Commuters face crisis

It’s not easy being a commuter these days.

The Port Authority of Allegheny County cut 15… It’s not easy being a commuter these days.

The Port Authority of Allegheny County cut 15 percent of its services in June 2007 – that was hard enough.

But now, gasoline prices are soaring to the highest they’ve been in history. They have increased by 51.3 cents per gallon in the United States in the last year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

And with these factors counteracting each other, commuters are figuring out how to cope.

“Even I’m looking to buy something more environmentally friendly and fuel efficient,” said Port Authority spokesman David Whipkey.

With summer quickly approaching, Whipkey said gas prices could reach $4 per gallon.

But, making a decision to change methods of transportation is not as easy for everyone.

“It’s hard for us to anticipate what the rise in gas prices will do,” Whipkey said. “I mean, there are people married to their cars.”

Joe Rockey, a junior at Duquesne University, drives from the North Hills area to school and work every day.

Because Rockey has a job, the rise in gas prices hasn’t really affected him, but he said at Duquesne, some students are affected and some are not.

“The less money you have, the more you’re affected,” Rockey said. “Some [Duquesne] students are hurting more than others. Some don’t even notice. It all comes down to if you pay the credit card bill or if mommy does.”

But what price would it take for a significant percentage of Pittsburghers to make a switch in their methods of getting around?

It’s an unanswerable question, said Edward Muller, director of the urban studies program at Pitt.

Some people are stuck with the investments they’ve made in their cars, and they don’t want to stop driving them until they’re paid off, Muller said. They try to ride it out, hoping that gas prices will eventually decrease.

But the decrease isn’t coming any time soon, said Paul Funk, marketing manager for Wright Automotive Group.

A rise in the cost of fuel temporarily stalls the sales of large trucks and sport utility vehicles, Funk said, although he declined to report concrete statistics.

“The situation is far from dire, but it’s not brisk, either,” he said, adding that the majority of sport utility vehicle buyers either have large, active families or need the space or use them for business.

“That market is always going to be there, no matter what the gas prices are going to be,” he said. “Fuel economy definitely matters, but gas prices aren’t going down.”

While it might seem like a good time to hop aboard public transit, some Pittsburghers simply cannot.

Port Authority ridership declined 7 percent from January 2007 to January 2008, in part because of the cut of more than 30 bus routes.

And even though some riders are still lucky enough to have a bus to get from point A to point B, they face another dilemma – sometimes, there is not enough room for them.

With fewer buses traveling along the same routes, the buses are packed, said Samantha Faulds, secretary of the Commuter Student Association at Pitt.

“I’ve had so many buses pass me because they’re full,” the Pitt sophomore said, adding that it’s always around 4:30 p.m. when everyone is going home.

If she misses a bus from Oakland to Homestead because it’s too crowded, sometimes she misses her transfer bus at the Waterfront that takes her directly to her house in Munhall.

“It’s kind of annoying, but I’ve been doing it since freshman year, so I’m used to it,” Faulds said.

But if the routes are convenient and the buses aren’t full, some Pittsburgh residents actually enjoy the county’s bus system.

In the last four and a half years, Lisa Kay Schweyer has saved about 45,000 miles on her car. She rarely spends money on gas, and she gets a discount on her insurance because she hardly ever drives.

Schweyer works for CommuteInfo.org, a program in southwestern Pennsylvania that strives to increase the number of commuters who share rides to work.

She takes the bus to and from work every day. But does she have any complaints?

“Heck, no. It’s great taking the bus,” Schweyer said. “I get to sleep in the morning, I get to read in the afternoon, and I don’t have to deal with any of that traffic.”

Even with the increase in gas prices, the Port Authority may not see an increase in ridership for a while unless the public transportation system in the county changes, said Carolyn Carson, coordinator of the urban studies program at Pitt.

Oakland is the third largest commuter destination in Pennsylvania, after downtown Philadelphia and downtown Pittsburgh, according to the Oakland Task Force reports. And yet there’s very little public transportation here, Carson said.

“You have to go through different towns and change buses, and it’s a pain in the neck,” she said, adding that people don’t generally change. They make a habit out of their mode of transportation to the city.

“They change to the degree they can,” said Christopher Briem of the University Center for Urban and Social Research. “Not everyone has the opportunity to switch between car and mass transit.”

Parking availability, too, has steered some people away from driving to Oakland on a regular basis, Muller said. Although some people find ways to park, not everyone can, and it diminishes the opportunity for new growth in Oakland, he added.

For instance, Muller said, if he were planning a meeting with people, he would say, “I’ll come out your way” to accommodate them because it would be difficult for them to park in Oakland.

Briem said most people prefer to ride some sort of mass transit, whether it’s light rail or the subway, so ridership rates are noticeably higher where the T operates Downtown.

And although Port Authority ridership rates aren’t increasing, they’re fairly high compared to most U.S. cities.

In 2005, 18.9 percent of Pittsburgh resident commuters used public transportation, ranking the city at No. 7 in this category, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

“We’re not near the top, but we do much better than, say, Cleveland in terms of ridership rates,” Briem said.

Numbers might be even higher with a different system.

“Would I like a metro here in Pittsburgh? You bet. I’d be a commuter in a heartbeat,” Muller said, referring to a subway system.

“If you’re going to build rapid transit, you need people who are going to use it,” Muller said. “Our problem is we don’t have the density [in population] to support the high cost of it.”

Cities such as Los Angeles are building new metro systems, which are federal government expansions.

They are “much bigger places with much more money to spend,” Muller said, and “it’s pretty hard for an area that’s not growing [like Pittsburgh] to come up with the funds.”

But for Duquesne commuter Rockey, implementing an expansive subway in Pittsburgh would be ideal, even if the city would have to “scrap the bus system.

“Being in cities that have real subway systems that actually go places as opposed to what we have here,” Rockey said, “you can get anywhere you want in half a second as long as you know how to read a map.”