Westmoreland transit touts rider gains

Ridership on Westmoreland County Transit Authority vehicles continues to rebound from a slump hastened by the coronavirus pandemic, officials said this week.

Through the first seven months of 2022, the number of passengers traveling on Westmoreland’s public transportation bus system has increased to more than 12,800 per month.

Overall, ridership has jumped by about 33% from a year ago but is still substantially less than totals seen prior to March 2020. The last full year of normal operations, in 2019 — before the pandemic — the authority averaged more than 32,600 riders a month on its commuter and local bus service.

In 2021, the authority averaged just more than 11,000 monthly riders.

“We think they will continue to increase but we expect to see increases more on our local routes. I’m not sure we’ll see commuter service back to what it was (before the pandemic),” said authority Assistant Director Ashley Cooper-Brounce.

The authority’s commuter service to Pittsburgh for more than a decade served as the agency’s bellwether, but even prior to the pandemic ridership decline, the number of passengers using express service into and out of the city had started to wane.

Despite the fall off, officials said they’ve seen recent signs of rebound.

Officials said the number of bus passengers on routes to Pittsburgh originating in Greensburg, Mt. Pleasant, New Kensington and Latrobe have doubled from totals a year ago but are still only a fraction of the riders who traveled by bus before the pandemic.

Passengers riding the bus to locations within Westmoreland County on 14 daily local routes that operate to and from Greensburg, New Kensington and other locations, account for nearly two-thirds of the authority’s business on its fixed route service, according to statistics released this week.

Local bus service increased ridership numbers by 21% through July.

“I’m glad to see the numbers going up,” said Authority Chairman Frank Tosto.

A long-delayed effort to revamp the authority’s bus service is expected to begin again this fall with the potential hiring of a consultant to review and design a new route structure. A similar study was conducted in 2019 that carried recommendations for the authority to continue its commuter routes but to refocus and add service on local routes.

Those recommendations were never implemented as the pandemic emerged and are now obsolete, officials said.

“Obviously, these (ridership) numbers are covid-related but there’s now progress in the right direction and it gives us more opportunity to plan future route adjustments,” Tosto said.

Meanwhile, authority officials continue to struggle with personnel issues. Executive Director Alan Blahovec said that while the authority has a full roster of drivers on the system’s fixed route bus service, staffing concerns remain for Go Westmoreland, the agency’s paratransit shared-ride program for low income, elderly and disabled riders.