Category: default || By jt3y

Bad news for "France Lynn," who has been scratching his, her or its name into all of the buses using the West Mifflin Garage. Come next spring, France Lynn may have a lot fewer buses to deface.

Bad news for the Mon-Yough area, too, which as expected would be fairly heavily hit by the Port Authority's proposed restructuring --- the "poison pill" designed to force the state Legislature into increasing its funding for public transit.

According to a preliminary list of bus routes that would eliminated, released on Friday by the transit agency, three local routes in Our Fair City would be cut altogether: 60A Walnut, 60P Port Vue-Liberty and 60S Crawford Village-Jenny Lind. The 58C McKeesport Express --- the motorcoach service that replaced the PATrain --- would also be eliminated, though riders could use the 58P and 58V that serve Port Vue and Versailles, respectively.

Elsewhere, the 50B Glassport-Clairton? It would be gone.

67J Lincoln Highway? Gone.

The Clairton, Elizabeth and Homestead Park "flyers"? Gone.

The 51E West Mifflin-Jefferson, 55B Homeville, 55E Whitaker-West Mifflin? You've got it: Finito, splitsville, headed for the big bus garage in the sky.

East Hills routes affected would include 63B Rankin, 65E North Braddock, and a bunch of Valley routes: 75A Monroeville Shopper, 75B Pitcairn-East McKeesport, 75C Garden City, 75D Penn Hills-Monroeville.

Of course, the Mon-Yough area isn't being targeted unfairly --- from Sewickley to South Park, and everywhere in between, bus routes would be lopped, and all weekend and night service would be ended.

The Port Authority says that in many cases of eliminated routes, "some service" would be provided by other buses --- it helpfully suggests the 58P Port Vue could supplant the 60P, for instance --- but that's really like saying that because United Airlines flies over Greensburg, it provides "some service" to Westmoreland County. In nearly every case where the Port Authority suggests that "some service" will be provided on a cancelled route, only a handful of stops will be duplicated, often at inconvenient times.

You can say that many of these routes are lightly patronized --- as Jon Potts puts it, "I've been on buses that were standing room only, but also ones in which I could have stripped naked, and no one but the driver would have noticed." (That was a mental image I didn't need, Jonathan.) The first bus that I catch each morning, for example, has anywhere between zero and a half-dozen riders.

But I would also argue that the lightly patronized routes are often the most necessary ones in some suburban areas of Allegheny County, where residential neighborhoods are often far from commercial districts. Speaking as someone who, during college, occasionally had to walk three miles home from the McKeesport Transportation Center after missing the last local bus to my neighborhood, I think I know of where I speak.

(And I did it uphill both ways, in the snow, fighting off dinosaurs. And I liked it!)

Without a bus, many elderly residents, students, single mothers getting off of welfare and others are going to lose their only lifeline to the doctor, school, work, or shopping areas. We have a car-based culture --- some would argue the merits of that, but it's here, and we have to deal with it. Private automobiles grant many Americans a great deal of freedom, but, ironically, they make some Americans even more isolated. Many neighborhoods lack drugstores, supermarkets and other necessities within walking distance; those local stores have been replaced by big-box retailers on the outskirts of town, easily reached by car, not so easy to reach if you can't afford one.

Is public transportation underfunded? Hard to say; how much is "enough"? According to PennDOT's 2003 Annual Report, mass transit agencies received about $658.6 million in assistance; "highway-related" expenditures ran about $3.6 billion, or more than five times as much.

One problem that PAT has pointed out is that government grants are often available for capital improvements --- extending light-rail to the North Side, for instance --- but not for operating expenses.

This is doubly stupid. The mentality of government agencies is often, "well, we might as well take the money for capital improvement projects and use it, because if we don't, someone else will." But each time PAT expands its capital plant, its operating and maintenance costs go up. Thus does PAT dig its budget hole a little deeper each time it gets a grant for capital improvements.

What should you do if you're concerned? Don't bother writing or calling Port Authority. Instead, contact your state legislators or senators. It's an election year, after all, so you have some leverage --- they need your vote --- and from my experience, a nicely-worded letter will do wonders.

Whether it will roust them in time to stave off route cuts that would leave the Port Authority less of a transit system than a parody of one remains to be seen.

...

Daily News coverage of the Daily News' sale is now online (tip of the Tube City Online hard hat to an Alert Reader who asks to remain anonymous).

...

Park Corporation has taken out a permit to demolish the Carrie Furnaces in Rankin and Swissvale (the old blast furnaces near the Rankin Bridge), reports Ann Belser in the Post-Gazette. This comes just after the county finally made progress on obtaining the money necessary turning the old furnaces into a tourist attraction.

Folks active in the effort to create a regional historic site explaining steelmaking in the Mon Valley have often accused Park Corporation of acting in bad faith in Homestead and Munhall. They have claimed that Park Corporation promised to preserve artifacts, then demolished them or refused to sell them to historic preservation groups.

Kelly Park told Belser that 16 years is "a long time for a private company to hold onto something" --- meaning the furnaces --- "and not do anything." That's true, but it also is easy to see why the historic preservationists have become so frustrated. Every time they have approached a hurdle, it's been moved further away from them. A tiny fraction of what could have been saved at the Homestead Works was needlessly bulldozed when The Waterfront was built.

...

Alert Reader Officer Jim reports that while In Philadelphia, Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin, at least one writer at the Inquirer is reading the Tube City Almanac.

Well, maybe not. But at the very least, Inky columnist Tom Ferrick Jr. was on the same wavelength Sunday as the Almanac was on Friday:

Does abortion trump everything else? What happens if the candidate is pro-abortion, but is in line with, say, the Pope on other issues --- pro-social justice, anti-death penalty, anti-Iraq war, etc.? The most frequently heard answer, albeit muffled in pastoral euphemisms, is: Yes, abortion does trump the others. In my experience, next on the list is parochial aid in its various manifestations, including vouchers. ...

Catholics should resist the bishops' attempt to turn them into single-issue voters. A democratic, pluralistic society is best served by voters who consider the range of a candidate's positions and performance and make their judgments accordingly.

That doesn't mean people shouldn't vote their interests. For God's sake, though, use your common sense.

...

An Allegheny County judge will rule this week on whether Clairton's youth football teams were unfairly ejected from the Mon Valley Midget Football League, reports Dave Conti in the Trib.

The league claims the Clairton teams were expelled because parents have refused to police fights at games; have piled on meaningless points against opposing teams; and encouraged families to bring their own food, rather than supporting opposing teams' concession stands. Clairton parents argue they're being singled out because they're too successful, piling up a record of 125-4 in league play over the past three years. Josh Yohe had more in the Daily News.

...

American Legionnaires are trying to save a World War II mural painted on the wall of the old post home in Mon City, reports Linda Metz in the Observer-Reporter.