Mobility for Who? Pittsburgh Mobility Report

I’ve been deep in the weeds with a writing project — as well as dealing with all the other stresses of life and getting through the winter — so activity at the blog has unfortunately been sparse. However I wanted to make my regular weekly update with some further news about mobility in Pittsburgh (one of the blog’s favorite subjects as late). This Thursday (Feb. 17th) there will be a panel discussion with members of Pittsburghers for Public Transit and Tech 4 Society to discuss the current status of mobility initiatives in the city. From the news announcement:

“Under the Peduto administration, Pittsburgh has poured taxpayer funds and time into private mobility techology, while failing to prioritize core infrastructure needs such as sidewalks, bus shelters - even roads and bridges. High tech investment has also driven gentrification and displacement to transit-poor areas, exacerbated by acute lack of affordable housing.

Transit accessibility is an equity issue. SPIN scooters, autonomous vehicles, sidewalk delivery robots, and other technologies have all been touted by Pittsburgh leaders as increasing mobility access for residents. These technologies are often inaccessible to many who need transportation most: senior citizens, the disabled, youth, families, low-income people, the unbanked. As Mayor Ed Gainey steps into office, now is the time to revisit decisions to invest limited city resources into inaccessible technologies. ”

More details on the meeting and how to attend are available here.

Bridges, Biden, and the Sublime Object of (Pittsburgh) Infrastructure

Last Friday President Joe Biden stopped in Pittsburgh in order to use some of the Steel City’s post-industrial transition into technology research and development as the backdrop for a speech about the Infrastructure Bill. News of Biden’s visit only broke the day before, and the timing seemed coincidental for me personally because Biden was to deliver his remarks at Mill 19, a redeveloped tech office-park in Hazelwood that has featured in my research for several years and that I’m currently writing about (and also visited during Open Streets last July). The timing of the President’s Pittsburgh pit-stop would end up proving much more coincidental, however, when the Fern Hollow Bridge that traverses a ravine in Frick Park in between the neighborhoods of Squirrel Hill and Regent Square collapsed around 6:00 AM Friday morning, just hours before Biden was scheduled to touch down in the city. No one was killed in the collapse, though the loss of a major thoroughfare will pose ramifications for mobility and accessibility in the city for a long time.

The timing of the collapse seemed like an unwelcome surprise engineered by the Cosmic Coincidence Control Center (although I saw several Twitter users deduce that the bridge failure was a false flag event designed to further Biden’s radical-left agenda; a conflux of phantasms). Throughout the news coverage journalists and other commentators made the absurdly obvious observation that the bridge failure underscored the importance of funding for infrastructure maintenance. The impotence of these assertions is only exacerbated by the preceding months of political discourse that hinged upon the necessity of public infrastructure investment so that, you know, bridges don’t collapse.

Biden visited the collapse site prior to his speech and talked with the local officials and first responders who were on scene. It seems that one of Biden’s aides included the trivia about Pittsburgh having more bridges than any other city in the world into his briefing; Biden repeated the factoid throughout the day. I lost my bet that Biden would refer to his credentials as a “bi-partisan bridge builder” in his remarks, but I did correctly predict that he would trot out the well-worn anecdote about “going to the McDonald’s parking lot to use the WiFi” that seems to feature in every single one of Biden’s infrastructure stump speeches. 

Locally the Fern Hollow bridge collapse was seen as a call to action, even as experts advised that it will take far more than the Infrastructure Bill to address all of the region’s outstanding issues. It also sparked reflection on previous instances of infrastructural deterioration and breakdown.

At the beginning of this month I wrote about the inauguration of new Pittsburgh mayor Ed Gainey and the legacy of outgoing mayor Bill Peduto through the lens of mobility infrastructure. I highlighted Peduto’s choice to describe his place in Pittsburgh history as “a bridge over troubled water.” Immediately after the collapse of this troubled bridge last week the incident was politicized as residents sought to assign blame. Many assigned fault to Peduto: some ascribed the collapse to Peduto’s choosing to fund police over infrastructure (Peduto has been very active on Twitter discussing the collapse and responding to other users); others claimed it was the result of diverting money to bike lanes (this is incredible but true…the goddamn “bike lane” discourse lives on!).

The excited murmuring over Pittsburgh infrastructure that the Fern Hollow collapse incited seems like a locally-inflected variant of the politicking that played out in national discourse over the past many months. Even the signifier “infrastructure” has become as ubiquitous as its signified, just part of the background of everyday life. Something that you tend to take for granted and overlook until it breaks down or fails. The constant repetition of this word, the application of its meaning to a vast array of potential interventions, indicate a “sublime” aspect of infrastructure as both materiality and discourse. In a material sense the all-encompassing and pervasive nature of our infrastructural environments suggest an inexorable sublimity.

And in this recent political discourse – whether on the national or local level – the way the term is operationalized and the various ideological investments revealed in these debates illustrate how infrastructure may function as sublime objects, imagined as the satisfaction of our desires.

MLK Day 2022

It’s a snowbound Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Pittsburgh (as it is in many places impacted by Winter Storm Izzy). In recognition of the holiday I wanted to share a community callout recently posted by Public Source. The authors pivot from Ed Gainey’s recent inauguration as mayor to reflect on some lesser known Black leaders in Pittsburgh’s history, and ask readers to submit suggestions for other forgotten stories of Black Pittsburgh that deserve a spotlight. I learned a lot from the article and look forward to seeing what other stories come out of this community callout.

Moving forward in Pittsburgh

The New Year started with a boom in Pittsburgh, and this period of calenderial transition portends more changes than usual. When I returned to Pittsburgh this past summer after an extended absence I had to steel myself for the changes wrought by the pandemic. It seemed unfathomable that a popular nightlife spot like Brillobox would close, or a hallowed neighborhood haunt like Take A Break would go for up for sale (however, the proximity of both these venues to Lawrenceville leads me to wonder how much the pandemic can be faulted, or whether the economic impacts of covid-19 only exacerbated the already established patterns of gentrification, capitalization, and dispossession…see also the massive new development taking shape on the former Penn Plaza site, a project that seems to have shifted from stalemate to speed train after the advent of coronavirus.). The closing days of 2021 saw similarly unthinkable news with the announcement that Pamela’s was shuttering its iconic Squirrel Hill diner location.

The long tail of the pandemic and the pervasive encroachment of gentrification will continue to remake the landscape of Pittsburgh, just as they are shaping cities around the world. But this new year also marks a political shift in the city. Today (January 3rd) Ed Gainey will be inaugurated as the 61st mayor of Pittsburgh and the city’s first mayor of color. Over the past weeks there have been numerous reflections and retrospectives on the legacy of outgoing mayor Bill Peduto. For me, Peduto’s mayoral tenure will always be associated with mobility and infrastructure. Not only did his administration create the Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure, but these were central focal points for my research into neighborhood change and development in the city over the last several years.

The final year of Peduto’s term saw further inroads in transit policy and innovation. Last July the city launched Move PGH, which was touted as the country’s first transit app for non-car transportation. The new initiative was accompanied by the introduction of e-scooters onto Pittsburgh’s streets, part of a comprehensive approach toward making the city a “leader in car-free mobility.” The fleet of electric scooters soon became an ubiquitous presence in Pittsburgh and sparked a rash of complaints over where the vehicles were being ridden or abandoned on city streets and sidewalks. Local media began covering scooter sightings on highways and in tunnels. As with the introduction of autonomous vehicle testing on the city’s streets years earlier, the Pittsburgh city council had to explore ways of legislating and regulating the new transportation technology.

In August a transit report ranked Pittsburgh the third-best 15-minute city in the country. The 15-minute metric refers to the availability of daily necessities and amenities within a 15-minute walk or bike trip. The study also highlighted the impact of affordable housing on mobility and accessibility, echoing a recent report that linked public transit funds to racial equity. That same month census data revealed that Allegheny County saw its first population growth since 1960, while also providing further statistical support for the much-discussed displacement of Black residents from Pittsburgh.

In September the Peduto administration announced the 2070 Mobility Vision Plan, a framework for the next 50 years of infrastructure investment in the city along with a commitment to “mobility justice.” The announcement of the vision plan was preceded by a host of new and proposed transit initiatives from the Pittsburgh Port Authority. The latter half of 2021 brought numerous other transit-related developments in the city including debate over the impact that a proposed Amazon distribution center would have on the streets of Lawrenceville, and a grant to transform a section of South Side’s 21st Street into a “complete green street.”

The closing month of 2021 saw a final flurry of mobility moves in Pittsburgh. Mayor Peduto announced plans to transform an abandoned road behind Bakery Square into a “living street,” with visualizations of the re-imagined streetscape. Residents of Hazelwood received news of a long-awaited sidewalk improvement, while mayor-elect Gainey announced a pause on the Mon-Oakland Connector that has long featured in debates over the remake-formerly-known-as-Almono that has been incrementally emerging in Hazelwood. Also in December, the city passed new legislation that bans parking in designated bike lanes.

All of these mobility-related initiatives are “on brand” for the Pittsburgh identity that Peduto has promoted during his term, but the bike lane legislation is a particularly appropriate measure for his final days in office. As I’ve mentioned before, bike lanes took on a distinct symbolic resonance in the mayor Peduto era. The newly dedicated lanes and other cycling infrastructure became synecdoches for the generational culture wars: bike lanes were regularly mentioned in letters-to-the-editor and the comment sections of local news websites as Pittsburghers decried a perceived shift away from traditional Steel City values toward the lifestyle preferences of the hipster-millenial-industrial-complex. While my own political values were typically at odds with the spirit in which bike lanes were cited in these cases, there is a germ of truth in what these Pittsburghers were responding to: bike lanes have been mobilized by municipalities as attractors for members of the “creative class,” and the social disparities inherent to “walkability” and “complete streets” rhetoric have long been noted. Indeed, my main contention with Peduto’s tenure hinges upon an overreliance and uncritical acceptance of “creative class” development initiatives (in conjunction with a pervading ethos of hegemonic liberalism that often expressed the right sentiments while falling short of inscribing them into policy).

This inherent ideological antagonism between the residual imaginaries of Pittsburgh’s gritty industrial heritage and the glossy banalized tech-sector landscape that has taken its place was aptly captured in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial published on New Year’s Day. Aside from correctly identifying the dominant contrasting urban identities that characterized Peduto’s mayoral term, the editorial seems ambiguously ambivalent toward the outgoing mayor (the conclusion is that Peduto was good for Pittsburgh but could’ve been better?). The compromised tone of the editorial may indeed be the result of a compromise among staffers: the Post-Gazette editorial board has long been highly suspect if not entirely disreputable due to the nefarious and noxious influence exerted by its right-wing ownership, but it seems that the editorial board will also be changing in the new year.

Mayor Peduto has given several interviews recently, reflecting on his accomplishments in office with a considerable degree of candor (I want to especially recommend this excellent write-up from Public Source). In one such reflection Peduto said that he might be remembered as “a bridge over troubled water.” It’s such a perfect cap to Peduto’s history of on-brand messaging rhetoric, drawing upon the bridges with which Pittsburgh is so closely identified as well as the emphasis on mobility and infrastructure that he foregrounded as mayor. It occurred to me this week that Peduto was first sworn in as Pittsburgh mayor in 2014, the same year that I arrived in the city. I remember watching his episode of Undercover Boss later that year. His approach to governance and vision of the city that he put forth has been integral to my experience of Pittsburgh.

Moving forward, and as long as I remain in Pittsburgh, I will continue to track the unfolding patterns of neighborhood change and development strategies, particularly as they relate to both old and new mobility infrastructure initiatives. Some of the ongoing infrastructure investments I am most interested in are not necessarily driven by transportation. For instance, Peduto’s “Dark Sky initiative” to combat light pollution by replacing 35,000 streetlights with LEDs. And more recently the Pittsburgh City Council approved the designation of six greenways to become city parks, a move that among other things addresses the importance of urban greenways in a post-pandemic world.

Incoming mayor Gainey has reasserted his commitment to a more diverse and inclusive Pittsburgh. As I’ve stated before, I am excited for this new era of civic leadership in the city, while also anxious about the racist rhetoric (whether explicit or implicit) that will surely emerge in public discourse during Gainey’s tenure. I wonder what will replace “bike lanes” as the metonymic signifier for competing cultural values and ideological struggles in the coming years.

Pittsburgh Mayoral Elections Update

The Pittsburgh mayoral election will be held tomorrow, and the result will be historic regardless of which of the leading candidates wins: either Ed Gainey will be the city’s first Black mayor, or Tony Moreno will be the first Republican mayor since the 1930s. The endorsements, campaign ads, and mailers have been out in full force, and now I’ve even seen discourse around the election spilling out into the spaces of the street.

I took the above photograph at the bus stop last week. There are several things worth noting about the handwritten flyer, some maybe more trivial than others. For instance, the fact that Moreno’s name seems to be spelled as “Marino.” More troubling are the racist rhetoric and tropes, including the closing allusion to Chicago. While we could debate just what is intended by the term “safe” another passerby has already contributed a more pressing question: “Who is THEY?”

The Post-Gazette asked the mayoral candidates to select supporters who exemplified their respective visions for a recent article. The themes that emerge across the supporters’ comments have to do with expectations of community engagement and a desire to upend the status quo. The city’s approach to policing is another prevalent topic which has remained salient since last years’ protest movement and the broader conversations they engendered. Meanwhile at the City Paper Tereneh Idia has penned an open letter to Pittsburgh’s next mayor asking the incoming administration to foreground the experiences of Black women in the city.

Pittsburgh 2021 Mayoral Elections

On November 2nd Pittsburghers will elect a new mayor. Whatever the results, it will mark a post-Peduto era for the first time since I’ve lived in the city. I was completely caught off guard when Ed Gainey won the democratic nomination earlier this year. I had assumed that Peduto was a shoo-in for a third term, though admittedly I had not followed the primaries closely. Since I had relocated outside of Pittsburgh in the midst of the pandemic I was also not in touch with how the local political climate had been impacted not only by the public health crisis but also by the social justice uprisings and reckonings with racial disparities that unfolded across the country last summer. Indeed, the national discourse on policing was cited as a significant influence on the Pittsburgh mayoral race. In the wake of Peduto’s loss commentators situated the surprising results in relation to a nationwide trend against incumbents. 

Peduto had branded himself as a progressive mayor who promoted policies based around modernizing Pittsburgh’s postindustrial economy and infrastructure through technological innovation. He acknowledged legacies of unequal development in the city even though his responses to rampant neighborhood gentrification were underwhelming. In contrasting himself against Gainey, Peduto was firmly established as part of the old guard of mainstream democratic liberalism, with Gainey representing the new spirit of social progressivism. With Gainey’s primary win he also became the presumptive first black mayor in Pittsburgh’s history. This historic milestone took on greater salience not only in relation to national discourse on racial injustice but also in light of the specific disparities faced by Black Pittsburghers. Pittsburgh has long promoted itself as a “most livable city,” but the city’s own research has confirmed that this “livability” is often not available to its Black residents. The disparities are particularly pronounced for Black women in Pittsburgh, with many Black women talking about leaving the city. This accords with broader demographic trends of Black residents leaving Pittsburgh. 

The election is now framed as a contest between Gainey and Republican candidate Tony Moreno. The two have debated their differing visions for the city, and while policing remains a salient talking point they have also debated affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. The prospect of a Gainey administration is exciting, although as the Moreno mailer I received demonstrates (pictured above), the rhetoric around his policies will inherently be racialized in both overt and covert ways. During Peduto’s administration bicycle lanes became one of the most hotly debated topics in local politics. Peduto foregrounded a robust approach to mobility and infrastructure, but the bike lanes became a stand-in for a particular inflection of the culture wars as they manifested in Pittsburgh, a signifier of progressive cultural policies that signaled being out of touch with “old” or “authentic” Pittsburgh residents and values. If Ed Gainey becomes Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor then I expect that the fixation on bike lanes will be replaced by more distinctly racially-coded exemplars of development agendas and priorities. As of now I remain optimistic that the discussions have shifted to more explicit concerns with unequal outcomes in urban governance.