Pittsburgh Bike Belt : A Modest Proposal

This has been a big year for bike trails in Pittsburgh, and there is the promise of more to come. Already we've seen the Point-to-24th Street / Strip District Trail opening and the long-awaited Duquesne-to-Munhall Steel-Valley-Coaster-Pipeline Trail opened on Friday. Both of these are tremendous.

This year we also expect to see the SouthSideWorks Trail complete, the PIT Airport connector trail will open, and we may see the Sandcastle connection open.

Which brings us to the matter of Names and Naming Trails. It's great to recognize people and to preserve memories by giving trails effective names like the "Mon-Whorf Trail". Some names are unwieldy, such as the Ruprecht S. and Penelope K. Rutherford Lower Burrel Multi-Use Health and Wellness Trail. If the official world gives an unwieldy name, the real world will assign a more pragmatic one, hence: Jail Trail, Casino Trail, Strip Trail, Southside Trail.

Although each community is justifiably proud of their efforts to bring forth their trails, for outsiders the distinction between the Southside Trail and the Baldwin-Brentwood-Whitehall Trail isn't intuitive. In the same way that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", the nomenclature of our trails restates the condition of our fractured local government.

With all due respect to the Bard, naming is not a trivial issue; on Friday, I had the occasion to call 911 seeking help for an injured rider, and it took a little while to suss out the specific name of the trail I was on. We may need a better system of trail names.

Fortunately, Pittsburgh has previously dealt with the problem of naming and marking routes that run through a variety of municipalities and domains. Let's look at some maps.

The map of today's Pittsburgh bike trail system looks like this:

(click image to embiggen in a new window)

Imagine What The Future Might Hold

Imagine what it would look like if the region is able to:

• fill in the southern gaps of the Montour Trail
• extend the Panhandle Trail on existing abandoned rail lines into West End Circle
• extend the Casino Trail to Neville Island

It might look like a belt system of trails:

(click image to embiggen in a new window)

Through a dozen local successes, we're on the verge of adding a new "belt" to Pittsburgh's infamous Color Belts: the Bike Belt.



I propose that we rename (and re-sign) the various Pittsburgh regional trails (in at least Allegheny and Washington counties) as the Bike Belt. Using the existing, much-loved and parochially functional color-belt framework would connect "new-green-bike" Pittsburgh with "yinzer-mullet-n'at" Pittsburgh.

New GAP Bike Trail Duquesne to Waterfront

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/GAPTrail
Yahoo: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Montour-Trail/message/4288

PLEASE JOIN US TO CELEBRATE!
The opening of the newest section of the Great Allegheny Passage. Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:00 am.

The amazing 3-mile section of the Passage includes two new bridges, a rolling ride along the scenic former U. S. Steel coke gas pipeline, and an exciting view of two of Kennywood's Coasters.

There will be an brief ceremony at the Whitaker Bridge to thank the funders, landowners, contractors, and volunteers. Bring your bicycle and ride the new section after the event.

RSVP to admin@atatrail.org or call 724-537-6905.

DIRECTIONS: Please enter at Guardian Storage (1002 East Waterfront Dr. Munhall, PA 15120) and you will be directed to parking for the event.

---

The new trail section is depicted in bright green in this hacked map:

• Note that the Sandcastle segment (due to open 11/11/11) is the remaining significant barrier to DC riders getting to downtown
• Notice how the Montour Trail is poised to connect to the Pittsburgh-to-DC Great Allegheny Passage
• Observe how the Panhandle Trail is poised to develop into an Oakdale-to-Oakland trail
• After Sandcastle, the remaining last bit of unfinished trail will be connecting Point State Park, the Mon Whorf Trail, and the upper level of the Smithfield Street Bridge for access to the Jail Trail

---

A report of an overnight Pittsburgh bike trip from this last week, West Newton to Rockwood and back.

Active Allegheny County Bike Plan

Today's Post-Gazette has words that aren't often placed in proximity to each other: Active Allegheny County Bike Plan.

What would do you do if you're a departing County Executive and you want to do a bit of legacy sculpting? You'd commission a report that describes things that are about to happen and you take credit for them. As long as they're good things anyway, that's okay with me.

We are pleased to note than Dan's staff has not placed an image of their boss' signature on their website. Luke Ravenstahl's staff is not as 2.0-savvy.

The planning document is online.

• Table of Contents
  
• meat of the report
  
• car-bike crash map and stats
  
• proposed County bike routes
  
• proposed bike route cue sheets
  

Touring Pittsburgh via Bike Trails

The perfect time for a downtown bike ride is during an out-of-town Steelers game. Enough people are watching the game to reduce traffic and any crowds, and there's plenty of open parking spots at the trailhead. Sunday afternoon the Parkway West was gridlocked so instead of riding the Montour Trail, I rode my bike on the city trail system and tried to map the various routes with my GPS.

I started at the south end of the Eliza Furnace Trail (aka the Jail Trail), riding north. There's a well-marked detour where the trail has been excavated at Bates Street. I took the Jail Trail past the Golden Triangle bike shop to the Smithfield Street bridge. Eventually there's going to be bike access down to the Mon Wharf trail and into Point State Park, but that's a next-year project so I ended up riding in a few blocks of street traffic to Point State Park.

From Point State Park you can ride over the Ft. Duquesne Bridge (excellent bike ramps) and join the North Shore Trail eastbound along the Allegheny River. That leads you to the recently opened replacement trail on concrete piers over the river (photo below), and then to the Millvale Trail.



On the way back, you can take a spur onto the Washington's Landing Trail, which is very nice but maybe a bit overgrown - it's a pretty narrow trail with reduced sight lines.

Back along the Allegheny River to the stadiums and then north along the Ohio River via the Chateau Trail. This was my first ride along the Chateau Trail, running from the Casino to the Penitentiary. It's a very nice trail, there's both green sections and industrial sections, and the Penitentiary with its concertina wire is an impressive sight. The trail ends just short of the McKees Rocks Bridge.

South to the stadiums again, and then my favorite bike-mile in downtown Pittsburgh: across the Ft. Duquesne bridge, a brief touch down in Point State Park, and then across the Ft. Pitt bridge to the west bank of the Monongahela. It's an incredible bit of bike infrastructure, you go from the North Side to Downtown to Station Square in a matter of minutes.

Then it's the Station Square Trail, to the South Side Trail. This is as nice a trail segment as you'll find anywhere. It does seem like the trail isn't clearly marked between REI and the Hot Metal Bridge, resulting in people riding their bikes on the sidewalk in front of American Eagle's corporate buildings, to their corporate chagrin. The sidewalk has signs "sidewalk closed to bicycles" and "use the tunnel park", but it's not obvious what the Tunnel Park is. Instead of telling people don't ride here, I think it would be more effective if they told people "you should ride over there", and mark the bike lane so clearly that any Yinzer Yahoo could identify it.

Tunnel Park is the green median strip shown in the photo below. It's called Tunnel Park because there's a railroad tunnel underneath the grass, but I don't know how a transient bicyclist could possibly know that. It's completely unmarked.



Next year (2011) the railroad is going to dig up Tunnel Park in order to raise the roof of the underground tunnel by 18 inches, permitting the track to carry double-height train cars. By 2015 the Panama Canal is going to be widened to accommodate bigger ships, and the double-height trains are intended to carry the anticipated increase in freight.

Continued south on the South Side Trail to the Baldwin Borough Trail, which terminates just short of the Glenwood Bridge. This week's announcement of an agreement with Sandcastle and the railroad means that on 11/11/11 (so they say) the Steel Valley Trail will extend further south to Duquesne, and then all the way to DC.

Back north to the Hot Metal Bridge, cross the Monongahela, right turn on the Jail Trail to the trailhead, and then around the corner on Swinburne Street to the Panther Hollow Trail. (The image on the right shows the transition.) I've never been on the Panther Hollow trail in daylight before, and I was really impressed at how much green space there is so close to a congested urban area. Reverse course at the top, back to the trailhead.

Total distance is 32 miles, takes about two-and-a-half hours.

It's a world-class trail system, right here in Pittsburgh. The trails show a very different view of Pittsburgh than you'd usually see, and you see all sorts of 'Burghers out there - kids and students and seniors, runners and rollerbladers. It's really remarkable that people like Mayor Murphy and Linda Boxx were able to build these trails given the hodgepodge of municipalities, the Yinzer resistance to change, and the nature of long-term projects.

If you'd like a really great map of the downtown trail system, email Friends of the Riverfront at friends@FriendsOfTheRiverfront.org and they'll snail-mail you a very nice dead-tree map.

Here's a GPS record of the ride made with a Garmin 76CSx.

Montour Trail Oasis: Enlow Station

Saturday I got to enjoy a bicycle ride with my daughter, and so I got to see something I've wanted to check out: the Enlow Station on the Montour Trail.


To get there, we took the newly-renumbered I376, Exit 56 (McClaren Road), drove away from the airport for about two miles and parked by the softball field.

We made a left turn onto the trail, which is a pretty optimal route for a young rider - there's a great illuminated tunnel on the trail, and the trail is quite flat. We rode east (getting off the bikes to cross two intersections) until it was time to turn around.

When we came back to the car we stopped at the Enlow Station, which is not quite a restored train station as much as an ice cream parlor fashioned out of a service station. Cold drinks, soft serve ice cream, hot dogs: all the needs of a recovering bicyclist.

There's not a lot of places along the Montour Trail to get a cold drink, let alone an excellent ice cream cone (I think of Farmhouse Coffee and the adjacent gyro shop as another oasis) and so I hope people will support the Enlow Station. Open seven days a week in the summer, 11am to 9pm.

Ohio River Trail: Coraopolis - Monaca - Beaver - Midland Bike Trail

But wait: there's more (good news about trails)!

The Ohio River Trail Council is working on a proposal to build a trail from Coraopolis, PA (north end of the Montour Trail) to Beaver, PA, and then to Midland PA on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border, where it ends close to the Columbiana, Ohio trail.



It's a very detailed proposal and the website includes some remarkably thorough documents identifying the history of the proposed route and all the municipalities and connections affected by the Ohio River Trail proposal. Also, there's a pretty informative Wikipedia page.

If When this is accomplished, you'd be able to ride from Midland to Washington DC on uninterrupted trails. Not everybody will do that, of course; it's enough that there will be a safe trail ride from Pittsburgh to Beaver, or from Monaca to Midland. You could certainly see people riding up from Pittsburgh, spending the night in a bed-and-breakfast, eating dinner at a restaurant, and riding back the next day.

(Midland, of course, is just a hop-skip-and-jump from the World's Largest Teapot. Talk about destination tourism!)

On the east side, this Ohio River Trail will connect to the Montour Trail, the Great Allegheny Passage, Cumberland MD and Washington DC. On the west side, the Ohio River Trail will be close to the East Liverpool-Cleveland trail they're building in Ohio, which connects to published trans-America routes. You couldn't build a new highway that would have a similar economic benefit.

The Ohio River Trail connects Beaver County to the existing trail system for Pittsburgh and DC, and will provide a future connection between the Cleveland trail system and Pittsburgh-DC. Who benefits? The benefits will accrue to the towns the trail passes through.

I believe that at the bottom line, in a zero-sum economy, these connected bike trails will do more for the economies of the towns they pass through than casinos will do for the places they're located. There's clean, green, fairly upscale money being generated in towns such as Frostburg, Meyersdale, Rockwood, Confluence, Connellsville, and West Newton. They've had their trails for a few years and are seeing real economic benefits from it. Towns like Coraopolis, Aliquippa, Monaca, Beaver and Midland will enjoy similar growth.

Great News for Pittsburgh Bike Trails

The last week has brought remarkably good news for Pittsburgh bike trails.

Two New Trail Bridges at Duquesne and Whitaker

By John Schmitz in the Post-Gazette on July 8th: County bridges all gaps but one in Pittsburgh-to-D.C. trail. Two new bike bridges have been placed across railroad tracks in Whitaker and Duquesne, PA.

The 170-foot bridge near Whitaker, which will have a 350-foot access ramp, will cross the tracks between Kennywood Park and the Rankin Bridge. The 137-foot bridge near Duquesne will have two 350-foot access ramps. The total cost of the bridge project is $3.5 million.

This will permit completion of the trail from the current terminus on Grant Street in Duguesne, beyond Kennywood, and connecting to the Waterfront Trail (which in turn leads to Sandcastle).

All that will remain incomplete on the Great Allegheny Passage after that is a one-mile stretch through Sandcastle Waterpark. Negotiations with the park owners have not produced an agreement that will allow the trail to go through.

"There's no solution just yet," Allegheny County spokesman Kevin Evanto said. "We're kind of at the same place we were a couple months ago."

Agreement Reached on Sandcastle Bike Trail

First seen at Pgh is a City, the Post Gazette's John Schmitz writes on July 13th:

Allegheny County and Sandcastle Waterpark are expected to announce an agreement within days that will allow completion of the last missing piece of a biking and hiking trail linking Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C.

"I really expect we'll have a formal announcement in the next couple days," said James Judy, vice president of operations for Palace Entertainment, owner of the park.

"I believe that is probably going to be the case," agreed county spokesman Kevin Evanto.

The combination of the two bridges and the Sandcastle agreement means that riding from downtown Pittsburgh to the main trail in Duquesne will no longer be a questionable, frightening act of courage along Route 837. It's going to be a ride you can take your children on and not be concerned about getting them killed. This is huge.

Amtrak Bike Service, Pittsburgh to DC, June '11

Posted in a message in the GAP Yahoo Group was an email message from Linda McKenna Boxx, President of the Allegheny Trail Alliance:

Yesterday at a meeting in Harrisburg, Amtrak officials announced that they would begin offering roll-on/roll-off bicycle service on the Capitol Limited by the end of June 2011!

This means that cyclists boarding at Pittsburgh, Connellsville, Cumberland, Harpers Ferry, Martinsburg, Rockville, or Washington, DC will be able to roll their bikes onto the train (reservations will be required; spaces will be limited at first), put them in a rack, and get off at any of these stops. Amtrak will be retrofitting several cars and needs to work out operational issues before the service can begin.

This is great news for all the towns along the Great Allegheny Passage and the C&O Canal towpath. This will add a great convenience and extra excitement to tourists who want to bike our great trail system.

This Amtrak announcement solves the logistical problem of making the round-trip without riding 700 miles; how do you get you, your bike, and your gear home after the bike ride? Now, if you're in Pittsburgh you can take the train to DC, disembark with your bike and start riding on the trail. Or, ride the trail from Pittsburgh to DC (my preferred direction), stay in the hostel and get on the next train to Pittsburgh.

My compliments to all involved.

Weekdays Southside Trail Closure

Temporary Trail Closure to begin June 21st on South Side Trail

PITTSBURGH, Pa. (June 11, 2010) A temporary Trail closure will soon begin
along a portion of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail as part of the Pennsylvania
American Water's Becks Run Pumping Station Replacement Project. The Trail
closure will be in place starting June 21, 2010 through early spring 2011. The
1.5-mile portion of the Trail being affected runs roughly from Water Street at
the Steelers practice facility to the dead end of the Trail adjacent to the
Glenwood Bridge. Signs will soon alert Trail users to the closure and note that
the Trail will be open and usable every weekend during the project from Friday
at 4:30 through Sunday evenings.

Thomas Baxter, Director, of Friends of the Riverfront stated, "It's unfortunate
to close the Trail for several months during the week, but we are pleased that
Pennsylvania American Water will open it on the weekends and restore the Trail
completely. Both the City of Pittsburgh and Urban Redevelopment Authority agreed
to a quick schedule of nine months, largely during the winter, and repeatedly
stressed that this project has to be done and is imperative for our region's
safe drinking water. I'm happy that they understand the need to complete this
project quickly before the last section of the Great Allegheny Passage is open.
Once that happens, another closure will be almost impossible."

Pennsylvania American Water will be making upgrades to its intake structure
located along the trail on the Monongahela River. These upgrades will
necessitate the use of the trail by construction vehicles and create a
potentially unsafe situation for trail users during project work hours.

"We understand that closing several miles of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail
will cause some inconvenience, but we have worked closely with all the partners,
including the City of Pittsburgh, Urban Redevelopment Authority and Friends of
the Riverfront, to ensure the safety of trail users and the timely completion of
the project," said Pennsylvania American Water External Affairs Manger Gary
Lobaugh.

Additional details on the project in relation are available on the Trail Status Page at
here.

DC to Pittsburgh Bike Trip

Trip report online of DC to Pittsburgh Bike trip.

Pittsburgh Urban Bike Trails

This afternoon I took what's becoming my favorite Pittsburgh urban bike ride - I started at the SouthSide Works, crossed the Hot Metal Bridge, and rode north on the Jail Trail.

As I approached Golden Triangle Bike Rentals, I slowed because they're usually closed when I ride by and I wanted to stop inside and look around, and they had the most remarkable thing: an overhead water mist station that was cooling off the cement plaza. It felt several degrees cooler along the twenty-foot long array of fine mist-makers (misters?)

In the picture below, the mist-making machine is the wavy structure along the bottom of the image:


This is an incredible idea for a place trying to encourage bicyclists to stop for a moment. It's eco-green. It's comforting. It makes you want to tarry for a moment. Truly awesome. My compliments to whomever had the idea. It's a brilliant thought for a trailside bike shop. I wish I'd taken a better picture of it.

I remember in summertime in Brooklyn, people who lived above storefronts would open hoses, water down the cement sidewalks, and sit in folding chairs set out on the cement because the evaporation would provide a break from the heat of the day. It was the poor man's air conditioning, my father told me.


I rode north across the Ft. Duquesne bridge, then east along the north shore of the Allegheny River out to Washington's Landing. I reversed and made my favorite downtown bicycle transition: I rode from the North Shore Stadium, across the Ft. Duquesne bridge, dipped down into Point State Park, climbed up the Fort Pitt Bridge, and crossed the Ohio River to Station Square.

The short bike ride from the Stadiums to the Point to Station Square is (in my experience) unequalled in American urban cycling. It's like riding from Manhattan into Brooklyn and then into Queens in ten minutes. It doubled my satisfaction that the cars were in rush hour slow-motion while I rode unhampered along the same bridges.


After Station Square I rode south along the trail back to Southside Works. There were a lot of people out and a surprising number of recumbents.

We're really very fortunate to have such a well-developed network of trails. When the final connections - the Sandcastle gap, and the Smithfield Street / Mon Wharf / Point State Park transition - are made, I think it'll be better than DC or Portland Oregon. It'll be the best urban bike trail network in America.

Tom Murphy's bike trails are really coming into their own.

Pittsburgh to Erie Bike Trail

It's an exciting time for bike trails, they're sprouting up all around the country (generally the rail-to-trail variation). Here's a map of the proposed Pittsburgh-to-Erie Bike Trail:




There's a great trail website, and also a growing Yahoo Group.

This will be a great thing. It'll open up a lot of small communities to tourism, it'll make the overall network more valuable (there's a cross-Ohio trail under development that'll end near Erie), and it'll make Pittsburgh bicycling more visible.

EDIT 12/06: This trail also connects to the Presque Isle network, including a 13.5 mile bike trail which is a National Recreational Trail.

Speaking of which (Pittsburgh bicycling), the Pittsburgh Dirty Dozen was held this morning, looks like they had nice weather for it. Photos will appear here.

Naming Hot Metal Bike Bridge Right

The most excellent Chris Briem has a recent blog entry at Null Space (highly recommended) about Hamilton Ontario's view of Buffalo vs. Pittsburgh. The article in the Hamilton Spectator features comments from former Mayor Tom Murphy — which prompts Chris to renew his call to name the Hot Metal Bike Bridge for Mayor Murphy.



I like(d) Murphy, then and now. I think he was a policy wonk willing to get his hands dirty, a choir boy who got business done in a traditional Democratic machine city; a mensch. Not perfect. Not canny. Led with his chin. Ended up in an agreement with the Feds to avoid prosecution. He did a better job than I would have.

He was a primary force behind turning waterfront into trails and usable space. He's now a Senior Resident Fellow at the Urban Land Institute.

I love naming the Hot Metal (Bike) Bridge after Tom Murphy, in that it recognizes a trail advocate along the trail. I'm not sure that it's the best use of this opportunity.

Naming rights are a big thing. PNC Park? Heinz Field?

What does the trail need? How can we use the opportunity to name the Hot Metal Bike Bridge to meet the trail's needs? What can we obtain by naming the bike bridge?



The trail (by which I mean the regional trail system, including the Pittsburgh to DC corridor) needs to figure out bicycle access through Sandcastle. It's the only remaining gap in the trail without a solution - the other gaps are agreed-upon works in progress.

Sandcastle is private property. Somebody owns it. Somebody paid for it, invested in it, developed it, gambled on it. I don't believe that eminent domain applies (nor should it). The trail organizations, loathe to route around SC because the options are terrible, need to find a way to induce SC to permit cyclists to cross their property.

The negotiated solution will probably include these factors: (1) a release from liability; (2) public investment in highway access to Sandcastle/Kennywood and drainage improvements; (3) some sort of marketing inducement-in-kind.

I think it might serve best to name the bike bridge the SandcastleWaterPark.com Bike Bridge — which would name, incidentally, the bike bridge that people from Pittsburgh would use to ride their bikes to Sandcastle.

It might get business done, and that's something Tom Murphy would appreciate.

We can name the Mon Wharf trail segment for Tom Murphy.

Mon Wharf Bike Trail Pittsburgh

Imagine this: you're bicycling into Pittsburgh from DC on the Great Allegheny Passage. You're riding north on the Southside Trail in Baldwin Borough, you've tried to plan a bike route to get to the fountain at the Point but however you try it, once you get to the Smithfield Street bridge the trail ends and you have to ride in streets with urban traffic for the last five blocks of your traffic-free ride from DC to Pittsburgh. You've ridden 352 miles on trails, except for those last five blocks in downtown Pittsburgh. And you're not riding a messenger's nimble fixie, you're riding a touring bike with heavy panniers loaded with gear.

That would be a mostly true report* now, but it's about to get a lot better. From the Post Gazette: Work begins on Mon Wharf trail link.
(My compliments to the artists, very nicely done)

I really appreciate the switchback ramp. It's very difficult to get a loaded touring bike up a staircase - there's a bridge in Harper's Ferry where you need to do that, and it's not very good.

This is welcome news. *There's also a trail section from McKeesport to Baldwin Borough that needs to be completed. That section is planned, approved, budgeted, and under way, with the exception of the Sandcastle property. The Sandcastle section seems likely to succeed, it'll be a negotiation between the owners and the County, probably mostly about liability.

I ride Pittsburgh-to-DC every few years with two friends, and I really think that once the Pittsburgh end of this trail is complete, you're going to see a lot of bicycle tourism. Also, once the PIT Airport to Montour Trail connector is built, you'll see people flying into PIT and riding to DC.