Hiring seems to have solved Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s problem with missed trips, but the agency’s on-time performance continues to be well below the standard it has set for itself.
The agency’s annual service report released last week shows the number of missed trips, which has been a chronic problem in recent years, dropped to 0.3%, down from 1.7% the previous year. Riders are left stranded when a missed trip occurs, meaning a scheduled bus or light rail train doesn’t show up usually because no driver is available.
“We have hired ourselves out of the service crisis,” Emily Provonsha, manger of service development, told the Planning & Stakeholder Relations Committee Thursday in a review of the 49-page report.
Missed trips spiked in 2022 – the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – and reached as high as 18% in March that year after the agency fired 43 operators who refused to be vaccinated against the disease. For that year, missed trips reached 3.2%, more than double the goal of 1.5%.
The agency later revoked the dismissals, but many of those drivers never returned, exacerbating what has been a common hiring problem for transit agencies across the country. PRT put on a hiring drive in 2024 that included boosting trainers from 24 to 32 so it could run two classes at the same time, increasing pay during training from $18 to $19 a hour, offering a $1,000 bonus to applicants with a commercial driver’s license, and paying bonuses to current employees who recommend candidates who finish training.
By December, CEO Katharine Kelleman said the agency reached 1,111 drivers, well above the 893 needed to meet all shifts and leaving enough extra drivers to fill in for call offs.
On the negative side, on-time performance held at 66% for the fiscal year that ended June 30, well below the goal of 75%. Overall, 78 of the agency’s 95 bus routes fell below the goal, and 35 missed the goal by more than 10 percentage points.
In an interview after the meeting, Chief Development Officer Amy Silbermann said it is a more difficult problem that has to be addressed over a longer period of time.
For example, coming out of the pandemic, ridership patterns have changed substantially: Mondays and Fridays are light days, Tuesdays and Thursdays are moderate, and Wednesday is the busiest day of the week. Arrival times on schedules are based on how long vehicles have to stop for passengers, and more passengers cause longer stops, so varied riding patterns can play havoc with scheduling.
The result is buses are more likely to run ahead of schedule Mondays and Fridays, on time Tuesdays and Thursdays and behind schedule on Wednesdays. That’s something particularly annoying to riders and schedulers, who both put a priority on transit vehicles arriving when the agency says they will arrive.
To address the issue, Silbermann said, PRT is talking to other agencies across the country to compare notes and see how they are handling that problem. One possibility is setting a different schedule for every day to make sure riders can rely on vehicles arriving on time.
“That’s definitely a long-term situation,” she said.
In other areas, total PRT ridership was down 1.7% to 37.2 million, about 29 million below its all-time high in 2019, before the pandemic. The biggest impact there was a 0.9% decrease in bus riders, who make up the largest segment of ridership.
Light rail ridership declined 8.5%, largely due to construction in the subway in Downtown Pittsburgh and the Mount Washington Transit Tunnel, which added time to light rail commutes. Ridership on the Monongahela Incline was up 7.4% because the system was open for almost the entire year after weekslong shutdowns the year before, and the use of Access paratransit service declined 8.3% because of the elimination of one class of service.
Provonsha said she was encouraged that bus ridership showed a substantial increase in April, May and June, which she said could be due to the reduction in missed trips.
“Our service is more reliable,” she said. “We’re hoping we’ve improved our relationship with our riders as a result and that will continue to grow.”
The agency’s cost per passenger served across the system per year increased from $12.61 to $12.91. The biggest jump there was in light rail service, where the decline in ridership caused the cost per passenger to rise from $24.24 to $27.23.
The cost per bus passenger increased from $11.48 to $11.61, the incline from $6.19 to $6.78, and paratransit from $40.88 to $42.01.
Ed covers transportation at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he’s currently on strike. Email him at eblazina@unionprogress.com.