Pittsburgh-area buses operating on routes with a recently reduced number of stops are more likely to arrive on time than before the changes.
"It’s early, but Port Authority [of Allegheny County] seems to be getting the results it wanted from its bus stop consolidation program," according to an article by Ed Blazina.
Specifically, the Port Authority has tested bus stop consolidation on two routes, "the 16 Brighton, which runs from Downtown through the North Side, and the 51 Carrick, which runs from Downtown through the South Side to Carrick."
"Phillip St. Pierre, the agency’s director of service planning and scheduling, told an authority committee last week that the on-time performance for the 16 Brighton increased from 70% to 78%. For the 51 Carrick, it rose from 63% to 74%." Blazina also reports ridership data for December compared to previous years, and for 2019 overall.
The changes were implemented in November 2019, so December 2019 was the first full month with the stop consolidation changes in place on the two routes. The Port Authority will eventually spread the consolidation program to other routes, but the process for selecting stops to eliminate has raised some controversy, as noted by Blazina in the source article.
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