Construction crews and lane closures are coming to Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood during the next two years as Pittsburgh Regional Transit enters the next stage of its bus rapid transit project, called PRTX.
The agency held its first public meeting Tuesday to discuss its plan for the construction of the University Line — a PRTX bus route that will travel along Fifth and Forbes avenues in Oakland through Uptown and into Downtown Pittsburgh.
By the end of the month, construction crews will be at work creating six new miles of lanes exclusively for buses between Oakland and Downtown. Buses will have priority at traffic lights along that route that runs inbound on Fifth Avenue and outbound on Forbes Avenue. In addition to the new lanes, PRT’s contractor Independence Excavating Inc. will put in 18 new bus shelters, improve street lighting, add bike lanes, traffic signals and sidewalks, and plant trees along the route as part of a $99.8 million contract.
“We're making additional improvements above and beyond the transportation aspect for safety and accessibility improvements,” said Steve Auterman, a project manager with the City of Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure.
These include accessible curb ramps, high visibility sidewalks, audible pedestrian signals with countdown times and new traffic signals throughout the route.
Work will start this month along the Forbes Avenue side of the route. Once the work on Forbes is finished, crews will move over to Fifth. PRT said it expects to wrap up the project by 2027. While its crews are at work, three to four block-long sections of the lanes along the route will close.
“They'll be longer-term,” said Denise Ott, a project manager for PRT. “And this will be kind of a rolling process. So as work is completed in one area, it'll kind of move down the street and it'll start in the next area.”
But the roads will remain open. Some sidewalks might close as needed, but PRT officials said they’ll post detours if that happens.
The whole PRTX project is projected to cost about $291 million. The agency hopes it will make bus travel between Oakland and Downtown faster and more reliable. By giving buses their own lane and streamlining the number of stops along the route, they can avoid traffic jams that throw them off schedule, according to PRT. Once construction is finished, five bus routes will follow this path. Right now, the 61A, 61B, 61C, 71B and P3 buses use the route.
When buses reach Downtown, they’ll ride around a loop stopping at five stations: Fifth Avenue and Ross Street, Fifth and William Penn Place, Fifth and Market Square, the Wood Street T Station, and the Steel Plaza T station. Work has been underway on the Downtown section of the route for more than a year and should be finished by this summer, according to PRT.
PRT will hold in-person meetings to talk more about the plan and upcoming construction work at 5:30 p.m. Thursday in the Power Center Ballroom at Duquesne University and at 4 p.m. Jan. 14 at the Connolly Ballroom at the University of Pittsburgh’s Alumni Hall.
