The much-heralded Bus Rapid Transit Project (BRT) between downtown Pittsburgh and Oakland is looking more and more like a typical government job every day.
While such projects have great merit – the operational and financial efficiencies typically are far better than light rail – the execution of this project appears to leave a lot to be desired on an evolving basis.
As has become per usual with this project, its scope keeps shrinking while its costs escalate.
To wit, the reconstruction of Fifth and Forbes avenues in the Uptown neighborhood (a city project versus the Port Authority project that the BRT is) now won’t roll out until two years after the BRT is scheduled to open.
Will “rapid transit” be reduced to a crawl when that reconstruction commences?
Then there’s the matter of how many buses will be in service. The number of electric buses that were to traverse the route has been slashed from 25 to 15 because of cost. That’s a 40 percent decrease.
Electric buses cost about double (around $1 million per) than traditional buses. And we’ve yet to hear anything tangible about how testing of those buses is going. Other jurisdictions have found electric buses haven’t lived up to manufacturers’ claims.
Inquiring minds want to know if these buses will turn out to be the proverbial purchase of a pig in a poke.
Fewer improvements, fewer buses of uncertain reliability and an increasing cost – now estimated at $225 million with less than half covered by federal tax dollars – and a $27 million funding gap that’s sent the Port Authority scrambling.
And have no fear, Allegheny County authorities say the project is so important that, as the Post-Gazette reminds, it will find other sources of funding if necessary.
All together now, taxpayers – “Uh-oh.”
As we’ve noted before, the BRT is starting to sound a bit like the North Shore Connector, the light-rail system serving the near North Side. In that case, the “Spine Line” to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center was lopped off, the project cost stayed at around a half-billion dollars and proponents bragged about how it had been brought in on budget.
Nonetheless, the Federal Transit Administration continues to rate the Pittsburgh BRT “highly.”
In the middle of what appears to be the standard-issue bureaucratic bumfuzzling, one can only lament the missed opportunity that could have made this BRT project a nationwide model.
That would have involved requesting bids from the private sector to build, own and operate the system. Now that would have been truly progressive.
But, alas, that would be a pipe dream in Pittsburgh and Allegheny where ensconced union interests would have insisted on so many poison pills that any deal would have been rendered impossible.
Just think of the poison pill(s) inserted into proposed efforts decades ago to privatize garbage pickup in the City of Pittsburgh.
But, then as now, “progressives” in government are exposed for what they really are – poseurs clinging to regressive bureaucrat-think.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
