Today, Carnegie Mellon, and specifically the Smart Growth Club, a student initiative based in the Heinz Business School, hosted a panel on "Transportation and Economic Expansion in Pittsburgh", looking at how transportation might grow and change in the next twenty years. The Traffic21 Initiative also helped host.
The panelists were a who's who of the public, private, local, civic, county, and state organizations involved in transport decisions in the city, moderated by a man who has served, over his career, in all of those catagories: Allen Kukovich, currently the Director of the Power of 32 Regional Visioning Project and a former PA State Senator.
Panelists included:
Breen Masciotra – Director, Uptown Partners (website is apparently a placeholder)
Councilman Bill Peduto – Pittsburgh City Council, District 8
Court Gould – Director, Sustainable Pittsburgh
Patrick Roberts - City of Pittsburgh Principal Transportation Planner
Stephen Bland – CEO, Port Authority of Allegheny County
The panel was an hour and a half long, and the time was divided roughly thus: fifteen minutes of general introduction, thirty minutes of short introductory comments from the panelists, thirty minutes of the moderator directing audience questions (written on index cards) to various panelists, with just a hint of back-and-forth between them, and then fifteen minutes of closing comments from the panelists.
Almost all the panelists opened by bashing the "purgatory" of low-density, high car-use suburbia, a big initial "we don't want that" caveat. Further talk trended towards the need to fix and creatively reuse the systems and infrastructure already in existence before talking of huge new projects. As Bill Peduto put it, "We need to fix city roadways up to the era of Duran Duran, at least."
Steve Bland mentioned a few exciting Port Authority upgrades, especially the introduction of Smart Cards, electronic bus passes that would be easier for consumers to use, harder to fake, and provide PAT with much more data on their riders.
He also mentioned the need to get real-time data to riders. According to market surveys, he said, if a person waiting for a late bus still knows how soon it will be arriving (is it two minutes late? or ten minutes late?), they are twice as likely to perceive the system as being "on time", regardless of how off-schedule it is.
(Very recently, the Port Authority actually opened up all of its scheduling and route data in Google's Transit Feed Specification, though with a pretty restrictive license that disallows modification and warns that a licensing fee might one day be instituted. This begs the question: why is a public utility's data not completely open and free to its public?)
Finally, he discussed ways in which the bus system (which contains 90% of PAT's overall ridership) could become more train-like, with bus terminals and stops that were not only efficient, but beautiful, appropriate, and which felt like real places integrated into their respective neighborhoods.
Steven Roberts had a lot to say that reinforced the above points, and added his own thoughts regarding cycling. He seemed like he had a lot more to say, seeing as he is the city's Transport Planner, but time was pretty limited and much of that talk was curtailed to a couple of buzzwords, most notably Livable Communities, Slow Streets, and Complete Systems (rather than Complete Streets).
The other two panelists got a bit edged-out of the panel-time (and my notes), but Sustainable Pittsburgh's Court Gould did make one striking point during his brief mic-time: there is no need to "balance economic development and transportation development. We can predicate economy on transport."
In all, it was a pretty optimistic panel. It looks like there are quite a few smart people thinking very hard about Pittsburgh's transport opportunities as time moves on. They did, though, all seem to be waiting for the money to come in for new projects and ideas, either from the federal government, from a restructure of local monies, or from public-private partnerships that have yet to materialize. It makes one wonder if there are ways that the money currently being spent could be spent in more interesting or efficient ways.
City Squid likes to think about these problems.
A few easy-to-implement ideas that the panel missed:
- Posted, relevant schedules at every stop. This can be done today- many bus shelters are actually paid for by advertising companies, but have areas where such schedules can be posted inside the shelter.
- Downloadable and printable schedules that are slightly more bespoke than currently available (pdf link), letting one print out, for example, a schedule of all of the busses that pass through a specific stop, with the relevant junction-points further afield calculated and specified.
- Bus schedule and route data made available online- in an open format.
- Serious development to make that data available via the mobile web, via cell phone txt queries, and with a sensible web interface.
And a few ideas that are a bit harder, that the panel did cover:
- GPS transceivers on every bus. Real time scheduling corrections and shifts. Better metrics on lateness, clumping, etc. Data-driven schedule changes.
- Live feedback at bus stops.
- Electronic fares and passes.
- The better rider data generated by the above ideas rolled back into route and schedule planning.
One can only hope that these ideas get implemented, and implemented well.
A final thought, the one that Bill Peduto chose to end on:
The city has, currently, a pretty-much-unused rail line that from Lawrenceville past Carnegie Mellon and down to the Monongahela river. It is ripe to be transformed into a commuter rail, one that could be the beginning of a region-wide rail system serving from Washington to Meadville. This line's right-of-way is so perfect for intra-city transport that its existence is near-miraculous to us, as we have forgotten that the region was built around rail lines, not the other way around.
As the Councilman says, "fix it first."
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