It is as if the City of Pittsburgh has set out to destroy the Strip District, more than a few astute observers have opined over a plan now barreling forth to eliminate one lane of vehicular traffic on Penn Avenue.
As the Post-Gazette describes the initiative:
“[The Department of Mobility and Infrastructure] (DOMI’s) planned ‘Penn Avenue Rightsizing’ would remove a lane of inbound traffic from 31st Street to 22nd Street, replacing it with a bike lane that would be separated from the road by street parking. The city has designated several gaps in street parking as loading zones for local businesses that currently use one of the traffic lanes.”
But as anybody who knows this very busy corridor understands, it would be an unmitigated traffic disaster that would place a large cork in what long has been a quite effective exercise in pure functionality.
And as those who long have opposed the city’s plan – but who have been shut out and shut down by city planners – now contend in a lawsuit, the changes are not only shortsighted but illegal.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday last in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court by the Strip District Business Association, formed in response to the city plan, it claims that the DOMI plan creates a public safety hazard by violating the 2018 International Fire Code adopted by the city in 2020 (which mandates access roads for fire vehicles must be at least 20 feet wide and unobstructed); that DOMI’s bike lanes, against the curb and separated from traffic by parked cars, “are not authorized under current state law”; that the plan is a “public nuisance,” interfering with emergency access and business operations, “causing irreparable harm to Plaintiffs and the public”; and that DOMI failed to properly advertise public hearings and consider feedback regarding the changes before approving them, that in violation of the Pennsylvania Sunshine Act.
In other words, an alleged illegal cluster cluck.
Robb Wilson, a Penn Avenue business owner and a business association board member, told the P-G that city officials “made a decision because they [think] they know better than all the businesses, all the visitors, all the residents and all the public safety officials that are against this.”
But they clearly do not.
Indeed, Penn Avenue in the Strip can be chaotic. But it long has been an organized chaos that, with a little patience, has worked quite well, if not seamlessly, for decades.
Thus, city government should leave well enough alone. Sadly, that’s always a tall order for the government-knows-best crowd that, in seeking to solve a problem that does not exist, creates a problem that never before existed.
Of course, when it comes to government planners, addlepatedness knows no bounds.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
