BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

I love the idea but I'd rather we figure out how to keep the system (modulo its many warts) we already have from falling apart. I'm sure Stu has some wisdom on this topic.

I'm sure funding mix will come up here.

The best wisdom I can offer here is to separate the constant funding issues from those of long-range planning. On the former, it's simply "find a funding solution that works so we can stop arguing about this all the time."

On the latter, we have the two largest trip generators within 250 miles sitting four miles apart, and about half the people who go to either start those trips from east of the pair. The current bus system is simply the rubber-tired equivalent of 1920s trolleys, with a few updates from the TDP of two years ago. What's missing is the need to move LARGE amounts of people from "east of Oakland" to Oakland and Downtown. "East" is anything from Morningside to McKeesport.

The task at hand is to implement a super-capable system, using rubber-tired buses, of getting lots of people from east to west, and back, without having to stop every 500 feet, and remain stopped for 45 seconds while every boarding passenger feeds 10 quarters into the farebox.

Short version: A bicycle should not be able to beat a bus down Fifth Avenue from Penn to Downtown. A bus should be able to beat a car from Penn to Downtown, and still board and carry 50 passengers, and still stop a half dozen or so places en route.

That's a planning process. How do you get there?

Not to be a provincialist here, but it seems to me that the western suburbs were largely ignored by the trolley/transit system of the first half of the 1900's, due to geography, and that the west didn't start to develop in earnest until the 50's. Thus the west hasn't even inherited the vestiges of an early system, we get some ad hoc minimal system that's barely functional. Based on my experiences with the routes out this way, i.e., way overloaded at peak, there seems to be huge unserved demand that would increase if the system was improved.

It would be like an entire quadrant of the region suddenly discovering that they needed a razor to shave.

Hear hear Edmonds! Not to 100% derail the downtown-Oakland discussion, but I find that much of the transportation planning is skewed eastward - even down to the meeting locations.

What more can we Westerners be doing to make sure we're part of the picture? Start a new thread discussing western wish lists? Continually inject discussions with "Don't forget about us"? What do others think?

Be loud, but know that the project is about east.

The west piece is the same as the north piece and the south piece, what I referred to in my earlier post as "the funding part". To actually have a transit system worthy of the name, after 2-Sep-2012.

One more meeting left. May 8th at Uptown Partners. Probably the last for another few months. Now is the time to show up for bikes.

http://bike-pgh.org/blog/2012/04/09/port-authority-announces-community-input-meetings-for-possible-bus-rapid-transit/

I don't understand why "transit funding" isn't funded in a more organized manner... You fund your maintenance and annual costs first, all the rest can be saved in the piggy bank for expansion once you've figured out how to pay for the maintenance and annual costs for the expansion too.

It's lovely that we're given federal funds to build new infrastructure, but, and I have no numbers to back this up, I can't help but get the feeling we've continually built new without figuring out how to pay to maintain it. So our buses, roads, bridges, everything is on an operating budget that lags so far behind the new construction schedule that we're losing ground steadily.

I wouldn't put in a swimming pool without figuring out how to pay my existing water bill, so why is infrastructure not handled more responsibly?

Edmonds/Pinky, west? You mean like the Point downtown? Or the airport? Wait, there's stuff inbetween?!?

Transit funding was never figured out properly in 1958-1964 when the Port Authority was being organized. The last real change prior to that was the 1945 amendment that prevented fuel taxes from funding (privately owned, tax-paying) public transit. There was simply the assumption that farebox revenue and tax subsidy would pay the bills. Maybe the union contracts were too generous all along, but nobody foresaw fuel and health care costs go waaaaay up, and investment income tank, like they all have the last 10, 15 years. A 1991 revenue fix was largely undone by a 1997 fix to something else, which started the snowball. It's always been touch-and-go, but it didn't get bad until about 1998-2000.

That's the transit side. The highway side is in a similar conundrum, though, and their problem is two issues at cross purposes. First, we built suburbia and tripled our land use and way overbuilt the road network, and it's now all falling apart. Second, the anti-tax mentality that keeps fuel taxes too low to pay for maintaining even the unexpanded system. So you end up with the six-lane Business 22s and McKnight Roads and Robinson Town Center Interchanges sitting cheek-to-jowl with 6,000 structurally deficient bridges.