When Port Authority eliminated Betty Bickar's bus in 2011, her daily round-trip commute ballooned from 40 minutes to over three hours.

"The old bus used to stop in front of my house," explains the 67-year-old, who often leaves her Baldwin home at 4 a.m. to start a 6 a.m. shift at the South Side Giant Eagle. The journey requires her to walk about a mile to catch a bus that is often overcrowded — and she worries about how she would earn a living if she became physically unable to walk to her stop.

Bickar isn't alone. At a July 9 meeting in Baldwin Borough — a community of about 20,000, located 8 miles south of Downtown — about three dozen residents met to discuss their progress on a campaign, organized by Pittsburghers for Public Transit (PPT), to convince Port Authority to restore a version of the 50-Spencer.

That route was cut as part of a 15 percent service reduction in 2011 — an era marked by financial crisis at Port Authority and transit agencies across the state. Today, however, Port Authority is on firmer financial ground, thanks to a transit bill passed late last year that PAT says will wipe out hundreds of millions of projected deficits.

Some transit activists, community members and state political leaders say the new funding should give the agency enough room to bring some of the routes back — even in a limited capacity.

Legislators met with Port Authority before and after the transit bill was passed and "we indicated there ought to be some conversations about restoration of service," says state Rep. Dan Frankel (D-Squirrel Hill). "[Port Authority] expressed a willingness to look at restoring service to some of the routes that had been discontinued. [...] It would surprise me if they didn't consider it at all."

From Port Authority's perspective, though, that's not something the transit agency is in a position to seriously consider.

"We have a list a mile long of requests like that, and it's not just people who are showing up at the board meetings," says Port Authority spokesman Jim Ritchie, who did not provide cost estimates for running individual routes. "It would only take restoring a few routes before that money is maxed out."

Instead, Ritchie explains, the authority is focusing on "service enhancements" — like adding more buses on existing routes that are overcrowded, and rolling out real-time tracking of its 700-bus fleet.

State Rep. Dom Costa, a member of Port Authority's board, thinks the focus should be on route restoration, calling it his "primary concern."

While the Stanton Heights Democrat says the agency can't act as a "valet" that provides service to every household, he adds, "I think there's funding in the new budget that will allow us to look at some routes and restore them."

Molly Nichols, a community organizer for PPT, says about a dozen Baldwin community members recently met with Port Authority officials to talk about restoring service there — a meeting some residents said was "encouraging."

"They're working on enhancing existing service and what we've been asking is, ‘What about people who still don't have a bus?'" Nichols says, emphasizing that those enhancements represent costs that could be allocated to some limited service restoration.

She points to ridership numbers that show that Baldwin's 50-Spencer route "had an average ridership of 500 per day before it was cut, and now they don't have that service at all. It's a question of what you prioritize."

According to a December 2013 ridership report, there are several routes that tend to operate with fewer than the 50-Spencer's 500 average weekday rides, including the 18-Manchester (454), 60-Walnut-Crawford Village (386), 68-Braddock Hills (400) and the 78-Oakmont (219).

"Where did we fall?" asks Patricia Davis, property manager at Churchview Garden Apartments, a Baldwin complex whose units have been harder to rent out after the cuts. "Was it 600 people we had to have?"

Port Authority's Ritchie explains that deciding how to reduce service is more complicated than merely lopping off the routes with the lowest ridership. "Cutting service is not necessarily a scientific process. [...] It's more driven by the financial necessity. That's why you see what you see in communities like Baldwin."

Few Baldwin residents know the issue like Mike Harms, a driver who's been with Port Authority for 17 years. He acknowledges there's no promise of restored service, but thinks the campaign has a good shot at succeeding if they're realistic.

"A lot of people want service from 6 in the morning to 9 at night — that's just not going to happen," he says, adding that he doesn't speak for the transit union, or Port Authority. But he says there should be enough rush-hour demand to bring some limited service back, especially since the community is only a couple miles from transit centers like the West Mifflin garage and the South Busway.

"My argument has always been it makes sense to restore routes that are closest to Downtown," Harms says, "If this community keeps the pressure on, they're going to do it."

But some observers contend that if routes can be added, it should be done on the basis of hard numbers, rather than on who exerts the most pressure.

"It should be based upon looking at maps that tell you where the zero-car households are and where the sidewalks are, where the concentrations of poverty are, where the concentrations of walkable properties are," says Chris Sandvig, regional policy director at the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group.

But while Costa says he wants to see some service restored, it's not clear how the Port Authority would go about it. "If you're going to have public hearings, everybody is going to say their route is most important," he says.

And for his part, Ritchie notes, "there's no requirement to hold public meetings on route restoration," adding Port Authority would not hold those meetings on its own accord.

But after years of cuts, hardly anyone has much experience with adding service.

"We spent the last decade fighting like hell to keep the system from disappearing," Sandvig says. "There's no road map to know how to put service back."