Fern Hollow Bridge is OPEN!Submitted by MaynardWaltrip t3_zste2a in pittsburgh
hubbyofhoarder t1_j1bs1n4 wrote
Reply to comment by AirtimeAficionado in Fern Hollow Bridge is OPEN! by MaynardWaltrip
It's been a minute since I lived less than 2 blocks from that bridge (well okay, 10 years). I lived in that neighborhood for 15+ years.
Only someone who doesn't live in the vicinity of that bridge would ask "do we really need four lanes" for that bridge. That bridge has been a gigantic bottleneck for that area as long as I've been familiar with it. Bikes can easily share lanes with cars there, as traffic is slow. Further, even if Fern Hollow Bridge had dedicated bike lanes in and out bound, no one is going to mass demolish houses along single lane each way South Braddock Ave to fulfill your bike dreams.
I get the anti-bike lane, anti-bicycle sentiment that often manifests in this subreddit. I'm not part of that. I'm pro-bike, pro-bike lane where bike lanes make sense. Removing car lanes for bike lanes for Fern Hollow would have made things worse for everyone who actually lives there.
You're not doing bike culture any favors with dumb posts like this.
burritoace t1_j1cwgns wrote
This is needlessly aggressive and wrong. The bottleneck is the intersection with Braddock, not the bridge. During off-peak times traffic through there is extremely fast and unsafe for bikes. Three lanes for car traffic would be perfectly adequate there.
tension_tamed t1_j1cefoa wrote
I think this way of thinking is exactly why you need to consider reducing the number of lanes and increasing protected bike lines. If the mentality is always "next year" or "next project", then the work will never get done and progress will not occur or will occur extremely slowly. I attended several of the meetings discussing the bridge and bike lanes, and there was enormous support for protected bike lanes and for considering how this bridge and the surrounding area could be changed to enable better transit for drivers, buses, cyclists, and pedestrians.
It is possible to have a solution that benefits multiple parties - many other cities have been successful in this area. And trying to discount people's opinions and ideas by anonymously calling them dumb isn't doing anyone a favor either.
AirtimeAficionado t1_j1bwic2 wrote
Well given the fact that traffic has successfully diverted around the bridge for a year with really no huge increases in traffic, it would suggest that the lanes aren’t necessarily necessary.
And a traffic bottleneck isn’t necessarily being caused by the lanes of the bridge, it is the intersection just past it on the Point Breeze side that limits flow, and causes traffic to cue * queue * on the bridge. Added lanes don’t really help this scenario, and in some cases actually hurt it by encouraging people to merge late/increasing chaos at a choke point (like we see on the outbound entrance to the Squirrel Hill tunnel, adding a lane before the tunnel and keeping the tunnel unchanged would not help traffic).
As for bike lanes, they aren’t really there for peak, standstill traffic periods. They are there for off hours, when traffic treats the bridge like a highway, and put cyclists at risk. It is the fact that people speed dangerously on the bridge, but not Braddock Ave (because it is so narrow), which is why the bridge bike lanes are necessary. It’s increasing safety on a dangerous stretch.
hubbyofhoarder t1_j1c42rz wrote
> Well given the fact that traffic has successfully diverted around the bridge for a year with really no huge increases in traffic, it would suggest that the lanes aren’t necessarily necessary.
Kindly link to the statistically valid survey of residents of that area that leads you to that conclusion
> And a traffic bottleneck isn’t necessarily being caused by the lanes of the bridge, it is the intersection just past it on the Point Breeze side that limits flow, and causes traffic to cue on the bridge.
It's "Queue", not "cue". Cues are read from cards, people wait in queues.
Having lived in this area, added lanes definitely help as you're not forcing all vehicles into a single lane to wait their turn to either access S Braddock going either direction or go straight through. Your proposal would back traffic into Squirrel Hill.
As for that stretch of roadway being treated like a highway: you're either ignorant, obtuse, or you've never lived in that area. It's not Fernhollow Bridge that's taken at high speed, it's the long straight bit of road between South Dallas and South Braddock. Restricting the bridge lane traffic would do jack shit to help with that.
The traffic lights at South Braddock restrict the practically non-existent speeding on the bridge. If you weren't completely full of shit and actually cared about speeding and safety on that stretch of road you'd be talking about traffic control between South Dallas and South Braddock.
The bridge is not the issue, it's the long stretch of read with no traffic enforcement and no traffic control.
Again, why make it so easy? You're taking positions that anyone who has lived in that area will know to be bullshit. Bike lanes are good for cities overall. The Fernhollow/South Braddock intersection is a place where a bike lane would only fuck things up more.
AirtimeAficionado t1_j1c767l wrote
Thank you for the lesson on cue versus queue, I will remember to proofread all of my posts on this anonymous social media platform of little to no importance more carefully going forward.
As for the data, since you’re the expert, feel free to go through PennDOT’s GIS data to prove your case, you can access it here: https://data-pennshare.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/a17c20bf71dd40fea24363bb9f0ae0e4
What I see are minimal changes in AADT for adjacent roadways over the closure period, with only a 14% increase from July 2019 to July 2022 on Penn Ave, for example.
Looking at the City of Pittsburgh’s data (which you can access here: https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/traffic-count-data-city-of-pittsburgh), I see that the average speed of travel for the October 2019 period of recording for Braddock Ave was 30 mph, with a 95th percentile speed of 38 mph. The city does not have data for the Fern Hollow Bridge, but given its speed limit of 35mph, it stands to reason the speeds of vehicles on that stretch is faster than the 30mph average observed for Braddock Avenue.
Given that the average risk of death for pedestrians involved in a car collision doubles from 25% to 50% with a 10 mph increase in speed from 32 to 42 mph (42 mph is likely very close to the Fern Hollow avg speed given the wide pattern of avg speed = limit + ~5-10mph), this difference is not insignificant by any means, and supports the general necessity of bike lanes on this stretch of roadway: cyclists are twice as likely to experience a fatal collision on this stretch versus those adjacent.
But, then again, I don’t live there, I live ten whole minutes away, so what do I, and these very absolute, quantitative data know anyway…
hubbyofhoarder t1_j1cufrh wrote
> it stands to reason the speeds of vehicles on that stretch is faster than the 30mph average observed for Braddock Avenue.
No, it doesn't. If you're inbound on Fern Hollow you're either coming from South Braddock, having made a turn or you've passed through, you know, a traffic control device that slows cars as part of its function due to merging traffic patterns. If you're outbound, you're again passing through a traffic light from a wider road to a single-lane road that has cars parked along its length nearly all of its length most of the time.
South Braddock is long and straight with relatively few traffic devices along its length. Fern Hollow either starts or ends with a traffic light, depending on direction. Not the same, your assumptions are shit.
>free to go through PennDOT’s GIS
You did, and what you got is a bullshit comparison of two non-comparable stretches of road.
Monkey-see, monkey-do is not part of my schtick.
astrosail t1_j1d99hf wrote
You’re not doing any cyclists a favor by posting “dumb posts like this” to use a phrase out of your own book. I’ve biked across the old bridge so many times and feared for my life. It doesn’t matter if there are cars around or not—cyclists feel unsafe and unprotected while biking over it.
Also, they ARE adding bike lanes to the new fern hollow bridge in the spring paving season. See you there… oh wait, you don’t live here anymore.
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