Faced with strong opposition from riders in the eastern suburbs, Pittsburgh Regional Transit will postpone any change to its P3 bus route until 2025.
To meet federal requirements before making adjustments, the agency has been taking comments for the past few months about route changes that will occur as part of the implementation of the Bus Rapid Transit system between Downtown Pittsburgh and Oakland. Many of those changes drew support or a mixed reaction, but the proposal to shorten the starting point for the P3 from Swissvale to Wilkinsburg on the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway drew by far the most negative comments last month.
As a result, since that change wasn’t proposed to take place until 2025, the agency will monitor the early operation of the BRT system before it makes a final decision on changing the P3, Chief Development Officer David Huffaker told the agency’s planning and stakeholder relations committee Thursday. The agency won’t include the P3 in its federal report on route changes.
Changes on four other routes — 61D, 71A, 71C and 71D — involve how far they go into Oakland or Uptown and could take place before the end of the year.
“We need to do some more work on the P3 suggestions,” Huffaker said. “We’ve got a couple of years to do some additional analysis. We’ll see what we can do to modify our proposal.”
Laura Wiens, the executive director of Pittsburghers for Public Transit, said she is pleased about the additional review of P3 changes.
“That’s so good to hear,” she said. “We appreciate PRT for soliciting comments and listening to riders’ feedback. We celebrate that they are paying attention.”
The agency plans to begin construction on the Downtown portion of the BRT later this year. Huffaker said the agency expects to receive bids for that section next week after it received no bids late last year.
At that time, potential contractors had technical concerns about the scope of work and whether the city of Pittsburgh would be involved in the project.
The rest of the system, located in Uptown and Oakland, will go out for bids in early 2024, and construction should be finished by early 2025 on the $291 million project.
Another factor holding up construction is that the Federal Transit Administration hasn’t released a $99.5 million grant to support the work. Huffaker said PRT could award the first bid but won’t authorize the start of construction until that grant is released.
One reason the agency considered shortening the P3 route is that the BRT system will use some electric buses, which will have charging stations at the Wilkinsburg site. Riders complained that the change would eliminate stops at the Swissvale and Rosslyn stations in Swissvale, and Hamnett in Wilkinsburg.
Because electric buses are rather new to the system, postponing the P3 change would give the agency time to see how long charges last in actual operation rather than only in theory.
The BRT system will use exclusive lanes on Fifth Avenue inbound and Forbes Avenue outbound, with priority at traffic lights, so that buses can move passengers without delays in rush-hour traffic and create a more reliable time schedule. Now, buses tend to bunch together, creating gaps before the next one arrives.
Ed covers transportation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at eblazina@unionprogress.com.