iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

I think that would be useful for other reasons but all of this seems much more relevant to a (second) Atlantic Terminal/Center Mall redevelopment than the remaining yard blocks

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

well, at least their schedules allow *lots* of time to make this transfer

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

You can see this in @chittimarco.bsky.social's diagram quite clearly; the yellow tracks in the top diagram are the WMATA Red Line, built 1976. (One also imagines how willing cash-poor RRs were to sell off their ROWs to rapid transit agencies that would provide the service the IRS wouldn't!)

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

With the coming of the Downtown-Oakland BRT, many of the Skybus corridors can be considered "addressed" with some form of upgraded transit. Busways do the heaviest lifting, but their total traffic separation makes them work. (Rapid transit > on-street BRT for Oakland is the biggest downgrade).

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 25/10/2025

The full Allegheny County 60-mile rapid transit system, a.k.a. Skybus, doesn't perform half-badly

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 24/10/2025

Substantial progress building out the rest of the "suburban system:" the lines to Rankin (on the PRR main line, essentially the rest of today's East Busway), the North Hills, and the County Airport (how times have changed).

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

monroeville ridership update:

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

2. Adding a Morewood stop on the Oakland line, because it seemed like a large destination that the Skybus proposal missed, and definitely *not* because of my own experiences waiting for overcrowded 61 buses at this location. It gets 4k daily riders, only slightly lower than the other Oakland stops.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Actually, though I said I'm building to the study, I've made a couple "editorial" changes: 1. On the M'ville line, adding the Busway's Negley stop. Shadyside is pretty residentially dense. The Baum-Centre Skybus stop *isn't* on the Busway—an odd miss, as it's right in front of Shadyside Hospital.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

One interesting quirk of this proposal is that the rapid transit study *slightly* predates the development of the Monroeville Mall and growth of US-22 into a suburban commercial corridor. Were this being proposed today, a rail line would almost certainly just follow US-22 to hit the mall.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Next: the Monroeville line. This extends the South Hills line, mostly following the PRR thru the East End. The canceling of Skybus that turned the South Hills line into LRT turned this line into the East Busway, a very successful early example of North American BRT.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

New Skybus line dropped. (Sorry for the hard-to-see blue). The "urban line" from the 1967 report combines two segments that run thru Downtown: the Oakland line, running east to Homewood, and the Ohio River line, serving the inner valley suburbs to the north and west.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

yeah! i suspect the "people" in this game may be slightly more rational about picking transit over driving than their irl counterparts

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Before getting to this second construction phase, this is how we're doing so far: ~12-13k daily riders on the yellow line here, which includes only the South Hills line as outlined in the engineering docs above.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

It is quite a significant job cluster to have no dedicated-ROW transit service! (In this quick pull from OnTheMap, Oakland is the cluster to the right, Downtown to the left). SoI am most curious to see the travel pattern impacts of a metro to Oakland (even w/ Subway Builder's modeling limitations).

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Downtown<>Oakland has long been one of the city's busiest transit corridors, but never got a rail ROW. Several earlier 20th century proposals were never built. Skybus' South Hills line advanced first...because a ROW already existed for streetcars. (And was later converted to the above LRT).

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

As the South Hills line got the furthest, its engineering docs provide instructions from which to conduct (virtual) construction: historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/ob... So it's the first built—I'm hoping that getting started on the Oakland line ASAP will bolster the mid early ridership stats.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

The line was never built, but if the route above looks familiar, it is because it is essentially the route of today's Red Line LRT; the consolation for the failure of Skybus cancelation was the renovation of two South Hills streetcar corridors into a modern light rail system.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

Skybus was the nickname for the "Transit Expressway Revenue Line," a 1960s proposal to bring rapid transit to the Pittsburgh region using automated, rubber-tired cars. A 60-mile system was initially planned, but only one line—the one to the South Hills—ever advanced to the engineering stage.

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

For decades, everyone has been wondering: would the Pittsburgh Skybus actually have worked? 50 years after the project was canceled, we have the tools* (Subway Builder) to find out. (*This is, at best, half-serious.)

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

in summary, please just let this system cook, for it has the juice

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Should be emphasized that Pittsburgh transit retains its impressive strength *in spite of* facts like this, which should be telling policymakers how much stronger the system could likely be with just a little investment! People, shockingly, do not actually enjoy sitting in Pittsburgh tunnel traffic.

Text from article reading: “Since 2001, PRT has reduced service some 36% through several cuts, and lost half its ridership, according to the agency. Funding shortfalls were a primary factor through 2011, while pandemic-related issues and operator shortages drove reductions in recent years.”

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Liam O’Connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 01/07/2023

ok let’s start things off here with nyc’s premier urban canyon

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