[PRCo] Fwd: Would Fineview be abandoned today?

[Schneider Fred]

ACCIDENTLY HIT SEND BEFORE FINISHING.   DISREGARD LAST ONE & READ  
THIS ONE.
Begin forwarded message:

> From: Schneider Fred <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> Date: December 13, 2008 8:15:01 PM EST
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: Would Fineview be abandoned today?
>
> 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 =  22848
>
> 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.
>
>
>

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