An oft delayed (and now $25 million) project to make Smithfield Street in downtown Pittsburgh “more pedestrian friendly” is expected to begin soon, the Post-Gazette reports. And, in the process, it will make it more difficult for vehicles to navigate the street – with corner “bump-outs” — and take away some parking.
“The goal over the next three to five years is to reduce traffic, install wider sidewalks and improve landscaping and public gardens between Fort Pitt Boulevard and Liberty Avenue.”
Oh, it might look pretty when done. After all, aesthetics are everything when constructing Potemkin Villages. But whether it will be functional remains a key question, especially if the vagrancy problem isn’t nipped in the bud.
And do remember, Downtown bicycle lanes – and traffic “calming” efforts elsewhere — already have become the bane of many motorists. Further vehicular restrictions might just make Pittsburgh residents and other would-be visitors say “Why bother?”
And what about all those would-be retailers that city officials are hoping to attract to the long-in-the-tooth corridor. The last thing they’ll want is less traffic, which means fewer eyes on, and less interest in, their storefronts.
University of Pittsburgh regional economist Chris Briem wrote an instructive commentary in last Sunday’s P-G saying we all should be beware of public subsidies for artificial intelligence.
That, as so many government jurisdictions have been falling all over themselves to throw taxpayer dollars at the endeavors. Still, others have been more cautious, but more so out of concerns environmental (i.e., massive water usage to cool AI computers) and economic (i.e., the demand on electrical generation that could threaten the already frail electric grid and spike electricity rates).
As we’ve cautioned before, while construction of massive AI centers certainly would create short-term construction jobs, the paucity of permanent jobs once such centers are built calls into question the notion that they somehow would be great economic generators, short- or long-term.
That said, they do pay taxes and they do stand to create down- and up-stream high-tech possibilities. Think research and development and ancillary jobs in each. Again, possibilities, not guarantees.
But, again, taxpayers are not venture capitalists and the risk should be borne alone by those private entities in need of such data centers to evolve and expand, no matter the end-use of their product, be it private or government.
Briem punctuates his cautions with the tale of the heavily taxpayer-subsidized Volkswagen assembly plant in Westmoreland County that turned out to be a major league failure after a decade.
It was failure, of course, of industrial policy. Which makes it all the more puzzling that in his pre-conclusion Briem opines thusly:
“None of this argues against either public and private investment in AI, nor against the need for greater electricity generation across the nation.
“In an ideal world, a coherent national industrial policy would be guiding the expansion of electricity generation capacity across the United States,” Briem writes.
Sorry, but the phrase “coherent national industrial policy” is an oxymoron. For as even Pitt’s Briem duly notes in his conclusion, “[P]ublic investment in AI is likely to come at the expense of many other economic development priorities.”
The simple fact of the matter remains that if is AI is the supposed be-all and end-all to economic development (and the supposed great profits to come from that), it, as with so many other proposed “public-private partnerships,” should not require public subsidies at all.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
