[PRCo] Pittsburgh Transit Topics (April 8, 2014)

Wed Apr 9 13:22:52 EDT 2014

Yes but those are only gross generalizations.   The problem is that many of those places that transit once served are dying because we have chosen to live in other places.   "Otherwise, not much changed" is a gross simplification.   

Wilkinsburg, for example, peaked at somewhere around 32,000 people after World War II.  Today's number is half that.   When my parents built a house in Penn Township in 1937, Mr. Deere, as my mother called him, ran school buses into Pittsburgh every hour.   Didn't need much service because only about 14,000 people lived in the township.  The peak census number was 62,886 in 1970, just after PAT forced Deere Brothers to sell out.   By then Deere was running 45 passenger GM diesels.   I seem to recall that the early PAT schedules were a bus every few minutes in the rush hour.   Now it's back to a half hourly headway and the population had dropped back to 42,000.    Where are we living now?   Farther out.   Plum Borough, for example, took a lot of what Penn Hills Borough lost.   I will not get into why because that will provoke an argument.  

In general, the southeastern end of the state gained slightly more people than the north and west lost.   But the state has gained only slightly over the last half century.   There was relatively large growth in the 1940s (6%) and 1950s (7.8%) and then it slowed in the 1970s (4.2%).   It has gained a little every year since 1980 but remained around 12 million people.   West shrunk, southeast gained.  Then in 2006 we had the worst recession since the 1930s and I do not anticipate much growth in the east except perhaps commuters to New York City.

When looking at census data, guys, remember several key points.  

      1.   College / university students are enumerated where they are in school and not where their home is.   I should be more specific … the law specifies where they are on April 1st but the census people are getting sloppy about that recently.   I remember a decade when Millersville borough lost a tremendous number of people because Spring Break just happened to hit April 1st.      Small counties with large colleges can be deceptive … Washington County with Washington & Jefferson and California State University for example.  Indiana University of Pennsylvania is another example … makes Indiana County look like a real growth county.    
The best example of all in Pennsylvania is Centre County where Penn State University students account for 29.6% of the county population and students plus professors and staff are probably close to 35%.   Now add in the stores, restaurants that would not be there without the students, maybe 50%.

     2.   Institutional population is very important as we have just learned but there is another segment of it beside just boarding schools and universities.   Think prisons.   Some rural counties have large prison populations too.   I just told you about Centre County's student population but they also have a large state penitentiary there too and all those guys in lock-up are also in the census.   People in county prisons as a rule don't distort totals … every county has them … but counties with large state and federal prisons do distort totals.   These are the people who don't needed highways and buses and trolleys.

     3.   There is a federal law that tells us that the census cannot disclose the location of active duty military personal.   Those people are in the national census totals but not shown by location.  So states will not add to the national total.   Of course some might be in Germany or Afghanistan.    That would not be important in places like Butler or Pittsburgh, but can you imagine how it distorts the population of Bell County, Texas?   The census shows 310,000 in Bell County.   Ah but Fort Hood has billeting for 90,000 troops and right now there might be close to 50,000 that do not exist.   

Now how the hell do you plan highways or mass transit for Washington DC and its suburbs when all those people in the Pentagon, the Quantico Marine Barracks, the U. S. Navy Yard, Andrews Air Force Base, Fort Belvoir, Fort George G. Meade, etc., do not exist?
I forgot the Coast Guard down where the Anacostia River flows into the Potomac.  

On Apr 9, 2014, at 11:35 AM, John Swindler wrote:

> 
> 
> Interesting.
> 
> Harmony route gained.  West Penn dropped.  Otherwise, overall, not much changed.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2014 11:26:00 -0400
>> From: rnetzlof at gmail.com
>> To: pittsburgh-railways at mailman.dementix.org
>> Subject: Re: [PRCo] Pittsburgh Transit Topics (April 8, 2014)
>> 
>> On 4/9/14, D Brashear <shadow at dementix.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> PDF. portable, and the whole point of PDF is "always renders the same"
>> 
>> Your wish is my command.
>> 
>> "Idle hands are the Devil's workshop."
>> 
>> PDF of Dennis' data attached
>> 
>> -- 
>> Bob Netzlof a/k/a Sweet Old Bob
>> 
>> 
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