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Coordination or Competition: State Regulation of Motor Buses under Private Ownership and the Decline of Mass Transit in Pittsburgh

2014; Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Volume: 138; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pmh.2014.a923368

2169-8546

Mark Gallimore,

Transportation and Mobility Innovations

The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 1 (January 2014) This paper is drawn from several chapters of the author's dissertation, "The Business and Politics of Mass Transit in Pittsburgh, 1902–1938" (PhD diss., Lehigh University, 2010). The author would like to thank his dissertation advisors—John Kenly Smith Jr., Stephen A. Cutcliffe, Roger D. Simon, and Joel A.Tarr—and Edward Lybarger of the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum for their help. 1 "PAT Riders Go Out of Way to Praise Retiring Driver," Pittsburgh Press, Dec. 21, 1983. 2 "Oversight of County Transit to Shift from Port Authority to Public Utility Commission," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 11, 2012; "Braddock Nonprofit Says Commuter Shuttle Has Enough Cash for One More Week," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, June 25, 2013; "Urgency Sought for Funding Pennsylvania Roads and Transit," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Aug. 22, 2013; An Act Amending the Act of April 6, 1956, Known as the Second Class County Port Authority Act, Further Providing for Membership of the Authority; and Providing for Department of Transportation Regionalization and Privatization Study, 2013, Pa. Legis. Serv. Act 2013-72. Coordination or Competition: State Regulation of Motor Buses under Private Ownership and the Decline of Mass Transit in Pittsburgh I n 1973, Allegheny County's public transit agency, the Port Authority, declared bus driver Leonard Bruno "Driver of the Year." A decade earlier, Bruno was not a government employee, but an entrepreneur who drove and maintained his own bus in a one-man operation, Carnegie Coach Lines. However, like all transit firms in Pennsylvania, his company was not free from government oversight.The route he drove, the fares he charged, and other aspects of Bruno's business were regulated by the state Public Utility Commission.The commission relinquished regulatory control when the Port Authority bought Carnegie Coach Lines and thirty-two other privately owned transit companies in Allegheny County in 1964 and 1965.1 In 2012 and 2013, Pennsylvania legislators re-empowered state regulators to grant private firms rights to operate transit routes in Allegheny County and called for study of further privatization options.With chronic budgetary woes, service cutbacks, and political battles over state subsidies, the Port Authority is already compelled to share responsibility for transit service with other nonprofit associations (suffering their own problems accessing public funding) and a private bus operator.2 MARK GALLIMORE 40 January 3 The Port Authority was created by 1956 legislation to build and manage a freight terminal for river and rail commerce. In 1959 it was repurposed to take over the county's mass transit. Sherie Mershon, "Corporate Social Responsibility and Urban Revitalization: The Allegheny Conference on Community Development, 1943–1968" (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2000), 592. "As far as can be learned," a 1953 study commissioned by county government concluded, "there are a greater number of mass transportation companies supplying local service to the immediate Pittsburgh District than is the case in any other American city of comparable size and importance."Report of the Allegheny County Mass Transit Study Committee ([Pittsburgh], 1953), 53. Ironically, decades earlier the Port Authority was charged with saving mass transit, which had suffered chronic ridership and revenue loss under fragmented private ownership, by bringing order and financial stability through consolidation. This was part of a national trend of public buyouts of ailing privately owned urban transit companies, but combining so many separate transit lines into a single system was a unique challenge.The Port Authority consolidated over thirty separate companies—which included Pittsburgh Railways, a large trolley company with a subsidiary motor bus fleet centered in the county's urban core, as well as numerous smaller independent bus firms from the county's periphery—into a single, integrated transit system.3 Far from encouraging such consolidation efforts, earlier public policy had energetically promoted transit fragmentation in Pittsburgh. Since the 1910s, privately owned mass transit was regulated by a state government commission. Between the world wars, regulatory policy shifted with dramatic change in state political leadership. Whereas in the past regulations had protected and promoted the territorial monopoly of Pittsburgh Railways ,new policies encouraged independent bus lines to expand into trolley territory at the expense of the older corporate firm.By...