Category: Transit

  • The Transformation of Beechview

    Suburban riders on the Red Line, if they have ever lifted their eyes from their iPhones for a moment, must have noticed the peculiar anomaly of Beechview: a tidy and pleasant residential neighborhood with an almost abandoned business district. A good part of the abandonment was the result of a scandal-ridden failed urban-renewal project, in which the city gave millions to a private developer who vanished with most of the money.

    But now the mess is nearly sorted out, and storefronts in Beechview are filling up with interesting and useful businesses.

    The big accomplishment was finding someone to open a new supermarket, which will anchor the whole business district. The owner of the new Market on Broadway already has some experience operating a successful urban market in Oakland, the Market on Forbes.

    A new neighborhood coffeehouse gives the locals a place to gather and gossip.

    This 1920s-vintage storefront has been beautifully restored for the new Crested Duck Charcuterie, which will be an interesting addition to a neighborhood more accustomed to spaghetti and meatballs in a church basement.

    A neighborhood artist has taken over this little building that was abandoned when the ESB Bank moved to larger quarters across the street.

    Eventually, this clothing store will have a name other than “Grand Opening.”

    All these new businesses face an uphill struggle; most new businesses fail, and Beechview residents themselves, who learned to go elsewhere for shopping, will have to be lured back to their own business district. But Beechview, aside from a strong sense of community, has one great strength most other neighborhoods lack: the Red Line, which brings rail transit right to the center of the business district. Perhaps some of those suburban riders will glance up from their iPhones, see the new Beechview, and start to think of it as a place for dining and shopping.We’ll see.

  • Allegheny Station

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    The new subway line (which in this section, obviously, will be an elevated line) to the North Side is taking shape. This will be the Allegheny station when it’s finished. The line is scheduled to open in about a year.

     

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.
  • The Pittsburgh Metro: Almost There

    Update: This article is kept here for historical reasons, but the map here is out of date. For an up-to-date map, see Father Pitt’s latest article on Pittsburgh rapid transit.

    Old Pa Pitt is amused. He finds endless fun in the workings of bureaucracy. The Port Authority is now operating under its new system of route names, and it’s perfectly obvious what happened.

    Click on the image for a PDF map.

    Can you spot it? Though Pa Pitt drew this map himself, he took the colors as well as the route names from the official Transit Development Plan map on the Port Authority’s site. It seems quite obvious to him that, at some point early in the revision, some genius hit on exactly the same idea that Father Pitt has been proposing for quite some time now: integrate all our forms of rapid transit (“fixed-guideway systems,” to use the language of bureaucrats) in a single system, with lines designated by colors, and you’ll have a first-rate Pittsburgh Metro.

    Click on the image for a PDF map.
    Click on the image for a PDF map.

    This was the proposal old Pa Pitt had come up with. Compare it with the system we have, and note the resemblance.

    Why are the routes that run on the East Busway designated by the letter P? Why do the ones on the South Busway begin with Y, and the West Busway with G? Obviously because the lines are purple, yellow, and green. But you won’t find that connection made anywhere on the Port Authority’s map.

    Father Pitt would be happy to be corrected by someone who was privy to the actual decisions, but it seems obvious to him that the original proposal was just what he had suggested: include the busways in the system of colored rapid-transit lines. But somewhere along the way, some high-level bureaucrat lost his nerve. It would be too confusing to cal the Martin Luther King, Jr., East Busway the “Purple Line,” he thought. We’ll make it easier by calling it Routes P1 and P2, and we won’t mention the color purple anywhere just to keep from confusing people.

    This is the way bureaucrats think, and Father Pitt would not be at all surprised to find that they had thought that way in this case.

    Old Pa Pitt will admit to being a little baffled by the routes that use the Fifth Avenue bus lane in Oakland. They’re designated by R, and the line is dark red; but there’s another Red Line already. We haven’t quite run out of colors yet, you know. Orange is very popular in other urban transit systems.

    The good news is that we’re halfway to common sense. The map already shows us what ought to be. Here’s a case where citizen activists can take over. We can simply start referring to the busways by their colors on the map. Call the West Busway the Green Line. It’s a green line on the map, isn’t it? Call the East Busway the Purple Line and the South Busway the Yellow Line. Sooner or later, the Port Authority will adopt what we have already made the de facto terminology.

  • Rapid Transit to Oakland

    A good transit link between downtown and Oakland would change Pittsburgh from a city with very good, even enviable, rapid transit to a leader in North American transit. It would certainly stimulate development along the route, and that would make some very good money for clever investors who see the opportunity clearly.

    Here’s your chance to be one of those clever investors. Are a few hundred million dollars just burning a hole in your pocket? Why not give us the last essential link in our already enviable rapid-transit system?

    Click on the image for a PDF map.

    The Redevelopment Authority of Allegheny County has set up a Web site where interested parties can submit proposals. If you always fancied yourself a streetcar baron or a monorail mogul, here’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

    You can read more about the project in the Post-Gazette.

  • Wood Street Station

    Two colliding grids make up downtown Pittsburgh’s street layout, and the collision happens at Liberty Avenue, giving us a fine array of odd-shaped buildings. This triangular structure, built as a bank, now houses the Wood Street subway station below and the Wood Street Galleries, an important contemporary art gallery, on the upper floors.

    While the Gateway Center Station is closed, Wood Street is the terminus of the subway downtown.

    This picture was taken with a Kiev-4 camera, a Ukrainian rangefinder that Father Pitt loves with an unreasoning passion. He would like to state for the record that the hideously rusted car in the foreground is not his fault.

  • Fallowfield Viaduct

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    Late-afternoon sun catches a Route 42C train headed inbound across Dagmar Avenue on the Fallowfield Viaduct in Beechview. In rush hour, two-car trains run on all routes except 52. Route 42C will soon be the Red Line, according to the Transit Development Plan

  • Last Glimpses of Gateway Center Station

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    Father Pitt found time for a few last pictures of Gateway Center just hours before the station closed forever. In two years or so, we’ll have a big new station, but old Pa Pitt will still secretly miss the little old one just a bit.

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  • Gateway Center Mural by Romare Bearden

    “Pittsburgh Recollections,” installed when the Gateway Center station opened in the middle 1980s, takes us from canoes down the Allegheny to these marvelous modern mainframe computers with their gigantic reel-to-reel tape drives full of data, by way of the French and Indian War, Conestoga wagons, the riverboat era, a banjo that doubtless accompanied songs by Stephen Foster, and the age of steel. The Port Authority is raising money to have the mural restored and reinstalled at the new Gateway Center station. (UPDATE: The mural has been restored and reinstalled at Gateway station.)

    2009-10-30-Gateway-Center-02

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

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  • End of the Line for Gateway Center

    A kind reader who signs himself “Matt” had an excellent suggestion:

    Any interest in photographing or featuring the old Gateway Center Station one last time before it closes forever this weekend?

    2009-10-30-Gateway-Center-04

    It was never a beautiful or impressive space, but of our trio of odd underground stations, Gateway Center was the oddest. It will soon be replaced by a gleaming new station that will doubtless be more convenient and more beautiful. But old Pa Pitt confesses that he was always sneakily proud of the old Gateway Center station when he brought out-of-town visitors downtown. They might come from cities with more expensive or more comprehensive subway systems, but few subway stations are as just plain weird as Gateway Center was.  Notice, for example, the low-level platform, now closed off by a rail, that was built to accommodate the old PCC cars when they still ran the Overbrook route—a feature shared by all three of the underground stations downtown.

    2009-10-30-Gateway-Center-B-02

    The weirdest aspect of Gateway Center, of course, was the loop. Visitors riding the subway for the first time were always alarmed to see the station they wanted flashing by on their left, as though the car had somehow just missed it. Then came the long squealy loop that threw everybody to the right-hand side of the car, and finally the car re-emerged into the station, this time with the platform on the right side.

    Click on the picture to enlarge it.

    We’ll see more pictures of the old Gateway Center station shortly. Meanwhile, the subway ends at Wood  Street until further notice, except for the next few weekends, when it ends at First Avenue.

  • Pittsburgh Rapid Transit (updated again)

    Click on the image for a PDF copy.

    Update: The map above is Father Pitt’s latest map of Pittsburgh rapid transit. This article is kept here for historical reasons, but the map below is out of date.

    The new Transit Development Plan has changed [updated from “will change”] the names of the streetcar lines from route numbers to colors, which is so obviously sensible that Father Pitt wonders why no one thought of it before.

    Here is Father Pitt’s revised map of Pittsburgh rapid transit, which takes the changes into account:

    Click on the image for a PDF map.
    Click on the image for a PDF map.

    Once again, old Pa Pitt attempts to explain what he means by “rapid transit.” For Father Pitt, “rapid transit” is any form of mass transit that runs on its own dedicated track: in other words, what the Port Authority calls “fixed-guideway systems,” a lovely slice of terminology that would warm the cockles of a bureaucrat’s heart if there were any cockles in there. That includes trolleys or streetcars, the subway (which is just the streetcars running underground), and the inclines, all of which run on rails. It also includes the busways, which are completely grade-separated tracks that run like metro lines.

    The HOV lanes on the Parkway North are included as “rapid bus” routes on the Port Authority’s new system map (available here in PDF format), but not here; see an explanation at the earlier version of this map.

    So far we have what is, which old Pa Pitt is delighted to find is at least halfway to what ought to be. For the next step, Fathr Pitt will soon provide another map—one that shows how the Pittsburgh Metro ought to work.