[PRCo] Would Fineview be abandoned today?

[Schneider Fred]

Bob Rathke pushed my buttons the other day.   I am not willing to let  
something fall by the wayside without trying to come up with a decent  
answer.   Attached to this letter is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet  
that compares 2008 and 1948 Lougee report data for weekday passengers  
in Pittsburgh.   The Lougee Report only gives annual averages ... for  
want of a better way to do it, I did not adjust seasonally ... I  
simply assumed that summer and winter were the same (they never are)  
but I assumed that 80% of the riders were weekdays (5/7ths of the  
days is 71 percent ... is 80% a tad low?   Probably not because a lot  
of people were still working Saturday mornings.   It's close.
There is an even bigger problem with making any comparisons and that  
is that the routes in 1948 are far different from most of the routes  
today.   Bob Rathke's lines up in Troy Hill or Spring Hill or Spring  
Garden actually go all the way up in the country to Ross Garage  
(Keating) today.   The old 8 Perrysville line doesn't stop at Keating  
any more but goes all the way to West View.  The old 11 East Street  
goes to Ross Garage Park and Ride.   But there is a West View Express  
that uses the I-279 expressway but it only runs part-time.   So most  
of the West View riders now go in Perrysville Avenue.   Down in  
Manchester, all the routes (17, 18, 19 and 20) have been rolled into  
one line.  Fineview has been combined with the old Charles Street  
shuttle.   That is only part of how the city's route structure has  
been changed.

Remember 96 East Liberty - 62nd St?   Well, guys, it doesn't go to  
62nd St. anymore.   It crosses the Highland Park Bridge and goes up  
to Harmar Garage in O'Hara Township.   And remember 94 Aspinwall and  
95 Butler Street?   Well, they don't end there ... they've been  
combined with the old West Penn, or later Community route up the  
valley.  94 now runs to Cheswick.    73 Highland doesn't go  
downtown.  There are all sorts of variants of 62 and 63 Trafford today.

I gave you a smattering of the changes I had to cope with for the  
last three days in this analysis.   If you want to make sense of it,  
you can go on like and pull up all the PAT schedules.   They all have  
maps.

Point is guys,  is easier to come up with some reasonable number of  
weekday fares in 1948 than it is to allocate the passengers today on  
some comparable route to compare to the old route.

But I've tried.

The important considerations are these:

Allegheny County's population peaked about 1960 at 1.628 million and  
then began to implode.  In 2000 the census takers enumerated 1.220  
million people, a drop of about 400,000 people or 25 percent.

Pittsburgh City had somewhere under 700,000 people at the end of  
World War II.  The peak census year was 1950 with 676,806 but a lot  
of suburban homes had already been built between 1945 and 1950.   In  
2000 the census takers counted 334,963 people in Pittsburgh.   I  
found one website that suggests that Pittsburgh is reversing the  
trend but I found an even more telling one and that is that  
Pittsburgh School District enrollments have plummeted by one-third  
since the year 2000.   Maybe some kids are going to charter schools  
or other private schools but I think this is telling me that the  
general population decline is continuing unabated and that the city  
probably has fewer than 300,000 people today ... down by more than 55  
percent since 1945.

So what happened to the transit patronage?

The typical bus route today is hauling somewhere between -75% and  
-95% of the passengers that were on it in 1948.   And 1948 already  
represented a stinging drop from 1945 because we had almost caught up  
to the demand for new motor cars.   The worst lines of all are those  
in the bottom lands --- the mill towns.   Route 56B Hazlewood is  
almost identical to the old 55 East Pitsburgh via Homestead and 2nd  
Ave ... it has lost 94.4 percent of the business it had in 1948.

The best routes are the light rail lines, largely because they were  
in neighborhoods that expanded last.   The interurbans actually had  
very low patronage; the areas beyond Castle Shannon didn't completely  
fill in with homes until after the Washington and Charleroi lines  
were torn up.   Remember my picture of the weathered barn under the  
thunder clouds in the Bill Middleton's book The Time of the  
Trolley?   That farm was just north of where South Hills Village Mall  
is sited today.  As a result, the rail patronage is only 30 percent  
lower than those routes moved in 1948 and most of that probably  
relates to the inner (abandoned portion) of route 38 Mount Lebanon,  
49 Beltzhoover and of course to the declines in office importance  
downtown.

Now, how likely would continued operation of routes 21 and 40 be  
other than to a railfan who dreams about it?   In the late 1940s when  
General Electric was still trying to push electric vehicles, they  
suggested that you needed enough revenue passengers to fill a PCC car  
every five minutes to make it practical, and that a trolley bus  
worked well in a 5 to 7 minute envelope and beyond that diesels would  
earn you money.

OK ... Lets run the numbers that GE was telling us.   A filled PCC  
every five minutes ...
Base period = 12 times an hour x in or out x 14 hours x 56 people =   
9,408 people
Base period in the other direction = 12 times an hour x in or out x  
14 hours x 25 people =  4,2000 people
Evening = 6 times an hour x 4 hours x 30 people x 2 directions =   
1440 people
Very late evening = 4 times an hour x 2 hours x 30 people x 2  
directions =  480 people
Owl service = 4 hours x 1 trip hour x 2 directions x 15 people =  120  
people
Rush hours = 4 hours x 12 additional trips an hour x 150 people =  
7,200 people
Total =

When Pittsburgh Railways ordered the 1700s, at least routes 55, 56,  
68, 76, 82, 87, 88 and 94 qualified for reinvestment according to the  
G. E. formula.   Today there isn't anything that comes even close.    
The East Busway all-stops local has almost 10,000 riders on a weekday  
and that is heaviest bus route in the system.





-- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
-- Type: application/octet-stream
-- Size: 119k (121856 bytes)
-- URL : http://lists.dementia.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/PAT%202008-1948%20passengers.xls


-- Attached file removed by Ecartis and put at URL below --
-- Type: text/plain
-- Size: 8 bytes
-- URL : http://lists.dementia.org/files/pittsburgh-railways/ecartTkBXIn