with PRT on planning, designing and construction, along with the Office of Engagement and Community Affairs.
“So there’s several different groups across campus that have relationships with PRT, and also advocate (for Pitt),” Sterne explained.
Communications with PRT arise in instances like anticipated University ridership at the start of an academic break, which can result in more people on the 28X Airport Flyer bus going to and from Pittsburgh International Airport, and during Thursday night football games, which bring increased transit usage to downtown Pittsburgh.
“But we also connect with PRT through planning and design and construction for projects that may require temporary closures or relocations of bus stops due to University projects, to which they’re very helpful and accommodating when we need to interact with them,” Sterne said. For instance, the stop at Forbes and Schenley was closed because construction on Hillman Library, forcing riders to the stop in front of the Barco Law building.
Salcido asked Sterne about non-routine elements — “trends or sentiments” of the University community — regarding questions about “routes they plan to use in the future, whether they want to live in a certain area because it has rapid-transit access, or stuff that you really wouldn’t be able to get from a schedule, but you’d have to get from talking to folks,” Salcido said.
Sterne said a transportation demand study from 2022 generated a “pretty significant response,” which outlines how the Pitt community uses transportation, “and that really provided a lot of information to us about how our population is getting to campus and the University. We also have record locators of where people live, so we know key areas are in the north and southeast, what some of the key lines are.”
Ridership fluctuations
And as it did to everything else, the COVID pandemic changed riding trends. “We actually saw a drop during COVID of usage and that’s because, obviously, there (were) more people working from home” and general concern about the safety of public transportation because of COVID transmission.
“People just weren’t comfortable,” Sterne said. “So we saw some shifts in where people were commuting from, where they are tapping (ID cards). And we’re starting to see it come back.”
Another, slighter drop occurred last year when Spin-brand scooters arrived on Pittsburgh streets in a two-year test. “It stopped in July. We’ll see if they come back. But we saw a drop in a lot of the short trips where people, maybe on one end of Oakland, may jump on a bus to get to the other end of Oakland.”
Sterne shared the following recent statistics regarding public transportation and ridership:
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21.9 percent of Pitt commuter trips occur on the PRT transportation buses.
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96 percent of Pitt transit riders use PRT.
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81 percent of transit users walk to their transit stop.
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17.4 percent of transit users drive to the transit stop and get on public transportation (park and ride).
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4 percent of Pitt transit riders use the eight regional transit authorities that serve areas beyond Allegheny County.
Sterne explained that he and Sheehy negotiate with PRT on behalf of the University for how much Pitt pays “for the taps of our ID cards” based on ridership numbers. “We know that 50 percent of non-transit riders would consider taking public transportation if we had more direct routes to Oakland,” and the resulting decreases in door-to-door trip times. “We share that that request with PRT.
“We don’t dictate PRTs decision-making, but we try to share that information with them,” he added. “And we know in general what communities have the highest number of people coming into (Oakland), so we use that information to help advocate.”
Useful tools
Construction on the BRT line into downtown has resulted in the 61D-Murray, 71A-Negley, 71C-Point Breeze, and 71D-Hamilton ending their inbound trips in Oakland and no longer serving uptown and downtown.
Sterne encouraged visiting the PRT website, the Mobility/Public Transportation section of Pitt’s Parking, Transportation & Services website and downloading the transit app to track trip times between Oakland and downtown. “There’s a lot of good information on the PRT website,” he said. “They try to communicate pretty openly.”
Responding to a comment about a recent downtown-bound bus with “standing-room only” space, Sterne further encouraged use of the transit app. “The more people that use the transit app, the better information you get in terms of time expectation, when’s the next bus coming, when you can expect to arrive at that particular location … It’s a good tool.”
PRT’s email and phone contact information also are available on Pitt’s Transportation website, Sterne said.
He said he would share comments and feedback from the CUPS committee with PRT. Salcido suggested creating a mechanism for the general community to communicate transportation questions through a “web form,” he said, “comments that they have regarding public transportation, just because (it’s) part of our Pitt experience. It is a thing that we all have by virtue of our (ID) cards.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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