Transit cuts worry community leaders in Hill District

It’s been a month since the Port Authority announced its plan to cut service by 15 percent in… It’s been a month since the Port Authority announced its plan to cut service by 15 percent in March, and community leaders from the areas facing reductions are worried about the effects on their neighborhoods.

Oakland doesn’t stand to lose any vital routes — at least not during the first wave of cuts scheduled for March 27. But students will likely notice the absence of the 84B Oakland Loop and the G2 West Busway-Oakland, along with a reduction in the frequency of 71 buses. Service through campus will not otherwise be greatly reduced.

Several neighborhoods near campus stand to lose more significantly, particularly the Hill District. Residents of the Hill District depend on transit to access vital services like doctors’ offices, groceries and pharmacies.

Chris Sandvig, president of the Hill District-based Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group, said the lost access to important locations causes impoverished communities — around 40 percent of Hill residents live below the poverty line — to suffer more significantly than affluent neighborhoods during transit cuts.

Sandvig’s group has been involved in the transit crisis for more than a year, advocating for residents of the Hill District and other neighborhoods around Pittsburgh. He spoke at the meeting in January when Port Authority’s executive board announced the cuts, stressing the importance of public transportation to a city’s economic health.

In a recent interview, Sandvig said that although Hill District residents will not necessarily face more cuts than other Pittsburghers, their dependence on transit for access to services that aren’t available in the immediate area makes even small reductions significant.

“The communities that get impacted the most are those that tend to have the fewest cars, and where people need to travel elsewhere for groceries, doctors’ visits, work, you name it,” Sandvig said. “There’s a lot still lacking in the Hill.”

Another Hill District community leader, Father Carmen D’Amico, a pastor, reported that similar worries are brewing in the neighborhood. D’Amico oversees three churches in the Hill District: St. Benedict the Moor, St. Mary of Mercy and Epiphany Church. He also helps run an organization out of St. Benedict’s called AJAPO (Acculturation for Justice, Access and Peace Outreach), which helps African and Caribbean immigrants assimilate to life in Pittsburgh.

D’Amico said many of the hundreds of poor Hill District residents he works with depend on public transit to get to work and to access education and health-care services. Without buses, these services would simply be out of reach for many of the most vulnerable community members, he said.

“It’s extremely worrisome to think that in 2012, service could be reduced by up to 50 percent,” D’Amico said. “Many of those who can’t afford other forms of transportation will be totally isolated from their means of income.”

Port Authority spokesman Jim Ritchie said the transit system factors these issues into the route-cutting process. He said deciding which routes to cut and measuring what effect cuts could have on a particular community involved a lot of number-crunching and hours of work within Port Authority.

As for the actual decision making: “When you have a list of routes, some do better than others. Some are on the top of that list and others are on the bottom. That’s the only way to do it,” he said.

He declined to comment on the Hill District situation specifically.

Ritchie said that, as Sandvig, D’Amico and others are stressing, the route elimination process is not a simple numbers game.

“We don’t cut routes without considering the impact on the communities the route has,” he said. “If a route serves a particular facility, like a large senior center or community establishment, those factors come into play.”