From the BikePGH blog and newsletter…

In 2010, the City of Pittsburgh installed about 5 miles of bike lanes and sharrows, mostly in East End neighborhoods.  These lanes were a welcome addition to the emerging city-wide bike lane network, and showed that the City was serious when, upon receiving the “Bronze Bike-friendly Community” status, Mayor Ravenstahl proclaimed that there will be “25 miles of new bike lanes and sharrows in two years.”

We want to make sure this momentum continues, so we decided that we’d deliver to him a bunch of “Thank You” notes to demonstrate how much support Mayor Ravenstahl has for his bike initiative, and how bike lanes have positively impacted the lives of thousands of Pittsburghers.

We want you to write or draw fun, creative responses on our kinda boring form letter on how more bike lanes will change your life.  The idea is that hand-written letters are more effective than emails, form letters, and post cards, so write-away!

Click here for details on how you can help.

Sustainable Pittsburgh in collaboration with Pittsburgh BRT Forum Collaborators

Monday, September 20; 8:00 am – 4:00 pm; Duquesne University – Power Center Ballroom, 1015 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA

To register send full contact information to: info@sustainablepittsburgh.org (SPACE IS LIMITED.)
http://www.sustainablepittsburgh.org/3ELinks/08_26_10%203E%20Links.html#article2

No fee to attend.

A new on-street BRT service is under consideration in Allegheny County to offer faster, more reliable, and easier-to-understand transit service. The initial focus is to link Downtown Pittsburgh with Oakland and other East End neighborhoods. As has been realized in other cities, “Rapid Bus” service improves transportation and is an effective catalyst for community revitalization. Implementation of BRT in Pittsburgh’s East End could result in similar benefits for the Forbes and Fifth Avenues Corridor. This forum, focused on Pittsburgh’s Downtown – Oakland – East End area, will feature:

• Planning, development, and transportation professionals with BRT experience along with stakeholders from the community.
• BRT insights from other cities including: Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Cleveland.
• Secretary Allen Biehler, PennDOT
• Breakout sessions will facilitate discussion of BRT benefits, challenges and community development issues.

Some additional blog posts about BRT…

• “Transit-Enlightened Cities” Showcase BRT’s Brilliance (thecityfix.com)
• With Light Rail Stalled, A Push for BRT in Tel Aviv (treehugger.com)
• BRT system for Dublin (politics.ie)
• UNEP: BRT Key to Sustainable Urban Development in Latin America and the Caribbean (thecityfix.com)
• Construction Begins on Amman BRT (treehugger.com)

BikePgh asked each of the Mayoral candidates to discuss the status quo with respect to making Pittsburgh as bike friendly as possible, and asked them as well to what each of them would seek to do as Mayor to further cycling as a viable mode of transportation citywide.  The resultant questionnaire, which each candidate completed at some length, informs not only the cycling issues at hand, but also the candidates’ respective visions for Pittsburgh generally.  An excellent and illuminating read. 

And while you’re at it, why don’t you donate while you’re over there.  If I’m not mistaken, thanks to a generous benefactor, donations this summer will be matched one to one.  You’ll get to feel twice as good about supporting one of the most effective advocacy organizations in the city.

After reading Lady Elaine’s post about potholes I started thinking more about whether the pothole website was motivated by the upcoming election or if this was just part of an ongoing effort to improve communications with city residents. I read committeegrrl’s post last week about potholes and my first reaction was that she was really reading too much into the whole issue.  I decided to look up the history on the domain PittsburghPothole.com –  the domain was registered on Febrauary 26, 2009.  Which is pretty recent – if this pothole website was something that had been in the works for awhile – one would think that the domain would have been registered sooner.  The good news is it looks like they used Pittsburgh based Pair.net to register the domain.  

WHOIS information for: pittsburghpothole.com:

[whois.pairnic.com]
Registrant:
  City of Pittsburgh
  414 Grant St, Room 604
  City County Building
  Pittsburgh, PA 15219
  US

  linda.heidelberg@city.pittsburgh.pa.us
   +1.4122552152
   +1.4122552355

Domain Name: PITTSBURGHPOTHOLE.COM

Administrative & Technical Contact:
  City of Pittsburgh
  414 Grant St, Room 604
  City County Building
  Pittsburgh, PA 15219
  US

  linda.heidelberg@city.pittsburgh.pa.us
   +1.4122552152
   +1.4122552355

Domain Name Servers:
  NS4.PAIRNIC.COM
  NS3.PAIRNIC.COM

Transfer-Lock Status: ENABLED

 Created:     February 26, 2009
Modified:     February 26, 2009
 Expires:     February 26, 2014

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Pothole Problem: Our Swiss Cheese Roads (chicagoist.com)
• It’s Pothole Season: Over 1,300 Already Reported (VIDEO) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Pothole crews battle yearly scourge (thestar.com)
• Christmas Miracle: Another Pothole Filled (sf.curbed.com)
• Potholes ahead? Plan to avoid them, report them (bjsmith.wordpress.com)

During the first cyber meeting, Onorato addressed hard-hitting questions on why property assessments have increased, the need for better public transportation and the consolidation of city and county services.

You can participate by emailing questions to askonorato@alleghenycounty.us prior to tomorrow’s webcast. See the Allegheny County website to view the prior webcast.

Mayor Luke Ravenstahl‘s idea to lease the city’s parking garages (more here) has generated quite a bit of buzz in Pittsburgh and beyond.  The article from the PG was also picked up by Harvard’s Kennedy School here and on the blogs Milwaukee Talkie and Planetizen.

This idea has also been covered by some local bloggers:

• Cognitive Dissonance – Ed notes that this idea never took off in Harrisburg
• The Huddler – thinks this is a good ideas and that pensions in PA are out of control
• The Pittsburgh Comet – Is leasing the garages an idea that sounds too good to be true?
• Matt H – is worried about the parking prices going up
• Pittsburgh is a City – asks if parking rates make a difference, and if this plan makes sense during a recession.
• The Allegheny Institute – thinks that Ravenstahl is really thinking oursite the box with this idea.
• The Angry Drunk Bureaucrat – is not sure if this is a good idea or not and maybe having less expensive parking is a good thing.

Yesterday, Councilman Patrick Dowd addressed this issue – expressing concern that no one from City Council sits on the Parking Authority board. (PG article here).

What no one is mentioning…

Many of these articles about leasing the parking garages have quotes from Merril Stabile, who owns Alcoa Parking.

That’s doubtful, said parking magnate Merrill Stabile, owner of Alco Parking Corp., Pittsburgh’s largest private parking operator.

“No private entity that comes in to run these things is going to raise the rates to a point that it chokes out business,” he said.

Anyone who knows local politics knows that Mr. Stabile is a frequent donor to local politicians.  In 2007 he gave $10,000 to Ravenstahl’s campaign (PG  article here.  See this PG article which notes that Stabile benefits from parking tax cuts.

Merrill Stabile, whose Alco Parking manages some city garages and benefits from parking tax cuts.

So this is a win win for Ravenstahl, Luke gets to claim he is addressing the pension issue while working on a project that might likely benefit one of his campaign contributors.  Even if Stabile isn’t the one who leases the garages – he would probably prefer to compete with another business than a public authority who is willing to not put profit first.

Would leasing the parking garages put David Onorato out of a job?

The other issue… Cost of Parking vs. Cost of Downtown Revitalization

We have spent and are spending tons of money trying to get people to live and work downtown.  Like some of the other bloggers, I would like to see more people drive less and take public transit.  The fact of the matter is that Downtown Pittsburgh is competing with all of the other developments in the county and almost everywhere else has free parking.  It is a waste of money to spend money promote downtown as a destination and to ignore the parking factor.  Pittsburgh needs to stop spending money in a vacuum.  All of these things are connected and it would be nice if some of our elected officials would talk about how each of these things impacts the other.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So what to do? Members of Congress, here’s what I propose:

1. Transporting Americans is and should be one of the most important functions our government must address. And because we are facing a massive economic, energy and environmental crisis, the new president and Congress must do what Franklin Roosevelt did when he was faced with a crisis (and ordered the auto industry to stop building cars and instead build tanks and planes): The Big 3 are, from this point forward, to build only cars that are not primarily dependent on oil and, more importantly to build trains, buses, subways and light rail (a corresponding public works project across the country will build the rail lines and tracks). This will not only save jobs, but create millions of new ones.

2. You could buy ALL the common shares of stock in General Motors for less than $3 billion. Why should we give GM $18 billion or $25 billion or anything? Take the money and buy the company! (You’re going to demand collateral anyway if you give them the “loan,” and because we know they will default on that loan, you’re going to own the company in the end as it is. So why wait? Just buy them out now.)

3. None of us want government officials running a car company, but there are some very smart transportation geniuses who could be hired to do this. We need a Marshall Plan to switch us off oil-dependent vehicles and get us into the 21st century.

Chris B. deconstructs some of the “facts” touted in a recent Forbes.com report and P-G article about Pittsburgh being in the top 5 commuter-friendly regions.

He points out that the figures that put us in the top 5 are ridership numbers from BEFORE LAST YEAR’S BUS CUTS.

Where once we were ranked pretty high in transit usage, the only question at the moment is how far we have fallen. Will have to wait for some more data for answer that for sure, but that was the cost we will pay for the route cuts last year.

Some highlights from the comments—

• Downtown business scribe, Ken Zapinski,  asserts that increasing ridership and serving populations who don’t have cars shouldn’t (necessarily) be  goals of public transit.

Underlying your premise is that more ridership is the appropriate goal for the Port Authority (or any transit agency.) All things being equal, the more passengers, the better. But all things are never equal.

Thanks for finally putting it out there Ken!

• Blogger Ed Heath wonders what the “public” part of public transit is supposed to mean.

• Chris argues that prioritizing the commuter market over the transit-is-their-primary-transportation population will lead to even more residential segregation in our region.  And he reminds us how segregated we already are:

http://www.briem.com/gis/AA_county.pdf

Please feel free to join the conversation here or there.  Just please, join the conversation!

Don’t punish transit workers

Perhaps local corporations should make ‘concessions’

I read with interest the rantings of Ken Zapinski of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development titled, “A Time for Concessions” (Forum, Aug. 31). For four decades, I have proudly served as the attorney for Local 85 of the Amalgamated Transit Union and I negotiated and arbitrated the two most recent contracts between the Chicago Transit Authority and the unions to which Mr. Zapinski alluded in his article. Let’s get the facts straight….. (read entire article)

Mr. Pass confirmed some ideas that were being suggested elsewhere on the internets in recent days. (see: nullspace transit 1 ; nullspace transit 2 ; bram 1 .

I’m so happy to finally hear some analysis of the situation from the workers’ side.  The messages that have dominated the public discourse around the Port Authority budget so far have been so obviously engineered by the Port Authority board and executives (and the corporate and political leaders who put them there.)  I just can’t believe that it’s either the full story or that their positions are in the best interest of my community and my family.

As a city resident who supports a strong, better!, public transit system, I’m deeply suspicious of any proposal to save transit that will end up hurting the families of all of the unionized Port Authority workers.   I’ve been suspicious that there’s been a whole other side to the story than what we’re getting on PAT’s websites: pghtransitinfo.com and portauthority.org (PR which we, taxpayers, are footing the bill for).  Messages pernicously mimicked in and around all things Allegheny Conference for Comm. Development.  http://www.alleghenyconference.org  and nocommuterleftbehind.wordpress.com/

More commentary later from me, for now I’ll just agree with Mr. Pass when he writes:

In the meantime, if the Allegheny Conference is interested in the development of this community, it ought to seek ways to fund transit other than on the backs of workers. Since public transit is vital to the economic growth of this community, as recognized most recently by the fact finder appointed to analyze Port Authority contract issues, perhaps the conference should urge local corporations to buy bus passes for their employees. Better yet, when corporate America and/or its CEOs make exorbitant profits or wages, perhaps we could tax them to subsidize transit. Their backs are bigger and better able to sustain “concessions” than those of the working men and women who provide transit service to our community.

Check it out: http://nullspace2.blogspot.com/

Also– from Save Our Transit:

We will be picketing the Port Authority as well as Dan Onorato in the up and coming weeks asking them to STOP DIGGING IN THEIR HEELS when it comes to union contract negotiations-stop trying to tear apart our public transit system! STOP threatening our dedicated funding!

SO COME JOIN US! It would be great to have LOTS of other public transit riders AND supporters in this endeavor!

We just can’t sit and watch our transit system continue to be BEAT UP by our local politicians (Dan Onorato) and their respective thugs (steve bland)!

Here’s where we’ll be next week:

PORT AUTHORITY

WHEN? Monday, August 25, 2008
TIME: 12 noon till 1:00 PM
PLACE? Port Authority (6th and Smithfield st. Downtown)

DAN ONORATO

WHEN? Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
TIME? 12 noon till 1:00PM
PLACE? Allegheny Count Courthouse (436 Grant St., Downtown-outside!)

PORT AUTHORITY

WHEN? Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
TIME? 12 noon till 1:00 PM
PLACE? Port Authority (6th and Smithfield St., Downtown)

**WE WILL HAVE SOME SIGNS ALREADY MADE! WE HOPE ALL OF YINZ CAN MAKE IT!!

**IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS, PLEASE EMAIL Amanda at zeidersamanda@gmail.