Pittsburgh Regional Transit will receive financial help to boost its services during the 2026 NFL Draft.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe best way for football fans to get Downtown is on public transportation,\u201d Jerad Bachar, president and CEO of local tourism agency Visit Pittsburgh, said during a transit agency committee meeting Thursday.<\/p>\n
The Greater Pittsburgh Convention and Visitors Bureau Educational Foundation \u2014 a nonprofit managed by Visit Pittsburgh \u2014 will provide $350,000 to help cover costs the agency will incur from running extra buses and light rail services throughout the three-day event.<\/p>\n
Adam Brandolph, a transit agency spokesman, said Friday he could not say roughly what percentage of Pittsburgh Regional Transit\u2019s outlay for the draft would be covered by the grant.<\/p>\n
Officials during Thursday\u2019s meeting provided few details about the public transportation options that will be in place for the draft.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt a very high level, the plan will include additional trips on certain routes basically from each part of the region during the draft to make sure that we\u2019re prepared for the additional amount of people that we anticipate during those days of the draft,\u201d Pittsburgh Regional Transit Chief Legal Officer Mike Cetra said.<\/p>\n
Katharine Kelleman, the transit system\u2019s CEO, said they will be \u201crunning every single car we can have out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officials are expecting between 500,000 and 700,000 fans to flock to the draft, Bachar said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe shouldn\u2019t shy away from that,\u201d he said. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t let that number scare us.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a point of comparison, the recent St. Patrick\u2019s Day parade drew crowds of 200,000 to 300,000, Bachar estimated.<\/p>\n
He said there would be a \u201creally strong, multimodal, holistic approach\u201d in place to get people to and from the draft \u201cin a safe and secure manner.\u201d<\/p>\n
The draft will be held April 23-25.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh Regional Transit will receive financial help to boost its services during the 2026 NFL Draft. \u201cThe best…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":144753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-144752","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-pittsburgh","9":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","10":"tag-pittsburgh-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}