Ahhh, but they haven't been ignored at all. What they have been is, designed, built and maintained in precisely the fashion local politicians need in order to achieve their objectives ...

Objectives which absolutely, unequivocally DO NOT including making it easier for people outside the City of Pittsburgh to get around.

PennDot doesn't give ANY money to downtown property owners.

What it does is give money to local politicians and planners for projects with vaguely sketched out objectives and purposes and those local politicians and planners make sure the projects that serve their own interests and those of the developers who support them get funded.

You all need reliable transportation to the Pittsburgh "International" Airport? Sorry, streets around the stadiums, casino and apartment buildings nobody will ever move into get done first.

Except that not how it actually works. The north shore connector is a pretty good example of how it does. Federal money is frequently given to regional planners for a stated purpose and the local planners make the final decisions on how to achieve the purpose.

Most everyone who supported doing so assumed it would be used for one of the proposals on the table to extend it to Oakland or the North Hills. It wasn't until after the money was approved that locals decided the tunnel to the stadiums was the best use of the money. Technically it meet the objective, it did expand the existing system but virtually nobody who sought or supported the funding imagined it being used is such a manner.

Same for the funding of the transportation to the airport, funding was provided as part of the airport project for the purpose of increasing access to the new airport site, not a specific project, and most everyone thought that would be one of several LTR proposals that had been made. Once the airport funding was approved locals opted to build a bus way instead which technically met the criteria of the funding. When all was said and done, one crappy bus route was all that came to be and the funding for that project disappeared down the rabbit hole.

That's how it always works for new projects around here, one big shell game.

You think that's good news? Lol! There are far to many examples to site in a single Reddit post, but I did give a few in my above post, of SWPA region being awarded plenty of money in the past for projects to improve and modernize the transportation infrastructure in the area. Virtually all of which has been redirected by local politicians and planners to projects that server their own political interest instead.

15 billion, 150 billion heck 1.5 trillion, you can give Penn Dot and Allegheny County all the money you can imagine and more and very little, if any, will ever be used to actually improve the mess around here. Do you know that the federal government has twice in the past allocated money for a beltway highway system around Pittsburgh? Take a couple guesses why it was never built.

Every penny of whatever they're given will be directed to serving the interests of downtown property owners and developers just as it always have been.

The most honest and direct answer to your question, the one Pittsburgh Redditors will hold their breath and stamp their feet about, is the public sector unions are in charge of the route 28 projects as they are all road projects. And that's why it's been in a constant state of repair since the day it was "completed."

Much of the transportation infrastructure in Pennsylvania was designed and built during the Great Depression and years immediately afterward when government projects were planned with one of the criteria being creating as many busy work jobs as possible to get and keep people employed. Tunnels and bridges especially were proposed and built where road ways around the obstacles would have made more sense, and very frequently simpler and more direct proposals were dismissed in favor more elaborate and complicated systems that require more maintenance precisely because they would employ more people then and into the future.

And now we're stuck with many of those decisions.

Stuck with them not always because there aren't better solutions or ways to correct the design flaws, but stuck with them because proposals to replace the bad ideas, like the Parkway East Bypass that would eliminate the bottleneck the Squirrel Hill tunnel creates and has been proposed and re-proposed again and again since the 70s', would mean far fewer jobs for Penn Dot in the future. Same with rt 28, many proposals have been made and dismissed to replace that road with others that make more sense, but Penn Dot and the politicians they support prefer to keep things the way they are precisely because it keeps the money flowing to them and serves another of their political interests ...

... that being population control, down vote away but it remains true none-the-less;

Back in the 80's Pittsburgh hosted a convention for some Society of Transportation Infrastructure Engineers (or something like that I can't recall the exact name) where they "awarded" Pittsburgh with the title of worst transportation infrastructure in the country. Not because of the condition of the roads, which if you can believe it were even worse than they are today, but because of what the engineering group called the "Berlin Wall approach" to population losses by local politicians. They cited numerous examples where transportation money was used to build/upgrade/change road ways, one of which was ... drum roll ... rt 28, in the least efficient and most disruptive way possible with the idea being that if they made it as difficult as possible to get in and out of the city that would dissuade people from moving out to the suburbs in increasing numbers as they were back then.

Obviously that didn't work but even in more recent years that "Berlin Wall" approach has been repeatedly employed to make commuting into and out of the city deliberately difficult. More recent examples being, federal money that was allocated to extending the light rail system out of the city to serve the expanding Pittsburgh International Airport project in the late 80's being instead diverted by local planners to a bus way projected instead, the decision to do so resulting in the head of the regional transportation committee at the time to resign and take a similar job elsewhere (in Atlanta I believe) with a public letter EXCORIATING local politicians and planners for choosing an already "obsolete" plan over real modernization for the purpose of serving the interests of public sector employee unions over the needs of the region ... that bus way btw was obviously never built. Other examples are the money intended to increase access to Oakland from downtown (the forever proposed Spline train and similar) and proposals to deliver light rail to the North Hills and beyond instead being used to build one of the biggest boondoggles ever (voted that by numerous watchdog groups) the LTR tunnel connecting the Northside stadiums.

Like it or not, the rt 28 project like all of the transportation projects in the area are under the control of political interests who think punishing people for choosing to live outside the city by intentionally designing inefficient and obsolete transportation systems and keeping them in a constant state of disrepair to the benefit of public sector unions is a legitimate function of the government.

Thunderdome style please...

Six mattress stores enter one mattress store leaves.