Bus drivers’ counts don’t always add up

After months of observation and numerous interviews, The Pitt News has confirmed that some… After months of observation and numerous interviews, The Pitt News has confirmed that some Port Authority drivers over count the number of Pitt riders on city buses.

A total of 15 Pitt students, faculty and staff – a third of those polled – admit to having personally seen drivers record more Pitt riders than those who got on a bus at a given stop this school year.

Though a few said it might have been accidental, the majority believe it was purposeful, since they have seen drivers count double or triple the actual number of riders showing Pitt IDs. A contract between Pitt and the Port Authority allows Pitt students, faculty and staff to ride Port Authority buses fare-free by showing their Pitt IDs.

The University does not think ridership inflation by drivers is a serious issue.

“Pitt remains one of the lowest per-ride partners out there, and we believe it remains a great deal,” said Pitt spokesman John Fedele, who did not wish to directly address the issue of rider inflation.

He said Pitt was content with the Port Authority’s behavior thus far and claimed that the University has had individuals ride buses to conduct informal audits in the past.

In early January, a staff member at The Pitt News observed a Port Authority bus driver click the counter 60 times when 14 people, largely Pitt students, disembarked from a bus in Squirrel Hill coming from Oakland.

Another reporter who boarded an inbound 61B bus in Squirrel Hill Feb. 23 observed the bus driver press the counter button twice for each Pitt student who boarded along the bus’s route into Oakland. Additionally, the driver pressed the counter button several times at intervals between bus stops. When the reporter asked whom she was counting, the driver asked if the reporter was an undercover auditor. The driver then responded that she was making up for riders she had not counted at previous stops.

Many instances, however, are not so extreme. Drivers who over count tend to do so inconspicuously.

Student Jeanna Thomas’ story fits the usual mold.

“[Over counting] happens only occasionally,” Thomas said in an e-mail. “What usually happens is a very large group of people will enter the bus and instead of counting the people one at a time, the bus driver will wait until everyone has boarded and [then] press the button repeatedly until one has realized that the driver is not counting.

“I wouldn’t say it’s laziness, but that the drivers are in a hurry because they have a tight schedule to maintain,” Thomas said.

Port Authority spokesman Dave Whipkey said there is no reason drivers ever need to press the counter button more than once when counting riders. Several bus drivers have corroborated this fact.

One 19-year veteran Port Authority bus driver agreed with Thomas. He said, under condition of anonymity, that he may often over count Pitt riders because the large amount of students climbing aboard in Oakland tends to slow him down.

“Sometimes I’ll estimate if it’s like 10 or 15 students getting on just to save time when I get into Oakland,” he said, emphasizing that he presses the counter button several times for any person who looks like he’s “between the ages of 18 and 25.”

Judy McNeil, director of marketing and communications at the Port Authority, said she is aware that some bus drivers wait until after the students have boarded to press the counter, but she was not aware of bus drivers over counting Pitt riders. She attributed any over counting to unintentional carelessness on the part of drivers.

“This is something that we take very seriously. And when we have all the facts, we’ll look into it,” McNeil said.

But carelessness does not seem to explain the drivers who over count riders at double or triple the actual number. Though no drivers admitted to over counting on purpose, the fact that rider counts are central to the issue of how much Pitt pays for its fare-free contract is noteworthy. Officials at the Port Authority and Pitt have both confirmed that an increase in Pitt ridership contributed to Pitt substantially increasing its payments to the Port Authority in a new contract approved last fall.

In September, Pitt agreed to double its annual payment to the Port Authority by 2012.

Since 1998, Pitt has had a reimbursement arrangement with the Port Authority. Pitt and the public transportation company have traditionally negotiated five-year contracts.

When Pitt’s five-year contract ran out at the end of last July, the possibility of Pitt forgoing its ridership program frightened many Pitt students, who rely almost exclusively on the Port Authority for transportation. The financially strapped Port Authority, fresh off a wave of service cuts and layoffs, pressed the school for a significant increase in Pitt’s free ridership contract.

Near the end of September, it was official: Pitt would increase its yearly payment to the Port Authority from $2.9 million to $6.8 million by 2012 by way of a 15 percent annual rise over the next five years.

Though this would amount to a roughly 134 percent increase by the contract’s end, the hike didn’t seem to bother students, content to retain their ability to ride Port Authority buses with nothing but a leisurely flash of their Pitt IDs.

Although it is uncertain how much Pitt’s rider count has been inflated, if at all, it might end up costing Pitt students a lot of money, especially current freshmen who will be around to see Pitt’s reimbursement more than double.

Though the fare-free program is billed as “free” to students, much of the money that pays for the program comes from students’ security, safety and transportation fee. This fee – $90 a semester for both full- and part-time students – also pays for the campus shuttle system, the SafeRider program and capital improvements to campus safety.

Funds from the Education and General budget currently supplement the transportation fee, Fedele said.

The University had no comment on whether the increased contract will mean a hike in student transportation fees, but nearly $4 million more will be required to fund the ridership program annually by 2012.

Counting ID holders

Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University students and senior citizens are the only riders who are manually counted on Port Authority buses and ride free of charge by displaying an ID. Bus fare boxes, in which other riders deposit a cash fare, are outfitted with separate buttons for all three groups.

Drivers are expected to press one of three separate keypad buttons only once to count a single member of each group. Pressing No. 3 counts seniors, pressing No. 6 counts Pitt riders and pressing No. 8 counts Carnegie Mellon riders.

Upon being pressed, each button produces a conspicuous beeping sound, so riders know immediately when the driver has counted them. The full tally for each of the three groups is digitally retrieved Monday through Friday when buses return to their garages. The numbers are then transferred to a computer that compiles all the data from the entire system.

In the case of senior citizens, the Port Authority forwards the total number of riders to the state, which reimburses the Port Authority for the average current rider fare of $2. These reimbursement funds are paid for, in part, from state lottery revenues.

The Port Authority stores the ridership numbers for Pitt and Carnegie Mellon and uses them to determine what either institution is paying per rider. This number is significant when a new contract is being negotiated. And this isn’t only true in the current case.

A close relationship

Pitt and the Port Authority began their formal relationship in May 1995 when the public transportation service took over Pitt’s shuttle service that bused students between Oakland, Shadyside and Squirrel Hill. By partnering with Pitt, the Port Authority offered a free zone to faculty, students and staff in the tri-neighborhood area.

The program evolved the following summer into a reduced-fare program that charged University riders 50 cents per ride, said Kent McGaughey, manager of travel and transportation at Pitt.

In August 1998, Pitt negotiated its current free-ride program, which uses student transportation fees to buy the service in bulk for a reduced price per rider. At the time, the parties worked out a four-year deal in which Pitt would pay the annual lump sum of $2.1 million.

It was mutually beneficial: Pitt reduced Oakland’s traffic congestion and made the city more accessible for students, and the Port Authority found a stable source of revenue.

But the program quickly became far more popular than either institution expected.

“We had anticipated about half of the ridership amount that we ended up generating. We had thought maybe 150,000, maybe 200,000 a month. We doubled and tripled that number,” said McNeil, referring to the number of monthly Pitt riders.

The first month there were about 257,000 Pitt riders using their IDs on Port Authority buses. By October 1998, just two months later, ridership had more than doubled, hitting 518,000. This meant that instead of the 60 cents per fare that the Port Authority was hoping for, which was calculated by predicting that Pitt would pay about half of the then-average system-wide fare of $1.25, Pitt was charged 42 cents per ride during fiscal year 1999.

The free ride program’s popularity continued to grow and, for the next three years, Pitt ended up paying slightly less than 40 cents per fare – less than a third of the average rider fare.

In 2002, the Port Authority negotiated a new five-year contract that increased Pitt’s annual reimbursement to $2.92 million. Pitt now paid roughly 52 cents per ride over the next five years, but this was still less than a third of the average rider fare, which had increased to $1.75.

And although the final year of the contract had slightly decreased ridership from the previous year, overall ridership had increased 5 percent since the start of the second contract.

The issue became more urgent in 2007 when the Port Authority found itself facing a $44.6 million budgetary shortfall. To stay afloat, the Port Authority cut some routes entirely, reduced others and laid off 203 employees.

The 19-year veteran bus driver mentioned above said that though seniority kept him from fearing layoffs, newer drivers were concerned.

According to Chris Hess, assistant general manager of legal and corporate services at the Port Authority, though Pitt ridership has not shot through the roof, the reduction of the Port Authority service hours have made Pitt riders a much greater proportion of total ridership. Pitt riders now make up more than 8.5 percent of total rides in the system.

“Despite the fact that the number [of service hours] has been decreasing since 2001, there has been a slight up-tic in Pitt ridership, so we’re putting out less service, so Pitt’s share is bigger,” Hess said.

The issue might become moot, however, when the Port Authority puts a Smart Card system in place by the end of next year. The Smart Card system requires Pitt riders to swipe their IDs upon boarding a Port Authority bus, a change that would eliminate the manual counting of riders.

Fedele said that because auditing ridership numbers is difficult, the University is strongly in favor of the new system, which will also allow both parties to renegotiate payment per rider.

But the system’s implementation couldn’t be soon enough for freshman Anide Michel, who says she has noticed drivers over counting Pitt students before.

She said that beyond protecting against the fraudulent practices of some bus drivers, the Smart Card system is necessary to simplify the service.

“I’m from New York so I’m used to the metro [which has a swiping system]. It’s confusing here, since sometimes you have to pay when you get on and sometimes when you get off,” she said.