This past fourth of July, my son and I took the bus to see the fireworks downtown. After the show was over, there were enormous crowds at the various bus stops downtown. There were multiple stops with over 100 people waiting. Unfortunately the bus service was operated on a Sunday schedule for the holiday, which meant that riders were faced with infrequent service and long waits. For us riding the 61 bus to get home, this meant the buses came every 10 minutes, but the first several buses were full before we could get on.
This is a lost opportunity for the Port Authority to provide good transit service. The end of major events downtown, whether it is fireworks, a sporting event or a concert, is one of the few instances where bus transit is able to provide time competitive service with automobiles. The reason is that there are traffic bottlenecks at the egress points of the parking garages when everybody is leaving from an event at the same time. Therefore cars queue up and often have long waits before they are able to even get on the road. Buses are able to avoid this constraint.
If people didn’t face a long line/wait to get on the bus, there would be a lot more demand. Given that additional buses would likely be filled, the farebox recovery ratio would be very high, so this service improvement would come at a low or negative cost for the port authority.
On days with known, large events, the port authority should have buses at the East Liberty garage on standby until the event ends. They should then be called in using the East Busway so there is a service frequency of every 2 or 3 minutes until the buses are no longer turning away potential riders because they are full.
This would reduce traffic, and provide service to residents of Allegheny County who don’t normally ride or benefit as directly from public transit.
