A student commuter who rides the region’s light rail transit (LRT) system to and from school daily, Chris Hawkins says a survey on mass transit is long overdue.
Jimmy Kail, who uses the bus system says that the recently announced survey, Make My Trip Count, is important because commuters have limited options for transportation
For Rebecca Geizura, who commutes from Westmoreland County and has limited campus time due to the bus schedule, her problem could soon be corrected through this survey, the first of its kind.
These are students that have observed the potential the Make my trip count survey could hold for commuters. The survey is available for anyone on the popular information gathering site, Survey Monkey. Mayor Bill Peduto paired with The Green Building, a non-profit organization focused on “going green,” and other alliances in creating the survey which is being used to get information from the public on their current and ideal travel methods as well as other opinions on transportation.
“I think there could be many improvements dealing with transportation, especially bus schedules,” Kail said.
The city will use the information from the survey for decision making when considering future investments in new infrastructure for traveling in and out of the city. Pittsburgh is home to the LRT system but it only travels in one direction, to the South Hills, this is an inconvenience for many people. Another problem is the limited amount of buses traveling outside of downtown making it hard to get into to the city for some.
Hawkins says, “If people aren’t happy with the current transportation methods available maybe the survey will help the city come up with solutions for those people.” Although Hawkins does ride the LRT into school and it is only a ten minute ride he also explained that it is his only option for transportation “… There are no buses anywhere near my house so I have to ride the train.”
Kail says he spends anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour traveling to and from school. Although Kail did not know much about the survey he said, “This is important information. There are a lot of problems with Port Authority buses especially in the winter when it is cold.”
The survey is very focused on commuter’s methods of traveling into downtown and Oakland specifically, but it is not limited to those destinations. There is a large amount of congestion on the Parkway, limited and expensive parking in downtown, and the bus system can sometimes be unreliable.
The survey could maybe change some of those problems for the future. You can find the survey on Surveymonkey.com by typing in “Make My Trip Count”, it is available to anyone. The survey opened on Sept. 14 and will be available until Oct. 16.
It is a two-part survey that asks general questions about the commuter’s modes of transportation and gets more in depth in the second part. It could take anywhere between two to ten minutes to answer the questions.
