Many streets in the Pittsburgh area used to have a median where the streetcars ran in a separate right-of-way: Center Avenue in West View and Brookline Boulevard in Brookline are two examples. Broadway in Dormont is the only one where the streetcars still run in the median. We could also count the Silver Line through Bethel Park as a broad instance of the same kind of development, although the streets between which the trolleys run have different names.
Other cities have King Boulevards; we have an East Busway that is officially named for Dr. King, but no one ever uses the whole official name, because by the time you have pronounced the decasyllabic name “Mar-tin Lu-ther King Ju-nior East Bus-way,” you have forgotten what you were talking about. Why not just “King Busway?” We do less honor to Dr. King by using his full name as the name of the busway, because no one ever speaks it.
At any rate, here is the East Busway with two of its stations, in pictures that demonstrate why this busway is such a useful transit artery. Along with the railroad, it runs in a hollow that winds through Bloomfield and Shadyside, giving it the grade separation of a subway without the construction cost. It is in effect a rubber-tired metro line. Pittsburgh invented “bus rapid transit,” and for the most part we did it right.
Above, East Liberty; below, Negley.
Two 4300-series CAF cars pass at Fallowfield station in Beechview.
A two-car Blue Line train comes in from Wood Street and heads out under the Allegheny to North Side; a Silver Line car departs for Wood Street. You can see the video at full resolution on its Wikimedia Commons hosting page.
The video is obviously hand-held. There are some very sophisticated video-stabilizing algorithms in our video-editing software, but the parade of identical square windows in a moving trolley makes them panic and jiggle the picture all over the screen, so we give you the video without stabilization.
Above, the First Avenue subway station (which is an elevated station, but it’s on the part of the line we call the “subway”) from First Avenue. Below, a CAF 4300-series Blue Line car comes in from the Panhandle Bridge.
The interior of a 4200-series Siemens car. These were the “LRVs” (for “light-rail vehicles,” which is better than “trolleys” or “streetcars” because it has three more syllables) that were ordered in the 1980s when the subway was built, and then refurbished to match the new 4300-series cars from CAF.
Architect Rob Pfaffman gave us just about the most whimsical subway entrance old Pa Pitt has ever seen, and he has been places and seen things. The whole station is unique, above and below the ground. There are no right angles, or at least very few. Yet from a practical point of view, nothing is confusing, and the station works very well for its intended purpose, which is to get us into a trolley quickly.
In Beechview, you always find a streetcar at the end of the rainbow.
Steel Plaza was designed in the 1980s, and its architecture is an interesting combination of Brutalist and Postmodern styles—the two most prominent materials are raw concrete and polished granite. It was built as a junction station, where the main subway line met the spur to Penn Station, which is not in regular service these days. In the picture below, the main line is on the left, and the spur is on the right.
