On Thursday, March 28, the nonprofit Mobilify Southwestern Pennsylvania hosted a discussion on the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project, especially as it related to community concerns in Uptown Pittsburgh. Uptown is located between Downtown and Oakland, and it contains Duquesne University and the Penguins arena.
The University Line of the BRT project is currently under construction. According to the project’s website, this new line “will operate between Downtown, Uptown and Oakland” and “use Fifth and Forbes Avenues in Uptown and Oakland and Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Downtown.”
The event began with a lecture by Michael Rodriguez and Olivia Perfetti, both master’s students in public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon and interns at Mobilify. They described similar projects in other cities, such as Grand Rapids and Indianapolis, comparing costs and timelines. Such projects tend to receive about 80 percent federal funding, but the BRT project has received about 70 percent federal funding. While similar projects had an average timeline of seven and a half years, as one audience member pointed out later on in the event, it has been 19 years since the BRT project began.
The main event was a talk between Derek Dauphin, director of planning and service development at Pittsburgh Regional Transit, Craig Dunham, senior vice president of development at the Pittsburgh Penguins, and Dr. Brittany McDonald, executive director of the nonprofit Uptown Partners of Pittsburgh. These individuals are all involved in the BRT project.
The discussion was based around community concerns. The concern about parking was especially important — there will be less parking as more road space is taken up by bus lines.
McDonald related the struggle of explaining to residents why the streets are being worked on. While her organization, Uptown Partners, has hosted meetings and put up signs explaining the BRT project, many community members are still confused.
Dunham, who represented the interests of the Pittsburgh Penguins, was concerned about whether the BRT project would negatively affect Penguins game viewers, who tend to arrive by car from outside of the city and leave at the same time. On the other hand, he said this plan may be more convenient for stadium workers and other city residents who would have better access to the bus.
All event participants seemed optimistic regarding the value of the project. Even to residents who don’t ride transit, this project will provide plenty of benefits. According to Dauphin, BRT involves “a bunch of pedestrian safety investments, and streetscape improvements, and stormwater improvements,” and even improvements to the electrical grid.
Improved infrastructure and public transit can attract more residents and businesses to an area. According to Dunham, the “starts and stops” of the project result in “a sort of speculative environment” in the local real estate market. BRT makes real estate in Uptown more valuable. However, he said, “nobody’s capturing [that value] to be retained within this district.”
Dauphin said that “we need to be pretty thoughtful and proactive about what the land use changes do, and how to manage the development that’s often unleashed as a response to this kind of investment.” However, all participants in the discussion seemed to agree that more development would be good fortheneighborhood.Duetothe project attracting more residents to Uptown, Dauphin’s “hope is there’ll be a much bigger Uptown that can enjoy this.”
The costs and length of the project were also addressed. According to Dauphin, the BRT funding is “mostly for the street itself, which will be returned back to a condition that’s far better than it was, and then the signals and everything on the street level. That is basically a complete rebuild of what’s happening on the street level for a very long stretch of space.” There is also funding for additional buses. However, he doesn’t think that the public transit sector knows “why the costs for infrastructure projects are so high in this country, when other countries can do identical — if not better — projects for less.”
As the interns said, this project is receiving less funding from the federal government than most similar projects. According to Dauphin, this is largely due to understaffing. “People cost money and federal dollars for projects are more available now than they’ve ever been.” The federal dollars are not for staffing, but staffing is necessary to unlock them.
Dunham sees the BRT project as part of a process in which Pittsburgh stops being all “about a traditional downtown. We’ve got Oakland, we’ve got Bakery Square, we’ve got all these things happening in fringe areas of our traditional city,” areas which will be even more connected by this project, Dunham said. The BRT university line will connect the universities, Oakland, Downtown, and Uptown.
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