Bring Back the UltraViolet Loop

April 2, 2008 9:09am

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.

Living in Shadyside, I’ve noticed a good many bus stops with the UV route listed, however that bus never comes by and I learned sometime last year that the route had been cancelled long ago. Today, though, I was playing around with the Port Authority Hand Schedule Finder at typed in the UV route.

This was an amazing route! Unlike every other Port Authority route, you could buy a Nightly Pass ($3 for unlimited rides) and the route went through so many great neighborhoods: South Side, Station Square, Downtown, the Strip, Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, Garfield, East Liberty, Shadyside and Oakland, to be precise. Even better, the UltraViolet Loop ran from 7pm to 4am!

Unfortunately, and according to Wikipedia, the UV died out due to lack of ridership. That is a giant bummer, I must account, as this would have been an amazing addition to our Pittsburgh exploration. Imagine hitting an art crawl in Garfield at 7pm and then catching the bus to the South Side a couple of hours later, never to fear how your too-many-quarter-drafts ass would get home?

From what I’ve been able to discern via the Internet, the UV was a largely community-driven effort that the Port Authority stuck with between 2001 and 2004. I do wish they’d give it another chance, even if they greatly reduced the frequency (it was running every 30 minutes, in both directions) and size of the bus used. Surely just as a means of keeping drunken college kids trying to make out with the car in front of them as they spill out of South Side and back into Oakland this would be worth it.

Check out a PDF of the UltraViolet Loop’s Schedule »

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Discussion

Jake 8 Apr 2008

My only memory of the UV Loop was near the end of what I imagine to be its lonely death.

Having just moved to Pittsburgh, and needing to get to Oakland for a party, I walked from our first place on the North Side to Downtown on a cold January night in 2004.

After waiting for what seemed like an obscene amount of time on a deserted, snow-blown Liberty Avenue, the UV made its appearance. I wanted the counter-clockwise loop, but the other one appeared.

Not wanting to wait any longer, I boarded. I was the only one on it. Being new to the city and the bus system, I asked the driver how long it would take to get to Oakland. He snorted, and said, “If you want to get to Oakland, you should get off and catch a 61 or 71.”

So I did. That block-long ride was the only one I took on the fabled loop.

Re-starting the loop is a nice idea, but unless it got some more free money to run, I can’t see the Port Authority spending anything to bring it back. One can only imagine the passionate anti-loop outcry that would erupt from cranky suburbanites who have never set foot inside a bus, yet have strong opinions on the operation of the system.

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nathan 8 Apr 2008

I definitely don’t see the UV actually coming back, but as a healthy fan of 2:30am, it’s that bus that I’ve always wanted.

Strange that you’d have had to wait so long, since the bus was supposed to be running every 30 minutes each direction, alternating in 15s. Maybe it’s because it was its dying day and they were slowly just saying fuck it.

As for the suburbs, I’ve always been curious as to what the ratio of suburban bus ridership is to in-city ridership. I’ve heard that when the cuts went down last summer, a good deal of them were aimed at suburban routes because they had less ridership and they often had longer times between stops (instead of stopping every city block, you only stop every suburb or something).

At the risk of sounding like a big fat jerk, I’d say that if you choose to live in the suburbs, you’ve chosen that particular lifestyle and it pretty much comes with a car. Let’s support our city riders first, and then move outward. But I must admit, I don’t know Squanto’s squash worth of squat.

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