Jeff Worsinger
Pittsburgh, 2011
In a little over a year the 1.2 mile extension of Pittsburgh's Light Rail Subway System will be open. This extension will take the system under the Allegheny River to the fast-developing Northshore area of the city. It will add two new stops that will service the baseball and football stadiums, the casino, Community College of Allegheny College's Allegheny Campus, The Carnegie Science Center, the Andy Warhol Museum, several nearby office buildings and the restaurants that are located in their ground levels, a charming riverfront park and more. City officials hope that upscale housing will follow shortly. The project will also replace the former end-of-the-line Gateway Center Station downtown with a reconfigured stop that will enable trains to pass through to the new Northshore stations.
It will also integrate with the more than 20 miles of rail now in place to further movement in the city of Pittsburgh.
So what's the problem?
This extension has been controversial because it adds only 2 new (and 1 reconfigured) stations and because of its high cost, now estimated at over 500 million dollars. Most of the money is coming from s Federal government funded dedicated to transportation infrastructure improvements. It has been unfairly derided as the subway to nowhere by some?and included among those are people who see no problem spending similar and higher amounts of money on building more sprawl-inducing highways through forest and farms in suburbia. The project passed a cost/benefit analysis before funding was obtained.
Originally in the 1990s this extension was to have included a 3-mile line in the other direction that would have linked Oakland, Pittsburgh's educational & cultural center as well as a major employment district, to the line. Thus the burgening Northshore would have been connected to the government and business hub downtown and the aforementioned amenities in Oakland.
Had this project not been killed in the mid-1990s, it would have certainly already been in operation and we would have had the entire 4 plus mile extension for little more than what are now paying for the 1.2 miles we will be getting. Major centers of employment, education, recreation and housing would have been brought together in a geographically and topographically fragmented city.
All of this means that central Pittsburgh would have been in an even better position to compete for development with outlying suburban areas. Still, this extension as its being built will bring greater ease of movement within the downtown area. With the availability of gas diminishing and its price headed up, it's even more important today to focus development in areas with existing infrastructure where automobile use is not mandatory. Downtown Pittsburgh fits this bill.
The American Public Transportation Association estimates that on average for every dollar invested in fixed rail public transportation 4 dollars of additional development are generated. The Northshore area of Pittsburgh is already experiencing over a billion dollars of development activity. By this formula an addition 3 billion plus dollars of development can be expected in this area in the coming years. Now is the time to be planning the expansion or creation of rail transit systems to serve densely populated areas in other parts of the country. The era of building more "free" ways to accommodate growth is over. Focusing our resources on movement within efficient urban areas is the smart way to move forward.
