The Post-Gazette reports that construction began Monday “on a multiyear project to change stodgy-looking Smithfield Street in downtown Pittsburgh into a pedestrian-friendly corridor with wide sidewalks, landscaping and other amenities.”
“The makeover, expected to cost upwards of $25 million,” the P-G notes, “will begin with the blocks between Forbes and Sixth avenues over the next two years. That is the core of a project that will be followed by work at each end so that the finished product crosses the width of the Golden Triangle from Fort Pitt Boulevard to Liberty Avenue.”
Oh, goody. The same city department that has screwed up so much traffic flow in Pittsburgh over the years – the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure (DOMI)– is behind this crock in the making.
From where the funding is coming is not reported and not even readily apparent on DOMI website.
How do we know it’s a crock? As the P-G further reports:
“Smithfield already has limited traffic with one lane of general traffic heading toward Liberty Avenue and an exclusive bus lane toward the Monongahela River. The new design will reduce parking even more and have limited delivery areas at businesses” along what once was a bustling thoroughfare.
Brilliant!
And if city officials can’t crack down on the still-chronic assaults, drug-dealing/use and public defecation and urination along Smithfield, the new lipstick on this new pig will be a multiyear, multilayered failure and a dangerous and smelly one at that.
Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Westmoreland County has been awarded an $850,000 U.S. Department of Transportation grant to bribe a new airline to replace Spirit Airlines, which left the Unity Township facility in bankruptcy this past May.
Spirit was the only commercial carrier at Palmer. But with Pittsburgh International Airport just over an hour away by bus, there are serious questions about taxpayers subsiding an airline whose services very likely will be duplicated, fully or by connecting flights, at PIT.
This new Palmer grant, said to be in the works before Spirit failed – what, to subsidize a second airline for Palmer’s just-finished subsidized $22 million second gate? — is part of the federal government’s Small Community Air Service Development Program and, in this case, would supposedly juice service to Myrtle Beach, S.C., and/or Florida.
But as Jake Haulk, president-emeritus of the Allegheny Institute, is wont to remind when such malarkey repeatedly raises its single tailfin salute to taxpayers, fundamental economics and sound public policy:
“What a waste. When the $850,000 is gone, what then?” asks the Ph.D. economist.
Any new airline will depart, just as so many have before at so many other airports (including PIT).
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
