[PRCo] Re: Fw: [Mileage] PAT Penn Sta. Spur

[Derrick Brashear]

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:29 PM, Dwight Long <dwightlong at verizon.net> wrote:
>
> Joshua
>
> The confusion on the routing of the "Arlington-Warrington" line results from
> my time in Pittsburgh during which everyone I knew called the street that
> runs up the side of Mt. Washington from just east of Smithfield to
> Warrington Avenue "NEW Arlington Avenue" (emphasis added).

Because Arlington used to be what Josephine is now, and then they built
New Arlington.

> Reference to
> maps.Google indicates it is (at least now) called simply Arlington Avenue.
> In my day only the portion of that street east of the aforementioned
> junction was referred to simply as "Arlington Avenue."

It is now just Arlington; I found no reference so far as to when that changed.

> The system of route numbers that PAT tried to impose on the citizenry of the
> Pittsburgh area back in 1964 was confusing to and detested and ignored by
> most people.  Most folks continued to refer to their tram or bus route by
> its prior and well-accepted name.  Indeed, PAT apparently recognized the
> error of their ways, for the later tram-to-bus conversions kept the proper
> tram route number. The 1964 system died a merciful death at some point.
> However, the replacement numeric system has some glitches, of which 52 is
> one of them.  I don't object to their use of 52 for the "over the hill"
> route for the reason you postulated, but rather because that was an already
> existing route number for the Carson Street transfer car, which ran upriver
> on Carson from the loop.  A more proper route number assignment for the
> "over the hill" line would have been either 49/48 (which would not have been
> quite accurate either) or 49A, which would have fit in with PRC's scheme for
> assigning cutback route numbers when a logical numeric sequence was not
> available for same--for example 55A.

By the time it was given 52 the all-number system was (for the time)
dead anyway.
The Carson transfer car wasn't a peer.

> As to routes running on East Carson Street, the only ones that did were the
> 49 (for a very short distance), the 50,  the 52 (see above) 53, and 54 (also
> 77/54).  Rt. 51 was the Bon Air shuttle and it did not run on Carson Street
> at all.  Rt. 53 was Carrick, and it normally ran on East Carson between
> South 10th Street and South 18th Street.  54 was Oakland-Carrick and it ran
> on East Carson from the Brady Street Bridge to South 18th Street.  Rt.
> 55-East Pittsburgh used Second Avenue to access the Triangle, not Carson.

Sure. And that was the tram system, not the bus thing, where 51-55
were nominally
Carson, although the 53F 53H and 53K basically didn't in modern times
due to more express
express routes being available.

> Lastly, while brown may be a perfectly good color, the use of color to
> designate transit lines is not something of which I approve.  Such use dates
> back to the late 19th and early 20th century when there were countless
> illiterate folks and immigrants who spoke little or no English, and may not
> even have used the Roman alphabet.  As education progressed, the need to use
> colors for route identification lessened, and was gradually extinguished in
> favor of (hopefully) meaningful English route names, in larger cities such
> as Pittsburgh usually combined with route numbers.  This was a perfectly
> good system, which should have been maintained.  Going back to the color ID
> for transit routes is a condescension to the "dumbing down" of America, and
> I hate it.

Well, only for rail, and I suspect it's more for branding. Tho that
branding is pretty
silly given that you can only go south unlike e.g. Chicago where the colored
el lines can take you all over the city.



-- 
Derrick