Mr. Fitzgerald, the Allegheny County executive, led a delegation of nearly 70 Pittsburgh business, government and community leaders Thursday on a tour of Cleveland’s innovative HealthLine, which uses buses that have been modified to resemble and behave like rail cars.
The vehicles cruised several miles of what is known as a Bus Rapid Transit line, on which they travel in their own dedicated lane, passing several of the 40 stations on the 9.4-mile HealthLine, which connects Cleveland’s downtown with its medical-university-arts hubs.
The delegation, which included representatives of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, Pittsburgh City Council, UPMC, the Port Authority, the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, Carnegie Mellon University, the Penguins and the Benedum Foundation, saw a system that operates faster and draws more riders than the traditional bus line it replaced. They also saw block after block of redevelopment on the Euclid Avenue route, much of which followed HealthLine’s debut in 2008.
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