Posts Tagged Port Authority
The Cost of Being American
written 27 Apr 2009 in the earliest morning
What is the value of the American Dream? Making money consumes more than half of our waking adult days, so how are we spending this money? A recent article on Forbes.com (along with some other data) sheds some light…
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Ideas on Less Parking and Buses
Having spent some significant time in cities where transit really seems to work, meaning it’s easy to use, people actually do use it, and it’s affordable, I thought I’d jot down some notes about what I believe Pittsburgh needs to do to improve it’s own public transportation system, as well as a few other ideas to curb driving and bump ridership.
The Port Authority Finally Knows Who’s Riding What, When and Where
Brent over at Peak Direction has awesomely pointed out that the study the Port Authority commissioned to analyze it’s routes has finally come out to the public, and it’s got a ton of great information inside. Some of the info the report contains provides general information about Port Authority routes, such as the fact that they’re too complicated, often too long, and some routes are just completely pointless. Check out his site for all of the links you’ll need to really get in depth with reading the report, but I thought I’d share some highlights that I found interesting as I read the report.
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Port Authority Strikes
I lived in Portland, Oregon for most of last summer. I’ve been living in Austin, Texas for the past month and a half. Both of those cities are growing dramatically, offer a vibrant lifestyle for their inhabitants and have plenty of opportunities for employment. Both cities are also largely integrated in that parks, trails and trees are allowed to coexist with the concrete, steel and glass that make up a city.
Pittsburgh has the potential to be one of these cities. A place where youth flocks to for college and stays for opportunities and a great quality of living. I love the city of Pittsburgh and very much want to see it thrive and continue to move forward into the progressive, beautiful place to live that it can be.
But hearing these problems with the Port Authority I wonder, what is so drastically wrong that every six months we need to hear of another huge problem with our transit system? Service cuts then drinking taxes to improve a failing system, rate increases and now it can’t even keep it’s own workers happy. What should we do?
Public Transit: Comparing Austin to Pittsburgh
Maybe I’ll make a little series out of this, comparing the City of Bridges to the City of Live Music. Or this may be the last post in this vein, we’ll see. For clarification, the public transit system in Austin is called Capital Metro and the one in Pittsburgh is the Port Authority of Allegheny County.
Yesterday we took a few buses and while I wouldn’t call myself a Capital Metro-nado, we traveled far and had what I surmised was a pretty typical experience.
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The Port Authority Wants to Hear from You
As part of the major renovation that’s happening with our fair city’s transit system, the Port Authority is holding open house meetings specifically aimed at hearing where the public wants to go when it comes to riding buses.
This is your chance to do more than just blog and bitch about the bus system, which for all of its shortcomings is actually halfway decent and so the improvements which are likely to come out of this and the other initiatives the Port Authority has been undertaking this year are going to be a welcomed addition to Pittsburgh.
Bring Back the UltraViolet Loop
There are a lot of great bars and coffee shops and other late night hang outs in this city that are pretty easily accessible via bus routes from where I live, places like the Brillobox or Quiet Storm, or neighborhoods I’d like to explore more thoroughly like Regent Square. The problem is, if you plan on staying late, don’t — very few buses run until 2am or later.
Find Port Authority Hand Schedules Instantly
After I created this mobile-optimized version of the Port Authority’s trip finder, Jake from 42harold.org sent me some code and permission to style up his own creation, an extremely simple and easy to use little form that allows you to type in the name of a bus you’re looking to find and it’ll bring up the PDF version of the hand schedule from the Port Authority’s website.
A Better Port Authority Trip Finder
The Port Authority of Allegheny County offers an online trip planner that is decent from a functionality standpoint, but the Port Authority’s website in general, to be as definitively accurate as possible, sucks. For example, it’s a table-based layout, the design leaves a good bit to be desired, the site’s homepage fails HTML validation with 65 errors, and it’s awfully slow. Plus, it’s one of the few remaining sites where you actually have to type in www or you get a Bad Request error.
So I’ve done what I could and nabbed the primary code from their main site and optimized it for mobile phones. Well, for iPhone in particular, but it should work relatively well on any mobile device that’s got an Internet connection. If you use the site on a mobile device other than iPhone, let me know how it looks / functions in the comments.
iPhone and mobile device optimized Port Authority Trip Planner »
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Investigating the Port Authority, Drink Tax and the Onorato Administration
This report will attempt to demonstrate how, given the available data, the Port Authority could actually profit considerably more than $32M per year, if it gets its act together.
I have been doing considerable research (relative to my other posts, anyway) as to the purpose of the Drink Tax and its affect on the Port Authority, namely: Will their be measurable results to indicate if the drink tax is a success? The concern being that this becomes just another tax which has no visible results. I submitted questions to the Port Authority, Dan Onorato, County Council and FACT (Friends Against Counterproductive Taxation) in an attempt to get this question answered.
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