Submitted by MWBartko t3_10mst1r in pittsburgh
What infrastructure or amenities do you dream of Pittsburgh having?
First, given current reality what do you whish was a realistic priority?
Second, If funding and political will miraculously came through what would be your dream infrastructure or amenity improvements?
Third, full on sci-fi what do you hope the future of Pittsburgh looks like?
I don’t like the chance of protected bike lanes when residents on Stanton ave complained about losing one side of street parking to put in the new bike lane there.
Oh, simple -- make public transit so prevalent and reliable that people stop driving.
Oops, sorry; I was still in sci-fi dreaming mode, from the OP prompt!
Yeah one guy who complained to me said he has four vehicles and has trouble parking lol why do you live in the city then
Street-parking four vehicles should be punishable by law.
larger (here mostly meaning longer)/nicer/more connected parks along the rivers
I lived in Busan, SK for a year which actually has pretty similar geography to Pittsburgh (except it's coastal, not inland) and their parks were just incredible. We have a lot of decent parks in Pittsburgh, but it kills me that the parks along the water are so short and disconnected by comparison. Not only are they disconnected from each other, but the riverfront parks are a little isolated themselves from the city, or there isn't a whole lot of development around them. In Busan the parks were expansive with thoughtful landscaping, many flowering trees, and often sites of events that encouraged sightseeing and walking along the river in warmer months.
A very doable one is citywide composting.
My dream is to have high-speed rail, that will go from Columbus, Wheeling, maybe Morgantown, then Pittsburgh and from Pittsburgh go to Youngstown, maybe Meadville, Erie, Jamestown, NY, and Buffalo, NY. Full-on Sci-fi would take that to Toronto. If you remove Columbus and Buffalo, we'd make the most amazing megalopolis.
Once that becomes super successful, they will connect it from Erie or Youngstown to Cleveland, Toledo, maybe Detroit, and then eventually Chicago.
Heck yeah, a Japanese bullet train goes 220mph which would be PGH-NYC in less than 2 hours. They could build it as an elevated track above the turnpike 😍
Ooooh, that's good.
High speed rail to connect places a 2 hour drive apart with barely any traffic anyways? In the travel hot spot of the deadest parts of the rust belt?
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Sounds like something PA would do.
That's not the insult you think it is, visionless car man.
Oh, if the ideas dont need to be realistic or good, then why not just make it a rocket ship route, instead of a high speed train?if this is the science fiction ask, why not star trek teleporters.
Expanded light rail into more relevant areas of the city and surrounding counties.
High speed rail to other major metropolitan areas.
A community market downtown a la Faneuil Hall.
More mixed-use in our high rise buildings.
Public music art!
Put something in the lot next to PPG Arena. Please?
A nice amenity would be the return of a non-stop flight into the EU. We lost our Delta flight to CDG a while back, and our current flight to LHR requires customs/immigration stops twice to get into the EU.
I did Condor to Frankfurt and it was GLORIOUS
frankfurt is excellent for connections to pretty much anywhere in the world too
Yup, plus an attached ICE station. You can be anywhere in Central Europe in like 3 hours on a train.
I completely forgot we had that. Damn it.
I enjoyed it but my return flight got cancelled and ended up being a boondoggle.
Ooof that's rough
Ended up on Lufthansa so I did get to return on a 747 - it wasn't all bad!
Flying directly to Paris the one time I did it felt so luxurious as it's usually such a pain from here.
Flying to LHR/any other UK airport was always a pain pre-Brexit as the UK was never part of the Schengen zone.
And as someone from a less-sexy part of the EU, moving out to Pittsburgh and having a potentially 3-leg flight to visit family was definitely high on my list of reservations. I haven't gone yet but I'm dreading it.
I’d add that I’d love a direct flight to LA that isn’t spirit…
Light rail from Cranberry down 79 and 279 to downtown.
It is crazy how disconnected Cranberry feels… it’s only 30min away but it sometimes that’s a lifetime.
It’s “closer” than many parts of the northern suburbs in Allegheny because it takes so long to go east/west to get to 79 or 279 there.
It's pretty far away. You don't get to choose to live outside the county and then receive priority access to the city center
I’m not asking for priority access… but a bus connection every few hours would not go amiss.
A few completely realistic ones off the top of my head:
Pie in the sky: Fully complete all segments of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail, at least within city limits. Use eminent domain if necessary to connect downtown to Upper Lawrenceville, get the South Side trail off of industrial side streets, etc.
commenting to support the pedestrian amenities. there’s a lot of hostile architecture in pittsburgh and a lot of unsafe / un-walkable areas. so much is centered around cars. some areas in pgh have improved this and others are just so behind.
Pretty much what I was getting at. The highways are already built and important, and we’re not going to just wish them away. But getting pass-through traffic off of surface streets with some minor improvements without building more highways seems like a no brainer.
I really thought that shady and Forbes had a four way walk already? Maybe it’s active only at certain times of day?
You may be right but I've never noticed it. Probably about 2-3 weeks since I last drove through. All it takes is one car trying to turn right from Shady southbound to Forbes westbound to really gum things up on Shady. I suppose an alternative for Shady southbound would be to make it a no left turn at Forbes (not a ton of cars do that anyway), make the left lane straight only and the right lane a dedicated right turn lane.
Pretty sure it does yeah
No clue why you got a downvote for these ideas.
Who knows. Someone is always triggered. Would've been much more interesting if they'd engaged on what they specifically disagreed with.
Trains everywhere. To the point where people would laugh at you for being unreasonable if you were to suggest driving anywhere in the metro area
Can we just do some of the real common sense stuff? Take a look at optimizing some bus routes, a few more protected bike lanes to connect the network, pedestrianize Market Square, Walnut Street, etc. and then do some cheap traffic calming and tree planting.
Price tag on all this would be very palatable and create a noticeable QOL increase.
Bike lains for hilly ice roads..yes a priority I agree.
Ebikes exist.
You think they'd only put bike lanes on hilly roads when it's icy?
A rail connection to the airport would be nice. I wish the T was never converted the light rail. Full sized regional rail as it was would have been way better
A monorail down 30 and 376 from greensburg to the airport
The T extended north to cranberry and east to monroeville
Airport Rail.
Reduction in excessively-wide car lanes in favor of literally anything else... [wider] sidewalks, bike lanes, rain gardens.
Better rail connections to other Eastern cities.
Reduced (and enforced) speed limits to 20 mph within the city (although the reduced-width lanes would largely accomplish this automatically).
Making the Wabash Tunnel bikes only and/or restoring pedestrian access through the Liberty Pubes.
Some separated bike paths that aren't just cannibalized rail rights-of-way meandering through the woods but actually more direct routes than the cars get, like in Europe.
Modernized rebirths of the Knoxville and Penn inclines.
Neutering the Bigelow Boulevard meme road by adding speed limits, adding more crossings, narrowing lanes, etc.
Moving 376 somewhere else.
>Moving 376 somewhere else.
For what purpose?
Specifically, the segment along the Mon.
A comically expensive undertaking, to be sure. Hence its position at the bottom of the list. The more logical solution would be to have never put it there in the first place. Now it's gone all metastatic into the regional fabric.
So where would you move it to where traffic can get in, out of, and through the city?
The southern beltway should eliminate most through traffic east-west
Oh, um. I'm just gonna list dreams, I guess? I'm honestly not sure what's pragmatic / "realistic." Probably none of it, or some of it would have happened by now.
A huge, outdoor amphitheatre downtown that has free shows all the time, like the one in Chicago's Millennium Park
A riverwalk, too, while I'm stealing from Chicago -- with vibrant business running along at least one of the rivers
Buses that run to/through downtown that pass through all of our neighborhoods every 20-30 minutes, at least
The train to run through the North Hills, and not just the South.
Snow removal as reliable as the surrounding suburban areas have, where they run all night and you're ready with a drivable road in the morning
No potholes! 🫳🎤
Going straight for the sci-fi I see :p
Answer is No potholes for all three questions Alex… 😂
Reliable bus service outside of the east end would be a good start. Rapid transit to the airport and underserved parts of the county would make commuting easier for everyone, too.
PUBLIC TRANSPORT ZIPLINES!! From mt Washington to the point and from PPG to station sq…make future transportation fun
theres a public comment survey at www.talkpatransportation.com where you can post all of these.
A train system like they have in England and Europe would be really nice!
I wish someone would attempt to time traffic lights, at all, just one time. See what happens, what could it hurt?
Expand the T. Restore the Brown and Green lines and the old "street car" lines. Then expand the existing system throughout the whole county by creating new lines and/or putting any disused older rails back into service.
Reality: 61C at 10 min frequency
With funding: City-wide subway system
Sci-fi: No cars, everyone uses very reliable and affordable public transit
More efficient allocation of public space on our streets.
More and more comfortable outdoor seating, mores street trees, pedestrian only commercial streets (market sq, walnut, penn in the strip), an actual cohesive network of safe bike paths (not just painting a bike symbol in a 2 foot wide gutter), bus only lanes on busy routes
It’s a lot to ask, especially since selfish and entitled as f*ck car owners may be asked to slow down a bit or take a slightly different route or park 1 block away from where they used to, but even a few of these incremental improvements to our public streets would genuinely transform the city
Dream: Restore the entire streetcar/interurban/commuter rail network we had pre-1950 and expand on it, prioritize public transit over private automobiles, cancel the remaining portions of the Southern Beltway and Mon-Fayette, push for more sustainable zoning laws/parking minumums, and electrify the mainlines used for passenger rail.
Realistic: Fucking rail to Oakland. Maybe up the Ohio River as far as Sewickley with the airport as an eventual goal. Bus routes that don't all run from a suburb to downtown. Restore Allentown and Penn Station rail service. Modernize our water/sewage/utilities. Build some developments in the Lower Hill that will actually benefit current residents. Fix up our sad excuse of an Amtrak station and expand on the existing services.
Future: See dream above.
Everyone is talking about high speed rail or light rail or parks. But I am a simple man with simple needs.
Nice brick sidewalks lined with trees and more bike paths. Its so realistic it seems almost impossible.
Raw sewage treatment rather than dumping in the river
A LifeTime fitness
Basically more trains - light rail and commuter rail. More public restrooms and water fountains. Repair of the steps/placing more city steps in the places people live now
What we currently have - but without having to worry about bent rims and collapsing bridges and whether my bus driver showed up to work today and thinking about detours every time it rains.
Upping the frequency of the bus lines
Adding a long acceleration lane on the Squirrel Hill on-ramp on the 376
I'd start with bus routes that connect the South Side with Squirrel Hill, and one that does South Side-North Side without going through Oakland and Bloomfield. Longer term, perhaps completing the West Busway into downtown, and extending the East Busway.
I'd love a bike trail that goes along the Ohio River from downtown until Coraopolis and Sewickley. Also, protected bike infrastructure for going into the South Hills and the West End.
[removed]
A high line/elevated park like many major cities have
Paved bike lane following the t from south hills to downtown
I’d like to be able to just drive through a tunnel without congestion.
More glory holes
mckills t1_j65dacm wrote
BRT to the airport.
Protected bike lane network (yes - remove street parking)
Bump out/elevate/cover all bus stops
Expand POGOH network
Frequencies on key bus/T lines to under 10 minutes