One of my favorite projects that I worked on as a student was in my Fundamentals of Cartography class. I decided to do my final project about the effects of service cuts on the port authority of Allegheny County’s bus routes. I was inspired to do the project as I remembered growing up in the area when those budget cuts happened, and as I was young at the time, I was not aware of the extent of the cuts, but I knew they were massive. I wanted to map out these service cuts by comparing service before vs. After the budget cuts took place. Starting off I thought the project would be much more difficult than it was. A friend of mine had recently inherited his uncle’s collection of old Port Authority paper bus schedules which showed the old routes, this was also a big inspiration for the project in the first place. I had thought I would have to manually create the routes in QGIS using the schedule maps as reference. However, I was fortunate to find on the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data center site a shapefile of PAAC (Port Authority of Allegheny County) bus routes from 2006, 1 year before the first round of budget cuts. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find this shapefile online anymore ever since PAAC changed its name to PRT (Pittsburgh Regional Transit), although thankfully I still have the file. With the shapefile of the pre-cut routes, I was able to overlay it with the current bus routes and it clearly shows the extent of the cuts. There are some shortcomings of the map, many detailed sections are hard to decipher since the scale of the map is so large, it also does not show the extent of service cuts in terms of reductions to frequency or weekend service for example. Despite this I was incredibly pleased with how the project turned out, I was lucky to have found that shapefile as it made the project much simpler to complete. It was also sad to see just how much had been lost within the past 15 years. While Pittsburgh is well known for its industrial and population decline, many areas of Allegheny County have continued to grow and sprawl with new development, and it is precisely these areas that either have lost service or have no service at all while it is the declining older industrial towns and neighborhoods that still have service. With the negative effects of car dependence becoming increasingly evident it is frustrating to see that public transportation in the Pittsburgh area continues to struggle in the face of budget cuts. Despite this Pittsburgh had one of the higher rates of public transit utilization of American cities, owing to its heavy job concentration downtown and large university presence. It will be interesting to see if the city and county can deal with the post-covid shift to remote work and stave off another devastating round of budget cuts.
