Anne Hodapp is a single mother who lives in Pitcairn, a small borough just a few miles south of Monroeville. Her 10-year-old daughter has several disabilities and has seizures, but ACCESS has said she is not disabled enough to qualify for their door-to-door transport service for seniors and the disabled. The Port Authority has announced that at the end of March it will eliminate Route 72, Pitcairn’s bus link to Monroeville.
“I’ll still have the 69 to get into Oakland or Pittsburgh, but no service to Monroeville. That means I’m not going to be able to get to any of her Monroeville doctor appointments or to shopping. My daughter sees several specialists in Monroeville.”
“In Pitcairn there’s a lot of people like me who don’t have cars – it’s low income – and they rely on that bus to get not only to shopping but to work. There’s a high rise for elderly down on Broadway and a lot of them use that bus.”
“The bus to Monroeville used to be every hour. Then in the first round of cuts it went to every hour and 15 minutes, and we lost the part of the route that came up the hill where we live. The last cut in the fall, put us down to every two hours. When it went to two hours we lost our convenient transfer to the Monroeville Shopper, which means we can’t get to the library and the hospital without a long wait. So then it took us three hours to get to Forbes Hospital, which is 10 minutes from here. Now that bus will be gone.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do. My daughter gets medical assistance transportation because of her disabilities where I either get reimbursed for bus fare or they send me bus tickets. I have to call them and see – “I’m losing my bus, can we now get ACCESS for her appointments?” I don’t know what the answer’s going to be.”