PITTSBURGH | Development Rundown II

[Steel City Scotty]

Welcome, Highlander. Good to have you join us.

Now that I've moved to the city and am heavily involved with the customer service industry and making a good impression on visitors to the area, I am curious to gather a few opinions as to when some of you think the T may actually be extended all the way to the airport.

10 years? 20? Not realistic and never gonna happen?

[Austinlee]

Wow, this is the type of innovative idea that would help us leap frog other cities into the very near future of driverless autonomous cars.

Brian O'Neill : Driverless car revolution may happen in Pittsburgh
May 1, 2016 12:00 AM
By Brian O'Neill / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/...s/201605010157

Have you ever been late to a party and found yourself right on time?

Mayor Bill Peduto was making exactly this case when he had his monthly interview on WESA-FM’s “Essential Pittsburgh” last week. Partly because our region dawdled in extending light rail, he argued, we have more than 18 miles of busways that leave us uniquely poised to harness Uber brainpower and make driverless vehicles commonplace here before the rest of the world beats us to them.

“All of a sudden we may have an advantage over those who built those fixed systems years ago,” Mr. Peduto said.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by Steel City Scotty

10 years? 20? Not realistic and never gonna happen?

I'll take never. So many things are against it. It would be horribly expensive for a variety of reasons, including the North Shore T being on the wrong side of the river and the lack of an existing rail line going to the airport. The T is also just the wrong technology--it is basically just a streetcar and not nearly fast enough to be competitive for longer runs. And at the end of the day, there are not enough daily airport users to actually justify such expenditures. And in fact I agree driverless cars, possibly with Busway assistance, will likely kill that small market anyway.

[Jonboy1983]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

I'll take never. So many things are against it. It would be horribly expensive for a variety of reasons, including the North Shore T being on the wrong side of the river and the lack of an existing rail line going to the airport. The T is also just the wrong technology--it is basically just a streetcar and not nearly fast enough to be competitive for longer runs. And at the end of the day, there are not enough daily airport users to actually justify such expenditures. And in fact I agree driverless cars, possibly with Busway assistance, will likely kill that small market anyway.

Yeah, I'll wager that too. I would love to see some kind of rail transit extended out to the airport, but I just don't see it happening. Heavy rail would have been ideal, and the city effectively killed any chance of that several decades ago -- you know -- because the people running the city at the time were idiots. They had plenty of funding in place (roughly half a billion dollars in 2015 money), and they squandered it!

Not that they're any smarter now or anything...

Driverless cars are quite innovative, but I don't see that becomming the end-all be-all solution to the traffic problems. We'll still need transit.

[highlander206]

Originally Posted by Steel City Scotty

Welcome, Highlander. Good to have you join us.

Now that I've moved to the city and am heavily involved with the customer service industry and making a good impression on visitors to the area, I am curious to gather a few opinions as to when some of you think the T may actually be extended all the way to the airport.

10 years? 20? Not realistic and never gonna happen?

Thanks for the welcome! I unfortunately have to agree with the others that this likely won't happen anytime soon. I think the best bet for the area with new transit investments might be rapid bus transit from Downtown to Oakland. Also, it would be nice if PAT would change the Airport Flyer so it doesn't make that silly stop at the IKEA in Robinson.

[GeneW]

We don't need a train to the airport, we just need a much better bus to there. Having the 28X is better than not having it but it could be much better in a lot of ways that wouldn't be all that expensive to implement.

• Change the name from the cryptic 28X to something like AIRPORT so that out-of-towners could figure it out.
• Don't have it pull double duty as a bus to the Robinson Mall
• Make it a distintive and larger bus that has luggage racks
• Have its stops in Oakland and Downtown be well marked and single purpose just for that route and put them in a place with nearby and well marked long-term parking. It should be easy to drive downtown and leave your car for the week. Or Station Square or Strip or Northshore if there's no room Downtown.
• Have them leave Downtown and the Airport at very simple and consistant times that don't require a bus schedule to puzzle out. Maybe every fifteen minutes on the hour and each quarter hour.

None of these are all that infrastructure heavy and would make the service much easier for out-of-towners and locals who don't use transit often to figure out.

[eschaton]

On the point made upthread about the possibility of the T using the West Busway - no, just no. The T is slower than the buses on the Busway. It's the primary reason why the East Busway has never been converted over to rail again. The secondary one of course being that some sort of transfer station would need to be built at the end of the rail-converted busway in order to get people onto surface routes again.

I have a coworker who used to have a friend who worked at the Port Authority. He swore that there was a potential ROW that could be used to get to the airport, but only on the north bank of the Ohio, which is part of the reason the North Shore Connector happened to begin with. This was nearly ten years ago though, and I don't know the full details.

[BrianTH]

I agree the easiest, most efficient approach to airport public transit improvement is making the 28X better, and Gene's ideas look good to me.

By the way, I know some of what happened is that when the Port Authority had to cut costs, it had to do things like put back in the Robinson loop (it had been taken out when they did the big system re-design). I understand there are some money issues here and Port Authority has to balance many interests, but a well-done airport flyer probably has importance which is tough to measure using normal transit analysis. So I wonder if the airport could do something like sponsor the airport flyer to help make the numbers add up better.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by eschaton

The T is slower than the buses on the Busway. It's the primary reason why the East Busway has never been converted over to rail again. The secondary one of course being that some sort of transfer station would need to be built at the end of the rail-converted busway in order to get people onto surface routes again.

All this really can't be emphasized enough. The fact is that the Busways are basically an all-around superior technology to the T. As you note they are faster, and way more flexible since you can do local-to-express routes without transfers. And it turns out the peak capacity of dedicated Busways is higher than people had originally projected, so there is still way more available capacity if needed. Which is particularly relevant since they are future-proofed, in the sense any sort of vehicle which can use surface roads can use them too.

I assume the T is a little more energy efficient, but if that was really a big issue you could address it more cheaply using trolley buses. Otherwise the Busways are pretty great, and if we were going to make a big investment in anything it should probably just be extending the Busways and in general making more use of them.

[DKNewYork]

Last fall, the City Planning Department commissioned a report from PlaceEconomics, a DC-based real estate consulting firm, on the economic impact of historic preservation in Pittsburgh. I found it over the weekend---it's a really interesting read.

I didn't find a direct link to the PDF. But using the link below, the report, Historic Preservation: Part of the DNA of Pittsburgh, is the third link down under Publications.

http://www.placeeconomics.com/resources/publications

[PGHFan]

DK New York: Thanks for the link to the article. Those were nice words about PHLF as well as for the residents of the city itself. It is always a challenge to decide what to save but it would be far more difficult without a good grass roots advocacy effort.

[Wiz Khalifa]

Originally Posted by Jonboy1983

Driverless cars are quite innovative, but I don't see that becomming the end-all be-all solution to the traffic problems. We'll still need transit.

Driverless cars that can be hailed with an app and shuttle several people at a time to destinations like the airport or stadiums, ect. would that not technically be a form of mass transit?

[Wiz Khalifa]

Does anyone know why there are no bike share stations in Station Square? I was trying to help a family member return one but ended up having to cross the river and use the one at 1st and Smithfield. It seems like a no-brainer to have at least one over there considering it is a hub for tourists.

[photoLith]

I'm walking on Carson Street right now and it seems like a good 20-30 percent of the bars and shops have gone out business. What's the deal? It seems to mainly be effecting the more eastern part of Carson street.

Originally Posted by photoLith

I'm walking on Carson Street right now and it seems like a good 20-30 percent of the bars and shops have gone out business. What's the deal? It seems to mainly be effecting the more eastern part of Carson street.

A few pages back... we were talking about it after I commented that I noticed the same thing you cite.

There are actually a handful more vacant storefronts since I posted about it a couple weeks or so ago.

[photoLith]

^
I saw that cool art store that I used to go to all the time to buy frames went out of business, must have just happened too.

Anyways I was taking some photos for Walnut Capitol this evening of their new Hot Metal Flats development and took this photo for their website from the Hot Metal Bridge. The development in this photo isnt Walnut Capitol, but its pretty cool at night, the lit up one on the left side (Southside Works, the art decoish one I posted a few pages back up close), theyre just about done with it. And then right after I took this photo my 12 year old Nikon 70-200 f2.8 decided to shit the bed, so there goes 1300 dollars for a new one...

DSC_1650 by photolitherland, on Flickr

Also, a bonus shot of one of the photos I took today for Walnut Capitol inside Hot Metal Flats.

DSC_1538 by photolitherland, on Flickr

[BrianTH]

Interesting proposal for a community-owned green space in Garfield:

http://www.nextpittsburgh.com/curren...pair-dilemmas/





I have a few concerns about removing all that land from future possible development, and I wonder if the City will really be willing to give over control of so much park land--they argue it isn't that much, but it is considerably larger than a parklet or such. But they have a point the City has not exactly been doing a great job with this space.

[highlander206]

Originally Posted by photoLith

I'm walking on Carson Street right now and it seems like a good 20-30 percent of the bars and shops have gone out business. What's the deal? It seems to mainly be effecting the more eastern part of Carson street.

I've been noticing it too lately, especially when compared to how Carson Street was a year or two ago. The new parking restrictions apparently are that bad when it comes to driving businesses away. Hopefully they rethink this soon.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by photoLith

Anyways I was taking some photos for Walnut Capitol this evening of their new Hot Metal Flats development and took this photo for their website from the Hot Metal Bridge. The development in this photo isnt Walnut Capitol, but its pretty cool at night, the lit up one on the left side (Southside Works, the art decoish one I posted a few pages back up close), theyre just about done with it.

Very cool shot of the new riverfront park and dock. Generally, the more you look at the picture the more you realize how much is going on in it. Very neat.

[RespectCondor]

Originally Posted by photoLith

^
I saw that cool art store that I used to go to all the time to buy frames went out of business, must have just happened too.

All Utrecht Art stores were bought about year ago by Dick Blick Art stores. They left it open until they could get their own brick and mortar store set up in the area. since they just opened up their store on Walnut in Shadyside the utrecht location on the Southside was closed.