[PRCo] Re: Allegheny County's new Transit Development Plan

[Schneider Fred]

Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.   Love it Derrick.

Having worked all my life as an number cruncher / analyst .... I  
guess I feel I never wasted too much time looking at numbers if I  
eventually was able to pull out the right answer.   Sometimes the  
results are misleading but we try.

By the way ... passenger counts ... the one thing I could have said  
and I did not is that we are now pretty much cognizant that mass  
transit riders do prefer rail over bus ... we can now show that  
riding went down when we converted lines from rail to bus and came  
back up again in the same corridors when we went back to rail.   In  
the case of  Charlotte, NC, building a light rail line cause such  
impressive riding that the entire system ridership doubled in one  
year.   But I think it is also very safe to say that, regardless of  
how much the public may like these new systems, riding levels will  
never be at the point where they can support a privately owned  
system.   And government has to answer to the tax payers and the  
voters.   The TWU and the NAACP and other civil rights coalitions  
represent large blocka of voters so when you take over PAT or SEPTA,  
it is easier to run empty buses over the same old routes for 40 years  
as long as you can shift the burden of payment to the state and  
federal governments.   And the local boys tried for years to shift  
that expense until FTA screamed that they wanted fares to at least  
cover one-third of operating costs and then the locals simply tried  
to redefine operating costs.  Right John?

The renumbering of routes in Allegheny County reflects, in my not so  
silent or humble opinion, a reflection that PAT has finally come to  
grips with the fact that they can no longer shift to the state and  
federal government the burden of financing of a bloated transit  
system that needs to be reduced to a smaller number of lines.   About  
time, guys.

Beyond reducing it's size, I don't expect to see any substantive  
change until we recognize that oil resources are finite.

And who is Fred Mergner and if he is a railfan, why don't we have him  
in the museum and in this group of loony fellows?

Urban interstates?   Whole different issue than rural interstates.    
I truly love the scheme of mileage based exit numbers for rural  
interstates but it does fall apart in places when you are on things  
like the Roosevelt Highway in Manhattan or the Cross Bronx Expressway  
or the exits coming off either end of the San Francisco - Oakland Bay  
Bridge.   Jones Falls in Baltimore is another.   And Bob Rathke could  
cite the expressways in Chicago.

But for rural interstates, my personal conviction is that mileage  
based exit numbers is the best scheme the cat dragged home.   It's  
great to get on at 232 and know I can make it to 495 in about four  
hours with a heavy foot.

And to Matt Barry:   The fact that I responded to this in the first  
place is my way of saying thanks for the post.   I enjoyed it.

And what happened in the last half of the pre-season demonstration  
game with the Steelers the other night?   It went from 10-3 or  
something like that over the Ravens in the first half to a total  
upset by the final goal.   I thought it wasn't going to change so I  
was spending most of the time watching something more interesting on  
PBS.


On Aug 28, 2009, at 5:07 PM, Derrick Brashear wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Schneider  
> Fred<fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
>> Very interesting ... in some respects one would think there is a
>> railfan hinding in the staff ...
>
> Wonder if Fred Mergner is still there.
>
>
>> 8 Perrysville, 39 Brookline, 78
>> Oakmont (gone since the earth was cooling), 40 Mt. Washington, 44
>> Knoxville.
>> I guess I have two thoughts.   The positive one is its good to quite
>> confusing the riders with 11A, 11B, 11C, 11D, 11E ... °.
>
> I wonder why we decided to confuse people on urban interstates with
> mileage-based exit numbers which work out
> to 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D (quick, which one is Grant St?)
>
>> The negative is do we really have to mess with what has been in place
>> since 1964 ... it's been there for 45 years now.   This is as bad as
>> PAT screwing with what Pittsburgh Railways had in place for almost as
>> long.   By now the public has no recollection of 8 PERRYSVILLE but
>> they do understand 11D PERRYSVILLE AVENUE.
>
> In many cases, the routes are not the same anymore, so, your old 11D
> may not be your new bus for the same ride.
>
>> The other thing very obvious to me is that the routes of yore are not
>> the routes of today.   If you pull out a contemporary transit guide
>> and compare it to a 1955 Pittsburgh Railways map, where we run to
>> today isn't where we ran to back then.   The demand today isn't the
>> same as it was then.   Almost a half a century has elapsed and the
>> PAT service area has lost close to a million people.
>
> Some are. Many aren't.
>
>> I would really like to see comparisons in peak hour riding past the
>> maximum load point in 1945, 1960 and 2009 for Perrysville,
>> Frankstown, Ellsworth, Lincoln, Butler Street, Millvale, routes 18,
>> 19 and 20 which is all one route today, and the 2nd Avenue lines.
>
> Some 2007 numbers were in the TDP documents leading up to this point,
> in the alternatives analysis. I wasted entirely too much time reading
> it.
>
> Derrick
>
>