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Passengers wait to get on a bus at Smithfield Street and Sixth Avenue in Downtown in 2019.
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Port Authority to study bus routes through Downtown Pittsburgh

Post-Gazette

Port Authority to study bus routes through Downtown Pittsburgh

Last month, the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership unveiled a draft of the Downtown Mobility Study, a plan to allow pedestrians to reconnect with streets in the Golden Triangle. Coming soon will be the next step in the plan: examining where the Port Authority’s 86 bus routes pass through the business district and whether that will have to change to meet mobility goals.

The mobility plan also coincides perfectly with Port Authority’s needs because the agency expects to start new service for its Bus Rapid Transit system in late 2023. The agency needs to find out whether it should change the path other bus routes use in Downtown to accommodate the new system.

That system, which is expected to begin construction later this year, will establish exclusive lanes for buses from Oakland that will enter the business district on Fifth Avenue, turn right on Liberty Avenue, right on Sixth Avenue and exit on Forbes Avenue.

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Amy Silbermann, the authority’s director of planning and service development, said the agency’s buses follow about 25 different paths as they flow through the Golden Triangle. A consultant should be hired by the end of summer to work with the authority, PDP and the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to see whether any of those paths should change as a result of BRT and the mobility plan, she said.

A pedestrian walks across a closed Fort Duquesne Blvd. on Tuesday, May 11, 2021, Downtown. The Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership will be using the street for performance and recreational space.
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Ms. Silbermann said she expects that the consultant will come back with several options after the review, which could take as long as a year. There will be extensive public involvement as officials try to determine whether bus stops should be moved.  

“[The recommendations] could be minimal, they could be significant, depending on what we find,” she said.

Chris Watts, who is overseeing the mobility plan for PDP, said “understanding how BRT is going to impact the [route of other buses] is important” to the mobility goals.

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The mobility plan identified certain streets as heavy traffic and transit corridors and others as candidates for street activities for pedestrians, but those designations could change if some bus routes have to be changed, he said.

“This is the next step, moving to the implementation stage [of the mobility plan],” Ms. Silbermann said. “We don’t know what might happen yet. And there might be other goals that the public has that we don’t know about yet.”

Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470 or on Twitter @EdBlazina. 

First Published: June 28, 2021, 11:15 a.m.
Updated: June 28, 2021, 12:02 p.m.

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Passengers wait to get on a bus at Smithfield Street and Sixth Avenue in Downtown in 2019.  (Post-Gazette)
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