Pittsburgh: The Steel Biking City
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ต.ค. 2022
- Recently, Streetfilms returned to Pittsburgh for the first time since 2014 just to see what is going on and any cool stuff that has happened since. Didn't really plan anything out, just met up with a few folks to ride and did a lot of rolling on POGOH e-bike share for majority of the days. Saw a lot in the span of 60 hours (and also flipped over the handlebars on a bike thanks to a badly placed parking concrete curb, healing up)
Here's a list of some of the cool things you'll see in this Streetfilm!
- Celebration of Bike PGH 20 Year Anniversary
- Pittsburgh's Bigelow Blvd Might Be the Most Complete Street in the USA
- POGOH Bike Share Relaunches with E-bikes, Stations do the recharging
- Montage: Riding Most of Pittsburgh Downtown Bridges
- Serpentine Drive....Now ONLY for Bikes & Peds!
- Pittsburgh's "Steps": 800 Public Staircases
- Won't You Be My Neighborway? (Cool Bicycle Routes Through Alleys & Low-Traffic Streets
that Mister Rogers would love)
- Asphalt Mural in Friendship Calms Traffic at 5-Way Intersection
- Hazelwood Green: Planning Bike Infrastructure for the Future
Pittsburgh doesn't get enough credit for what it's been doing to make the city more livable. As with every American city, it has a long way to go; but it's great to see what they're doing!
I hear it's been taken over by lefties.
yes, Pittsburgh rocks!
I go to college in Pittsburgh, and I actually really admire how bike-friendly it is (at least compared to most US cities). I was genuinely blown away to see a designated bike lane and bike traffic lights lol
I've been a Pittsburgh cyclist since the bad old days. And all of this is good.....but this is basically a tourist board video rather than an accurate portrayal of what biking here is like.
Painted lines and Sharrows passed off as infrastructure. Bike paths with multiple "get off and walk now" sections. Beg buttons for street crossing - which often aren't reachable without dismounting". Constant construction with zero consideration for bike detours or respect for bike lanes when placing temporary road signs. Even the "good" bike lanes are still only separated by flexposts, leaving cyclists highly vulnerable.
The 3 Rivers Heritage Trail network officially closes at dusk and is never plowed during our winters - showing that city leadership sees it as recreation, not transportation. Main streets have snow and ice plowed *into* the bike lanes, and then never cleared, leaving cyclists to travel in traffic for days after motorists have resumed driving at full speed.
And so on.
This is an extremely cherry picked video. They literally only show the east end and a little bit of downtown.
@@kevin0carl Gotta start somewhere.
Go to city council meetings. Ask for wintertime plowing of bike lanes. Have to start somewhere.
If Pittsburgh would run the T to the east end I'd consider moving back. Love my hometown.
@7:43 When making a bike runnel, I recommend making a rounded L shape instead of a 90 degree angle. When a runnel is located next to a handrail, the bike must be pushed about 40 degrees from upright to avoid hitting a bike pedal on the handrail support.
yeah, it's better than nothing but it looks awkward and you can see the pedal strike pretty clearly
Great news. An example to other cities and states in the US.
Shows the importance of local efforts!
Suddenly craving chippy chopped ham and an Iron City…
I left Pittsburgh in 2017 and I’m so proud to see what’s been happening since then!
Thank you for all community members doing these projects.
Wow that's awesome what's been done there
Amazing & bold steps Pittsburgh has taken to transforms itself! Protected bike lanes, bioswales, runnels for bike tires, defunct car lanes being repurposed for bike only lanes - This all makes me want to move here! I hope every American city can be modeled after this.
City Nerd is gushing about Pittsburgh. They looking like they are doing it right there.
It's been a while since I've been able to cycle here in Pittsburgh, but it really is a great city to bike in! I was excited to recognize nearly all of the neighborhoods and streets shown in this video. 💚
incredible video! I had never even heard of any of the bike friendly and urban development that Pittsburgh was doing until now.
Man this make’s Pittsburgh look attractive to move to, currently living in a city with a ton of urban sprawl, dense bike-able walkable cities are top of my list for my next move.
Good job on red bike lanes. I find the green ones to look quite strange tbh
I think blue lanes stand out the most, green blends in with foliage and red blends in with dirt, but I do like red lanes over the others. It's much better when the asphalt itself is pigmented, so the color lasts a long time.
@@mrmaniac3 Plus I've heard that painted lanes tend to get slick when wet, reducing their effectiveness as a bike lane.
I was biking in the City and its suburbs starting in the 1970s. the biggest problems was how to get over Mt Washington and then crossing Saw Mill RUN boulevard (PA 51). I would go from Oakland across the Birmingham Bridge, then cut over to St Josephine street then 18th street to St Pius street, then up Brosville Road (NOT BROWNSVILLE ROAD, which is what 18th street becomes once you enter Mt Oliver) then to Warrington Avenue the a short cur over and along PA 51 to West Liberty Avenue.
Brosville is a very narrow and steep street but it is possible to walk your bike up it (18th Street, Arlington Avenue and McArdle roadway are all less steep, almost bikeable, but I liked Brosville, if you decided to walk your bike up any of those roads, Brosville was the quickest to walk (in the 1970s you could NOT take our bicycle on the Inclines). The second quickest was Sycamore and then Vinecliff (But Vinecliff is now cut off so you have to use Sycamore to get to the top of Mt Washington).
What is needed is the city to first convert the Wheeling and West Virginia (Formerly Norfolk and Western line and Wabash rail line) to a trail with rail line (It is a low volume line with room for a bike trail next to it). That part of the line that have been abandoned should be converted to a rails to trail line). Convertng tat line to a trail with rail opens up the old railroad bridge over PA 51 to be used to get bike riders to Woodvale Avenue (and if you can get the required wavier from the Federal Government to convert the old Wabash tunnel to a bike trail while maintaining the one way HOV system used in that tunnel today). That would open up a way to bypass MT Washington and open up not only West Liberty Avenue to more traffic but even Brownsville road and PA 88 (Through PA 88 would need to rebuilt to have a bike land, in many ways it is unsafe for automobiles let alone bicycles.
Another thing the City can do is rebuild both Knoxville Incline and the Penn Avenue Inclines. Both were vehicular inclines to haul horse drawn wagons up those two cliff sides. These inclines could haul Cars and Trucks up those hillsides (The Johnstown Incline is a surviving Vehicular Incline). Knoxville went up from South 10th Street to the intersection of Arlington and Warrington Avenue. The Penn Avenue Incline went from the Strip District to the top of the Hill District and thus it is a easy downhill ride to Oakland and the rest of the East End.
The above has been proposed buy no actions have even been proposed, it is all talk and no real actions. What has been done is cheap and in many ways just removed bicycles from roads used by Automobiles, instead of something new for just the use of Bicyclists (and that includes most rails to trail bike trails, those are cheap and easy to create, but do they open up new areas for people to bike? In many ways no, we still have to share the roads with automobiles.
Thank you for showing my city in such a positive way. Unfortunately we have too many "bike on the sidewalk" options on the bridges. 16th street needs a car lane diet with a protected bidirectional bike lane installed - same for Smithfield St Bridge.
That complete street is a really good item. It still needs protected intersections in order to bring out its full potential, but it is practically fully featured other than that. Speed tables, level crossings, narrow lanes, center median refuges, bike lanes on both sides, and bus stops on the inside of the bike lane to prevent bus-bike conflicts.
The deteriorated roads that have been turned into bikeways are interesting, and kind of depressing. The road is deemed too expensive and impractical to repair, which would normally be a bad thing, but in this case it's a happy opportunity to take it over for car-free use.
I'm not a fan of the Copenhagen left boxes, solely because the intersection should be redesigned into a protected intersection. The box does the trick, but it should be a full redesign approach.
Pretty cool!
I’m mad that TH-cam algorithm didn’t recommend this channel to me until today. Love the videos!
Thank you! Please recommend to all your friends. For some reason the last few years TH-cam hasn't been doing much recommending of us. Don't know why!
oh wow that is really neat!
It always blows my mind to see American cities with better bike infrastructure than my large British town which would be perfect for cycling. I know Pittsburgh is more progressive than the rest of Pennsylvania, but it’s hardly the most left leaning city in the US; so I was expecting it to suck for cycling. But it’s really pretty decent. Here, we don’t have any infrastructure at all even though everything is in cycling distance. We have narrow roads filled with huge SUVs and not even any parkways or even pedestrian / cycling bridges. Or, at least none that aren’t completely impractical, or with steps when they could easily have gentle ramps.
@RealSweetKid politics has nothing to do with liveability? There are some outliers, like the Netherlands, which is quite right wing and has the best transport infrastructure. But once you go too far down the neoliberal path, and you privatise everything so that transport is about making a profit rather than investing that money into better service or more sustainable transport for example, then the link is very clear. And that has certainly been the experience in the UK.
@RealSweetKid Republicans blocked the parking protected bike lane bill PA HB 140 for over a year now. Tell them that
@RealSweetKid infrastructure is political. There's just some diamond in the rough conservatives like StrongTowns who recognize the need. And at the same time there's some carbrained progressives. But good, safe, healthy, and human scaled infrastructure is a pretty progressive issue. The standard conservative policy these days is cars above all else.
"left leaning city". What does that have to do with anything? Walkability or the quality of cycling/pedestrian infrastructure has nothing to do with left or right.
@@razorblade1596lol well you dont see many good biking cities in the southeast US outside of college towns, unlike say the west coast states. Even SoCal may be miserable to bike, but they still paint bike lanes everywhere and acknowledge your existence in the infrastructure. That's my experience as a Floridian living in SoCal now
Interesting seeing in the comments about the little design adjustment that need to be done because of the risk of bumping the pedals against stuff.
Join in and speak up for bicycles in your community.
Contact your local transportation planners and elected officials and ask for more protected bike lanes, trails and safe bike parking areas.
Another inspiring video!
This is amazing, in a lot of aspects it even looks better than most swedish cities!
Excellent video!!
I wish the SF Bay Area would learn from you guys....separated/ protected /dedicated bike lanes is a must to get a "critical mass of girls and old women" like in Holland or Japan. Parked cars btw you and moving traffic.
Wonderful! ❤🖤💛
Will have to return. Was there last year in March before the e-bike launch.
Cool
Taking away Schenley park to Sq hill bypassing the greenfield bridge in that one area was such a shame.
Wow I want to live there.
Ok so as a yinzer and a biker myself... HOW IN THE SWEET F*CK ALL CAN I STOP THESE POTHOLED TO ALL HECK AND BACK ROADS FROM SCREWING WITH MY DANG RIMS.... SERIOUSLY. ive gone thru 4 sets of rims this year and trueing them doesnt work.
Im being honest... Like are there any mega lightweight presta compatible wheels i could use that wont just crumble under the 6 inch dips and crunches in wilkinsburg's "bike" lanes?
The end was quite sudden. Did you chop off a sentence?
That's why it was an extra after the credits.
In many places the curbs are too high! You should be able to pass them without your pedals touching them. And the strangely shaped blocks show the same problem! The width looks nice but if you have to stay away at least one foot from the edge to be safe, the width looses two feet and becomes so narrow nobody can pass each other without risking an accident with a pedal against the curb.
Why, oh why, do you make these beginners mistakes???
I guess because those things are life saving defense walls against the pickup trucks.
Indeed. At 1:13 you can see that the cycle path narrows from 2 cyclists wide to only 1. The wild greenery forces the cyclist to go to the right side ; the too high unforgiving curb on the right is a danger to the pedal, which forces cyclists towards the middle ; the wall on the left side is downright dangerous, and eats 2 feet of space away. The devil is in the details, but these are pretty obvious.
@@peterslegers6121 Curbs in the US are required to be 4" or 6" in height by law. Even at 4" its still higher than most pedals lowest point.
@@schmitty8225 The Dutch have more like 4" on regular streets, but often none on living streets (woonerf), and streets and roads with a grass berm. However, cycle paths are no streets, they are paths for slow traffic. They can be easily raised up a notch, so you have that legal curb on the edge of the car lane, but the cycle path has forgiving 2" curbs with a 45° angled side/edge, along the adjacent divide and side walk. If that's not legal in the US, they should definately change it.
@@peterslegers6121 Unfortunately for less than half the population and half of congress, that sounds like socialism and a war on American Life so very unlikely it will get done.
Bakes lines in Pittsburgh make me cry.
Comment.
No helmets! That’s a good sign.
Just because you can cycle without a helmet doesn't mean you should. You can always slide because of sand and gravel and ice, always run into an inattentive pedestrian (or cyclist), always lose control on a hill. It's foolhardy to pretend that cars or unsafe bikeways are the only reason helmets are needed.
Wear a helmet always when biking.
I just moved here this year. Funny seeing some of these streets that I've driven down in my loud ass s#!tbox in ways that probably made the designers cry lmao
What?
Stop signs are stupid
The burgh really isn't a bike city... The weather is limited winter spring for 3 days blistering summer then rain and fall. Not the safest for cyclist.
Amsterdam is the capital of cycling and it rains 🌧️ hard all the time