You think its bad for PAT now, it's about to get A LOT WORSE! (Pittsburgh: calculating, subdivisions)

[andyt4579]

Wasn't the Port Authority initially installed to a) wipe out the redundancies and inconsistencies of the various (occasionally fly-by-night) trolley transportation systems and b) give a more solid footing to the mass transit system of the area, dominated previously by the private company Pittsburgh Railways, which spent about 1/3 of it's existence in the early 20th century in bankruptcy?

I wasn't there. Just have read things. Are there any other options out there? Can we lobby the Richard King Mellon Foundation to subsidize Brian's gondola system and see where that goes?

[Goinback2011]

I remember the transit system before PAT. It worked great. It was cheap and reliable.

When you think it through, the best thing is to let this whole PAT death sprial play out to the end. At some point in the process, the beast will be killed off and something else will be created. Until then, don't sell the car.

[stburr91]

Originally Posted by SuburbanPioneer

There is an interesting study about issues experienced by Public Transit around the country these days. Some numbers are simply fascinating:

Fixing Transit: The Case for Privatization

That is very interesting.

[Goinback2011]

From Suburbanpioneer's link:

The Transit Pension Crisis

On top of problems with mounting debt, most transit agencies also offer workers generous health care benefits and pension plans. Transit “subsidies sent the wrong signals to management and labor,” observed Lave. “Labor interpreted the message to mean: management now has a sugar daddy who can pay for improvements in wages and working con-
ditions.”

[squarian]

Originally Posted by SuburbanPioneer

There is an interesting study about issues experienced by Public Transit

Some of the study's premises are dubious. In the first paragraph, the study asserts that public management of transit systems has been a disaster, citing as proof that "since Congress began giving states and cities incentives to take over private transit systems in 1964, worker productivity—the number of transit riders carried per worker—has declined by more than 50 percent".

A 50% decline certainly sounds disastrous. But when compared to the nearly 100% increase in car ownership in the same period (see Table 1), it might just as easily be argued that public management of transit systems has been a phenomenal success, having withstood an overwhelming transformation of American society in the last half-century from general reliance on public transportation to general reliance on individually-owned autos.

[squarian]

Likewise, the argument that "the amount of energy required to carry one bus rider one mile has increased by more than 75 percent" surely has less to do with public management of transit systems than it does the enormous increase in distances public transit systems have been called upon to transport passengers over, thanks to suburban sprawl in large American cities since the early 1960s.

It is very likely that, if we compared total distances traveled by transit systems in the early 1960s to distances covered today, modern vehicles would prove to be far more efficient than in the study's putative baseline date of the early 1960s. The relationship of suburban sprawl and energy expended per passenger would of course remain constant whether the transit system was manged privately or publicly.

[squarian]

But of course, one must consider the source: the archpriests of libertarianism, the philosophy of the rapist. It's one of our great modern ironies that they should call themselves by the name of Rome's greatest genuine conservative, when they themselves are little more than Jacobin revolutionaries.

[BrianTH]

Nutshell history of what happened with mass transit in Pittsburgh:

We once had an extensive private trolley system. If you dig into the economics of that trolley system, it wasn't actually self-sufficient in terms of rider revenues--it got cross-subsidies from affiliated business (land, energy, and so forth).

For complex reasons, most of the trolley system was gradually replaced with a bunch of private bus companies.

The system of private bus companies and remnants of the trolley system failed--they couldn't make money without the cross-subsidies that had supported the trolleys.

PAT was formed by the state to take over and consolidate the transit system.

Note Randal O'Toole's polemic for Cato begins its "history" with the claim: "In 1964, the vast majority of the nation’s transit systems were privately owned and profitable." That's not remotely true as applied to Pittsburgh--privately owned, yes, profitable, not even close. O'Toole in turn cites a 1994 study by Charles Lave, available here (PDF, page 21):

http://www.uctc.net/access/access05lite.pdf

But what Lave found isn't what O'Toole claimed. Lave found that in 1964, private transit companies were barely covering their operating costs, and weren't covering their operating costs plus depreciation of their assets. That isn't a sustainable situation, and that real history eviscerates the argument O'Toole is trying to make. And that is all in addition to the points above (subsidization of the automobile alternative, lengthening of necessary route lengths, and so on).

[BrianTH]

By the way, here is an interesting chart of energy intensity by mode, on a passenger mile basis:

RITA | BTS | Table 4-20: Energy Intensity of Passenger Modes

Noting that "other 2-axle 4-tire vehicles" are a big share of personal vehicles (this includes SUVs and pickups), transit buses were way more efficient per passenger mile as of 1980. By the 1990s, though, they were roughly equivalent, which reflects a combination of improved passenger vehicle efficiency and declining ridership per vehicle mile for transit.

But in the 2000s, the trend changed again, and transit buses are now once again much more efficient per passenger mile. That represents a lot of hard work in rationalizing routes and such, plus eventually higher gas prices and other forces driving share to transit.

[UKyank]

Were buses ever more efficient then rail (trolleys). I feel the leaders that got suckered into that switch over were the ones that really set the stage many years down the road for killing transit here