The Southwest Transportation Commission is revising its long-term transportation plan for the entire SWPA region.
Public meeting is being held on 6/8.
Deadline for public comment is 6/9.
Take a Look:
Big plans are in progress for public transit in Allegheny County (and the whole Southwest PA region including Beaver, Butler, Westmoreland County and 6 other regions)!
Who’s Doing the Planning:
The Southwest Pennsylvania Commission (SPC) is a planning body for the 10 counties of Southwest PA, representing a region bigger than the state of New Jersey. The SPC applies for and receives a lot of federal and state funding for regional public transit projects, and they have a lot of planners on staff to help identify and design repairs and improvements to our transit systems.
Why are we talking about this now?
Well, every five years, the SPC updates its Long Range Transportation Plan. Right now, the SPC is asking for feedback on that draft plan, called SmartMoves for a Changing Region: Long Range Transportation Plan and Transportation Improvement Programs. For Allegheny County and Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT), this plan has some big visions including the busway extensions to the Mon Valley and Monroeville, an aerial gondola (!) running north and south connecting Allentown and communities south of the Yough to Hazelwood to Oakland and up to Lawrenceville. This plan also has some necessary big repairs and replacements, like replacing much of our rail car fleet and building a fifth bus garage, one that can allow for more buses and an electric fleet.
Public Meeting on Thursday, June 8th at 6:00 pm:
The SPC is holding their Allegheny County virtual public meeting to talk about the Long Range Transportation Plan and get public input. Register here to attend virtually at 6:00pm and make sure your priorities are heard!
Give your feedback by email and take the survey:
Email your comments on the plan to comments@spcregion.org
Or click here for the SPC Public Input Form to submit your survey
The plan needs goals around improving service to actually connect communities. Here’s what we’re saying as advocates for better public transit:
For PPT, we felt that it was most important to call on the Southwest Pennsylvania Commission to include some plans and goals around restoring and expanding transit service in the long-range plan. The current plan draft doesn’t really mention growing service, which seems like a big oversight– transit riders have lost so much service frequency since the beginning of the pandemic (10% in Allegheny County of total operating service hours), with no plan for those transit service hours to be restored. That means that riders are left waiting at the stop for longer between buses or trolleys, and sometimes the service cuts have meant that transit stops earlier at night, leaving riders stranded after work or starts later in the day, leaving riders without options to get to work in the early morning.
The problem is, for PRT to restore and expand transit service, PRT needs to get serious about recruiting and retaining transit operators. With a beginning shortfall of more than 200 frontline transit workers, and not enough new employees being trained each quarter to replace the workers that are retiring or leaving, something drastic needs to change if we want the service trend to go in the right direction.
In PPT”s letter to the SPC for comments on the Long Range Transportation Plan, we put forward the following suggestions:
“In order to have an effective, connected regional transportation network, the restoration and the expansion of fixed route transit service across all ten counties must be a central focus. The SPC should be a leader in visioning what a frequent and reliable transit service network across our 10 county region would look like. Sister municipal planning organizations to the SPC like METRO in greater Portland, Oregon centered the need for expanded service frequency and affordable fares in their long-range plan, and the San Francisco area Metropolitan Transportation Commission explicitly named goals and the cost to reverse pandemic-related cuts to total transit service hours as well as the funding needed to expand local transit frequency and reliability.
At a minimum:
- The SPC must measure and report upon total transit operating hours currently provided by each of the fixed route transit service providers in the region, compared to 2019 pre-pandemic levels. The SPC should also assess transit service reliability for each of the fixed route transit providers, because poor reliability is often an indication of a mismatch between available labor and scheduled service hours, and can reveal deeper service cuts than what is visible on the published schedule.
- The SPC should identify near and long-term goals for transit ridership growth across the 10 counties, and the transit service frequency increases that would be required to achieve that ridership growth.
- The SPC should track and report the shortfall in transit operators and maintenance employees needed to provide pre-pandemic levels of service, and identify how many new frontline employees would be needed in each region to expand transit service frequency to meet near and long term goals.
- The SPC’s long-range transportation plan should budget for the increase of transit workers (including the operating cost increases needed to support expanded recruitment and improve retention) to meet service restoration and expansion goals, and not merely identify what funding would be needed to maintain this diminished status quo.”
As one last note, we really wanted to celebrate that the plan calls for bus rapid transit from downtown Pittsburgh into the Mon Valley, and in the Eastern Suburbs out to Monroeville! These demands have been the focus of our Beyond the East Busway campaign, and they are next on the docket to be funded and implemented! PPT Organizing Fellows led a planning effort to survey hundreds of transit riders in those communities to identify what improvements transit riders needed to make buses and their streets safer, their buses faster and their trips more dignified…when we organize, we win!
Read the plan, and give your comments! There’s lot’s you can weigh in on. If you also want to weigh in about a need for service restoration and expansion, it’d be good to share how the transit service cuts have impacted you and your community, and how transit service expansion would benefit your life.
Thursday, June 8th at 6:00 pm, SPC Long Range Plan Public Meeting:
Email your feedback: comments@spcregion.org or click here SPC Public Input Form Survey (surveymonkey.com)
Below is PPT’s feedback letter to the Southwestern PA Commission on the 2023 SPC SmartMoves: Long Range Transportation Plan and Transportation Improvement Programs Draft
6/5/2023
Pittsburghers for Public Transit (PPT)’s Public Comment on the 2023 SPC SmartMoves: Long Range Transportation Plan and Transportation Improvement Programs Draft
Pittsburghers for Public Transit (PPT) is a grassroots union of transit riders and transit workers, organizing for a more expanded, affordable, equitable and accessible transit system in Allegheny County. Our region and our communities thrive with strong and stable investment into our public transit system. As such, we support the Southwest Pennsylvania Commission (SPC)’s Long Range Transportation Plan’s call to increase capital funding directed towards public transit capital needs like building a fifth bus garage, replacing the light rail fleet, and addressing PRT’s state of good repair needs. We support the need to expand local funding options to supplement state transit funding, and the holistic, equitable land use and TDM policies to make transit accessible to low income and other marginalized communities, and incentivize transit use over single occupancy vehicles.
We particularly applaud the progress towards the visionary public transit projects being planned: of the North-South connector spanning neighborhoods like Allentown, Hazelwood, Oakland and the Hill District, and the extension of dedicated BRT corridors to Monroeville and Mon Valley. The latter project has been a central goal of our organization over the last several years, stemming from an extensive PPT participatory planning effort with local leaders in the Eastern Suburbs and the Mon Valley to identify priority transit corridors and infrastructure needs that would best serve those communities.
However, while capital improvements and investments can make transit more accessible, safer and more efficient, there is a major omission in the current Long Range Transportation Plan draft. Over the last several years of the pandemic, communities across the 10 county SW-PA region have all been devastated by deep and lingering service cuts. In Allegheny County alone, total Pittsburgh Regional Transit (PRT) revenue operating hours have been cut by at least 10%, through incremental reductions every quarterly service change over these last several years. For smaller transit agencies, service cuts can have an even more drastic impact with riders left stranded for hours. When transit service is reduced, so too is resident access to high paying jobs, healthcare networks, schools, childcare and community services. Without reliable, frequent transit service, our regional goals– for a robust economy, for clean air and lower congestion, for mobility for all– simply cannot be met, because electric buses that only run once an hour, or upgraded station areas that have limited transit service don’t actually meet resident needs.
And there is no end in sight for transit service reductions. At PRT, the transit operator shortfall is a primary catalyst for these cuts, and this is mirrored in counties across the SPC footprint. Allegheny County fixed route transit now has a deficit of over 200 frontline transit employees, and the labor crisis is growing every day because of worker attrition and the hundreds of frontline workers anticipated to hit retirement age this year and next year. At this point, PRT does not even have the capacity to train new employees quickly enough to just replace those that are outgoing each quarter, let alone to close the frontline worker gap. Without ambitious worker recruitment and retention plans, without dedicated operating funding for these purposes, and without a focus on transit operators and transit service restoration and expansion in the SPC Long- Range Plan, our communities will not thrive.
Fortunately, there is a blueprint for addressing the transit worker shortfall. TransitCenter, a national transit think tank and foundation, published a heavily-researched guide to addressing the labor shortfall entitled “Bus Operators in Crisis” last year with specific policy recommendations for transit agencies, municipalities, states and the federal government. More specifically for our region, the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 85 President Ross Nicotero wrote an op-ed published in TRIBLive that offered a number of suggestions around hiring and retention that takes into account the experiences of the thousands of current and former operators that he represents. These recommendations could expand upon the Workforce for Change portion of the SPC long-range plan, to highlight the workforce needs to specifically provide the transit service quality our communities deserve. Transit operator jobs are the jobs of today and the future.
In order to have an effective, connected regional transportation network, the restoration and the expansion of fixed route transit service across all ten counties must be a central focus. The SPC should be a leader in visioning what a frequent and reliable transit service network across our 10 county region would look like. Sister municipal planning organizations to the SPC like METRO in greater Portland, Oregon centered the need for expanded service frequency and affordable fares in their long-range plan, and the San Francisco area Metropolitan Transportation Commission explicitly named goals and the cost to reverse pandemic-related cuts to total transit service hours as well as the funding needed to expand local transit frequency and reliability.
At a minimum:
- The SPC must measure and report upon total transit operating hours currently provided by each of the fixed route transit service providers in the region, compared to 2019 pre-pandemic levels. The SPC should also assess transit service reliability for each of the fixed route transit providers, because poor reliability is often an indication of a mismatch between available labor and scheduled service hours, and can reveal deeper service cuts than what is visible on the published schedule.
- The SPC should identify near and long-term goals for transit ridership growth across the 10 counties, and the transit service frequency increases that would be required to achieve that ridership growth.
- The SPC should track and report the shortfall in transit operators and maintenance employees needed to provide pre-pandemic levels of service, and identify how many new frontline employees would be needed in each region to expand transit service frequency to meet near and long term goals.
- The SPC’s long-range transportation plan should budget for the increase of transit workers (including the operating cost increases needed to support expanded recruitment and improve retention) to meet service restoration and expansion goals, and not merely identify what funding would be needed to maintain this diminished status quo.
Without a long-term plan to restore service to pre-pandemic levels and both budget and plan for the expansion of service, it will be impossible to meet the mobility and climate goals of the long-range plan. If public transportation continues on the path of fewer operators, reduced service hours, and shrunken route coverage, local economies will continue to be left behind. We are hopeful that the Southwest Pennsylvania Commission can be a compelling force towards reversing this trend, by centering the need for restored and expanded transit service and a strong plan for transit operator hiring and retention in the 2023 SmartMoves: Long Range Transportation Plan.