Pedal PGH 2022 (w/ video!)

Back on the last Sunday in August I took part in Pedal PGH for the first time. Although this event had never been on my radar, it's been held every year since 1994. Having now participated, I recognize the color-coordinated route markers placed throughout the city to guide cyclists from previous summers; I always assumed they were left over from the Pittsburgh Marathon or other running event. This year there were four routes to choose from in mileages of 10, 25, 40, and 60 miles. In an honest assessment of my fitness level I would’ve opted for the lowest mileage option, but the 10 mile route only covered a loop around the South Side river trail, and I’m on those paths all the time as it is. So I opted for the 25 mile City Tour route.

Suggested start times were staggered based on your intended route length, but everyone began from the same place beneath the South Side end of the Birmingham Bridge. It was fun checking out the variety of bikes and cycling gear represented around the starting lane, particularly the more fanciful conveyances.

Streets along the routes were open for business as usual, so cyclists were sharing the road with other traffic, but with the energy of a massive group ride that was an entirely new experience for me. This year’s Pedal PGH coincided with the annual national meetup of Black Girls Do Bike, an advocacy organization committed to growing a cycling community for girls and women of color. I saw numerous riders with BGDB gear throughout my route and they were among the most active in calling out stoppages or traffic at intersections, especially through downtown. There were two rest stops along the 25 mile route with the first being in the Allegheny Commons Park on the North Side.

The inclines began to overcome me climbing out of the Strip District and crossing the 28th Street Bridge. Polish Hill really wore me out although it was cool traversing new streets and seeing neighborhood landmarks like the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church up close for the first time. There were also some great views along that stretch.

The next rest stop was in Highland Park, which was timely for a number of reasons. Firstly, I was feeling fatigued and famished at this point and was happy to find a somewhat shady spot to wolf down the lunch that was provided. Secondly, during the ride into Highland Park I started having issues with my bike that made me nervous.

Upon mounting my bike and attempting to resume the ride my rear wheel fishtailed dramatically, confirming my fears that I had a flat tire. Thankfully the rest stop also included a bike service station and I was able to get the flat fixed.

From there it was back toward the South Side passing through Bloomfield, Friendship, Squirrel Hill, Oakland, and Greenfield. The ride ended where it began beneath the Birmingham Bridge.

I gotta admit I was pretty wiped out by this ride and it took my body a few days to recover.

Here’s a compilation of footage I shot during my ride. I tried to record the whole trip but my phone was too low on battery after a couple of hours, so this video only covers about two thirds of the route. It’s a shame because it misses out on some of my favorite parts of the ride, particularly going through Schenley Park into Oakland, and riding Swinburne Street down into Greenfield. Also, apologies to the North Side neighborhoods that I don’t know well enough to properly shout out in the video…Manchester? Chateau? California Kirkbride?

OpenStreetsPGH July: East End Loop (w/ Video!)

This past weekend featured the final OpenStreets Pittsburgh event of the year. The last route of the summer was a 4.4 mile loop through the East End neighborhoods of East Liberty, Larimer, Homewood, North Point Breeze, and Shadyside.

As with the events in May and June, it was another hot and sunny summer day for cycling. I think this was the hilliest route so far and it offered a lot of variety in the topography and built features of the different neighborhoods.

My favorite part of this route was the Homewood sections, which is the neighborhood that I’ve spent the least time in out of those on the Loop.

I took the opportunity to stray away from the route and explore some of the public art and architecture in the area.

In a bit of serendipitous synchronicity I came across the Holy Rosary Church. I had just learned about the existence of this church last week while doing some research and was already planning an expedition to seek it out.

This is one of three churches that architect Ralph Adams Cram designed in Pittsburgh (there is a fourth nearby in Greensburg), along with East Liberty Presbyterian aka the Cathedral of Hope in East Liberty. So this East End Loop route ended up being a bit of a Cram Jam.

Cram supposedly considered the East Liberty cathedral (pictured below, also along the OpenStreets route) his masterpiece and “most profound spiritual experience” of his life.

To commemorate this final OpenStreets of the season (as well as my completion of the hat trick with this summer’s events) I also made my first foray into cycling videography. I felt inspired by all the Terry Barensten riding content I’ve been binging lately, but rather than splurging on a GoPro I decided to experiment with just my phone and a handlebar-mounted holder.

I had wanted to shoot the whole thing in a properly cinematic 16:9 aspect ratio but the possible configurations of phone and holder didn’t work out (except for some footage looking down over the front wheel and street which I used to bookend the video). So I opted for a Kubrickian or Errol Morris-inspired 3:3 frame. Anyway, I edited together a compilation of raw footage from the ride and slapped on some explanatory place-marking titles in iMovie. The onboard audio caught a lot of my huffing and puffing up the hills, but I don’t think there’s too much of my swearing or muttering about saddle sores in these clips.

WYEP Summer Music Festival & OpenStreetsPGH June 2022

The last weekend of June was also the first official weekend of Summer, and it was a busy one in Pittsburgh. On Saturday I headed into Oakland for the WYEP Summer Music Festival.

The concert was held in Schenley Plaza. It was nearly 90 degrees fahrenheit with lots of sun. When I arrived most of the shaded areas on the edges of the plaza were occupied, so I situated myself in a sunny spot in the grass.

The infrastructure and trailers behind the stage occupied Schenley Drive.

One of the event sponsors was Pittsburgh Regional Transit, the newly-rebranded name for Pittsburgh Port Authority. Their booth with free PRT hats was very popular.

They also had one of the newly-rebranded buses on site for viewing.

The streets of Oakland had responses to the recent Supreme Court ruling.

Sunday featured the second OpenStreets event of the summer. This course ran from Market Square down through the Strip District and Lawrenceville. I rode across the Hot Metal Bridge to the northern side of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail and took it to Downtown, riding surface streets to the Square.

The crossing from Market Square to Penn Ave was regulated by event volunteers, just as last month.

From Downtown the course continued up through the Strip District.

People were still doing their Sunday morning shopping, frequently having to traverse the gauntlet of OpenStreets riders to cross the street.

Even with the Sunday shoppers the Strip District never felt as congested as South Side did last month.

One of the dismount zones was demarcated by a pair of giant purple hands.

As with previous events there was also live music throughout the course.

Helpful chalk writing alerted riders to road hazards as well as dismount zones.

The course went past Allegheny Cemetery.

The Lawrenceville Doughboy looked over the proceedings.

My ride along Butler St was invigorating not only for building the speed that I did but also for gauging what had changed and what had stayed the same.

OpenStreetsPGH May 2022

Following several years of always being out-of-town or otherwise unable to attend an OpenStreets Pittsburgh session, last summer I returned to the city just in time for the sole event of 2021. I wrote about my experience cycling across the Mon to Hazelwood for that event around Mill 19 last summer. This year the organization is back to a full summer schedule with dates scheduled for May, June, and July. The inaugural route this summer ran from Downtown to the South Side, with the South Side terminus located nearby to where the Birmingham Bridge intersects Carson Street, which is practically at my front door. So on the last Saturday of May my roommate and I pedaled out onto Carson to join the crowds gathering to enjoy a day of (mostly) car-free streets.

After a week that was frequently overcast and occasionally rainy, it was a gorgeous Saturday. The day also provided a reminder of the importance of applying sunscreen: had I known I was going to be out and about for nearly five hours in vigorous sunshine, I might’ve prepared better. The route officially opened at 10 AM and, as with the Hazelwood event last summer, the streets steadily grew more populated over the course of the day. Below is a snapshot of the scene along Carson Street in the afternoon.

Among the various venders and activity stations scattered along Carson Street, stalwart South Side cycle shop Thick Bikes had a dedicated event area where visitors could ride a unicycle, drink a beer, and listen to live music.

We stopped a while to listen to the music, but did not take our chances on a unicycle.

Further down Carson we reached one of the great crossings of the route: the 10th Street Bridge. Unfortunately none of my photos can do justice to the experience of the actual crossing, which I can only crudely convey as both “cinematic” and “immersive.”

On the downtown-side of the expanse we approached the ostensible highlight of the entire course: what the OpenStreets web site described as “a magically car-free Armstrong Tunnel.”

The passage through the tunnel did indeed seem magical, in the sense of feeling out-of-the-ordinary to the point of nearly being otherworldly. During our initial transit the traffic was light enough to offer plenty of breathing room. On subsequent traversals the navigation around other moving bodies was a bit more harrowing, especially during the darkened portions of the tunnel where visibility was very low (an effect compounded by my sunglasses). While I was somewhat exacerbated by having to maneuver around perambulators and pram-pushers during these latter runs, I was also tempted to dismount and join these pedestrians who were savoring their time in the tunnel, walking through and examining the details of the wall tiles, inspecting the graffiti, etc.

The tunnel opened up on Forbes Avenue, emptying us out onto the streets of Downtown.

There were a couple of traffic crossings facilitated by event volunteers and city workers on the way to the Downtown-end of the course. Even during our first transit in the morning the streets on the Downtown side seemed more populated.

The Downtown terminus of the route was at Market Square, at the base of PPG Place and in the shadow of the Highmark building and Gateway Center. We surveyed the various booths and picked up some OpenStreets merch.

On our return trip from Downtown back to South Side my roommate and I both noticed a fountain in a courtyard that we hadn’t seen before. The fountain is in the courtyard of the Allegheny County Courthouse, and even though I have been in that complex multiple times (for various purposes of varying pleasantness) I had never noticed the fountain. Evidently many other riders were making a similar discovery on this Saturday afternoon, as several cyclists joined us in deviating from the route for a photo-op.

Back in the South Side we found Carson Street significantly more crowded than we had left it. Close to home we stopped and watched a stilt-wearing street performer’s show. He had amped-up energy and was doing great crowd work, but we decided to leave after he kept deferring his promised knife juggling routine.

We made the trip back Downtown. After arriving in Market Square we decided to continue on to the Point. This involved leaving the closed-streets car-free course and entering actual downtown traffic, which was a first for me. But it was a quick trip along the bike lane past the Gateway T Station and over to Point State Park. Once arrived at the central fountain we found that many other cyclists had decided to travel the extra distance.

From this point we decided to ride back to South Side along the river trail, cycling up to the Hot Metal Bridge to cross back over the Mon. We then made the round trip from South Side to Downtown and back a third time. All told we rode for nearly 20 miles and 5 hours. As I said before, it was a good reminder of the importance of sunscreen.

OpenStreetsPGH 2021 Hazelwood

Since 2015 OpenStreetsPGH has closed selected Pittsburgh streets off to vehicle traffic several times each summer. Organized by Bike Pittsburgh, the events are sort of outdoor festivals that open up a few miles of city streets for walking, cycling, and other forms of non-motorized transit. I’ve always wanted to attend, but during each of the previous events I have been out of town or otherwise engaged. As previously noted, I’ve just moved back to the city and have been regularly patronizing the South Side stretch of the Three Rivers Heritage Trail. On one of these regular recent visits I spotted a sign advertising the next OpenStreets event, occurring in Hazelwood on July 25th. So here was my chance to finally attend an OpenStreets, and since Hazelwood is just a quick jaunt across the river from my apartment, I would be able to cycle to the event.

Last year the usual schedule of OpenStreets events during the summer was interrupted due to COVID. This year the Hazelwood event is the first and only OpenStreets of 2021. Scott Bricker, executive director of Bike Pittsburgh, described the renewed urgency of the event thusly:

“OpenStreetsPGH invites the community to reimagine public spaces, something we saw the incredible necessity of during the pandemic. As the world starts to get back to normal, we are excited to present OpenStreetsPGH as a mini-event where people of all ages can get outside for some socially distanced recreation, enjoy a day of car-free fun on city streets, and check out some awesome bike infrastructure along the way.”

So this past Sunday I embarked by bicycle around 10 AM, the designated event start time. I’m still a novice urban cyclist, and when I had planned my prospective route the day before my greatest concern was how to get from the Hot Metal Bridge to the OpenStreets route on Blair St. Thankfully I found that Bike Pittsburgh representatives and public safety officials were managing the intersection between the bridge and the start of the trail (and enforcing a mandatory dismount zone at the crossing).

This was my first time back in Hazelwood since 2017 when I was researching what was then called the Almono development. As part of my broader research into the impact of Uber’s autonomous vehicle research in the city, I attended community meetings and interviewed developers about the plans to transform an urban brownfield into a cutting edge technology park. So it seemed fitting that my first experience with OpenStreets would be in the neighborhood that had featured so prominently in Pittsburgh mobility initiatives and in my own research.

The OpenStreets excursion therefore provided me with my first up-close look at the progress that has taken place at the Mill 19 site. The massive superstructure of a disused steelworks has been repurposed as a skeletal shell surrounding technology research offices, a visual-material confluence of Pittsburgh’s industrial past and the contemporary economy.

The redevelopment is an impressive blend of adaptive reuse and postmodern architectural flourishes. This sign gives a look at the site’s forward-looking innovative tenantry with names like “Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing” and “Manufacturing Futures Initiative.”

Expansion of the Mill 19 site is ongoing. Here you can see a banner promoting the next phase, and a look into the yet-to-be-redeveloped shell.

There were also sandwich boards drawing attention to some of the cycling-friendly transit infrastructure that has been built in Hazelwood Green. This sign highlights a floating bus stop configuration:

I completed a couple of circuits of the OpenStreets route then departed Hazelwood as the streets became more congested and the skies threatened to rain. Excepting the transition to Hot Metal Bridge, I managed to cycle all the way back to my apartment without dismounting. In my previous excursions I’ve lacked the confidence to ride along E Carson St, opting instead to walk my bike until getting to dedicated bike paths. My return ride today was not strictly regulation, but I felt accomplished and more confident in general. When I first moved to Pittsburgh several years ago, the bicycle I’d arrived with sat idle for a year before I finally sold it. The irregular topography of East End neighborhoods intimidated me, and I witnessed a cyclist’s death in traffic in Oakland. My current bike was a pandemic purchase, and I’m glad I brought it with me to the city. South Side Flats has a more welcoming topography and a robust network of cycling routes and other transit infrastructure.