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.

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 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.

The Fair City part 4: Equitable Development & Urban Justice

The following explores how notions of urban aesthetics and urban justice are implicated in contemporary concerns with gentrification and “equitable development.” The term “gentrification” was introduced by sociologist Ruth Glass in her 1964 book London: Aspects of Change. Glass coined the term from the English title “landed gentry,” denoting the land owning social class, to refer to the displacement of working class residents by the influx of middle class residents into London neighborhoods. Since the original publication of Glass’ book, the term “gentrification” has been used extensively to refer to patterns of urbanization typically characterized by neighborhood reinvestment and demographic change. Despite these common elements in application, gentrification has persisted as a hazily defined and often contested term. Lance Freeman, for instance, defines gentrification as “the process by which decline and disinvestments in inner-city neighborhoods are reversed.” Eric Clark advocates a broader definition that understands the root causes of gentrification as the commodification of space, polarized power relations, and “a dominance of vision over sight.” Wyly and Hammel have considered the legacy of Glass’ linguistic invention, wondering how discourses of urban development over the last four decades would’ve proceeded without “gentrification” as an operative term. They write:

Without the word gentrification, it is hard to imagine what other term could have served as such a powerful rallying-cry for the many thousands of meetings and marches, city council sessions and street-corner conversations, among millions of people over the past 45 years working to protect their communities and to maintain the use values of neighbourhood life against the polarisation and displacement involved in “the production of urban space for progressively more affluent users.”

Neighborhood gentrification is closely associated with the displacement of existing residents, and displacement has increasingly been used in definitions of gentrification. Freeman states “displacement has become synonymous with gentrification in the way that White flight has become synonymous with racial transition.” Increased awareness of and concern with rampant gentrification in U.S. cities have resulted in an abundance of public discourse on the subject. Municipalities and community organizations have tried to position themselves in response to these developments in a variety of ways. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has made a concerted effort to include explicit discussion of gentrification in his public addresses. In contrast, Pittsburgh mayor Bill Peduto has made a concerted effort to avoid references to gentrification occurring in his city.

The city of Pittsburgh has reinvented itself following decades of deindustrialization, and the East Liberty neighborhood stands out as an exemplar of urban change and redevelopment. East Liberty has undergone a succession of urban redevelopment phases and population changes in the last half century. At different periods in the city’s history, the neighborhood has been used metonymically in official and popular discourses to signify starkly different conditions of urban development. Once the third busiest commercial district in Pennsylvania, post-war urban redevelopment schemes scattered residents and shuttered businesses, leaving East Liberty an icon of urban blight. Recent years have seen another reversal of the neighborhood’s fortunes, and today the district plays an integral role in the discourse of Pittsburgh’s post-industrial reinvention and revival. The narrative of East Liberty’s recovery, however, will vary greatly depending on who is telling the story. While being celebrated nationally as an example of successful and equitable neighborhood redevelopment, the recent changes are also accompanied by the displacement of longtime residents amid fears of rampant gentrification.

On October 14th 2015, mayor Peduto spoke at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the East Liberty Transit Center. Development of the East Liberty Transit Center cost $150 million, and the project was funded through various agencies, including a $15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The project represents a significant investment in the city’s transportation infrastructure, and part of an ongoing phase of reinvestment in the surrounding neighborhood. When the center was officially opened the local press referred to it as “the centerpiece of the neighborhood’s ongoing revitalization.” One headline matter-of-factly announced “East Liberty transit center opens, revitalizing area.”

Peduto does not use any of the familiar euphemisms for redevelopment in his remarks. He does not mention renewal, recovery, or revitalization during his address. The idea and ideals of renewal, however, are evident in his speech. Peduto says that current investment in the neighborhood is “doing it in a way that will build the future for everyone,” and cites the need for efforts to keep community members in the neighborhood, “so that those people that went through the hard times will be there to be a part of the good times, too.” Peduto has already cited elements of the neighborhood’s earlier “blighted” condition as evidence of the “hard times,” so clearly the transit center and other contemporary developments are evidence of the “good times”. The notion of revival is also evident near the close of Peduto’s address, when he declares: “We’re not even halfway there. We’re not even halfway of seeing this neighborhood come back to its full luster.” Peduto cites the importance of affordable housing for the continuing redevelopment, saying:

And fourteen years later, we stand here today, doing what this area has always been: a transit hub. And we’re doing it in a way that will build for the future for everyone. And that’s why it’s so important that we have an affordable housing investment fund. So that the wealth that’s going to be created, on both sides of the road, on both sides of the track, on Shadyside and East Liberty, will be invested so that those people that went through the hard times will be there to be a part of the good times, too.

Peduto’s mention of affordable housing received applause from the audience, a testament to the abiding anxieties concerning housing and displacement during the current redevelopment in East Liberty. Concerns about rapid gentrification in the neighborhood had grown steadily since the beginning of this most recent reinvestment period in the early 2000s. More than a decade later, the gentrification of East Liberty was complete in the eyes of many. In 2014, Ebony.com contributing editor Damon Young published an article reflecting on the changes in East Liberty titled, “Did gentrification make my neighborhood better?” Young cites the arrival of corporate retail tenants and younger, more affluent residents to the neighborhood, but also emphasizes the role of gentrification in displacing violent crime. The increased neighborhood safety, Young wrote, was clearly a beneficial outcome of the recent developments:

So even as I lament the injection of and appropriation by others - and even as terms such

as displacement and pricing out enter my consciousness - I value the neighborhood’s

current decrease of familiar and conspicuous danger more than I’m put off by the means

taken to get it there.

At the time of his speech at the transit center opening ceremony, Peduto was keenly aware of the threat of displacement facing residents of the neighborhood. Only two months earlier, he had personally responded to the most recent mass displacement crisis in East Liberty during an emergency meeting held with affected tenants. In the summer of 2015, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland held a two-day policy summit in Pittsburgh to discuss “housing, human capital and inequality”. During the summit, participants toured East Liberty with the goal of observing examples of equitable neighborhood development. When their tour bus arrived in the neighborhood, it was met by a group of residents and activists holding signs displaying messages calling attention to the plight of residents facing displacement as a result of gentrification in the community. The following month, residents of the 300 unit Penn Plaza apartments in East Liberty received eviction notices, stating that they had 90 days to vacate the premises. An advocacy organization representative referred to the evictions as “a mass relocation of folks of color.” Days after the eviction notices went out Peduto convened an emergency meeting with affected residents, tenant advocates, and city officials. The city was able to quickly negotiate extensions for the relocations. 

The Penn Plaza evictions and rising housing costs throughout East Liberty caused concern among residents about the availability of affordable housing in the neighborhood. In August 2015, mayor Peduto called for a “very proactive affordable housing program” and established a city taskforce to focus on affordable housing initiatives. By the end of the summer, Peduto and the Urban Redevelopment Authority announced a plan to delegate a portion of investment funds generated by the East Liberty Transit Revitalization Investment District for low-income housing.

As a salient term, “gentrification” may be more conspicuous in Peduto’s speech by virtue of its absence. Elvin Wyly and Daniel Hammel have suggested that decisions of whether to use the term “gentrification” are significant, “especially when asking questions of policy officials who have made the choice to avoid, redefine or suppress an uncomfortable word that so accurately describes the geographies being produced in so many cities.” They argue that “the most familiar and accurate term for a contested process is the one most carefully avoided by those institutions and individuals working to promote it.” In the context of concurrent developments in East Liberty, Peduto’s appeal to affordable housing and resident retention can be understood as acknowledging the occurrence of gentrification and displacement, without using those specific terms. 

This avoidance of “gentrification” as a term was made even more explicit less than a month after Peduto’s address at the Transit Center opening. On November 5, 2015, the Twitter account associated with Peduto published the message: “So far Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood has avoided gentrification while reducing crime & improving investment.” This sentiment was derided by the local press and community members as being wildly out of touch with the actual effects of the neighborhood’s development.

What are we to make of Peduto’s determination to avoid “gentrification”? Pittsburgh is growing, and its recent economic Peduto understandably wants to celebrate these successes and highlight the positive developments in the city. Peduto seems to want “gentrification without gentrification;” he wants the “orderly” reinvestment and development, without the associated “disorderly” effects of displacement that these developments often incur. Perhaps there is another lesson to be learned here regarding the connection between the aesthetics of urban order and the ideal of justice. The concluding section of this essay considers the unique function of urban space in cultivating a concern for aesthetic beauty and social justice.

References

City Channel Pittsburgh. “East Liberty Transit Center Ribbon Cutting – 10/14/15.” Filmed [Oct. 2015]. YouTube video, 42:55. Posted [Oct. 2015]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovDqFVlYOXc

Clark, Eric. “The order and simplicity of gentrification--a political challenge,” in Gentrification in a Global Context: The New Urban Colonialism, Atkinson, R. & Bridge, G., Eds. (2005). London & New York: Routledge: 261-269.

Glass, Ruth. London: Aspects of Change. (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964).

Lyons, Kim. “$150M East Liberty transit center opens, revitalizing area,” NEXTPittsburgh, Oct. 26, 2015, retrieved from: http://www.nextpittbsurgh.com/neighborhoods/east-liberty/ribbon-cutting-marks-official-opening-east-liberty-transit-center/

Wyly, Elvin & Daniel Hammel, “Commentary: Urban Policy Frontiers,” Urban Studies 45, no. 12 (2008): 2643.

Young, Damon. “Did gentrification make my neighborhood better?” Ebony.com, April 4, 2014, retrieved from: http://www.ebony.com/news-views/did-gentrification-make-my-neighborhood-better-506#axzz3Y3lwUoAT

Pittsburgh-Paris Climate Rhetoric Returns

As is now tradition in American politics, the first days of the Biden administration have brought the initial efforts at reversing Trump-era policy positions. Many of these opening salvos have to do with signaling a recommitment to acknowledging climate change. The president has issued several executive orders related to environmental concerns, and the White House website has reinstated mentions of the climate crisis. These measures have also sparked the return of Pittsburgh-Paris climate rhetoric.

Last week Ted Cruz tweeted that the Biden administration’s climate policies signaled allegiance to the citizens of Paris rather than those of Pittsburgh. In response, Pittsburghers took to social media to lambast Cruz’s pandering, and Greta Thunberg congratulated America for rejoining the “Pittsburgh Agreement.”

This discourse stems from 2017 when president Trump justified his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords by asserting his responsibility “to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” Trump’s invocation of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy is at odds with the city’s contemporary economy. The city reached its economic and population peak in the industrial era, and this period of the city’s history remains the age most associated with its image and identity. In the 21st century Pittsburgh sought to reinvent itself as a center of post-industrial technological innovation. The city has since attracted technology-oriented entrepreneurial investment and been a site of many smart city policies and technological innovations. Trump’s reference to Pittsburgh had less to do with the actually-existing city than with its place in U.S. urban imaginaries.

(Trump’s evocation of Pittsburgh may ultimately be the result of a speech writer’s inclination toward alliteration, a proclivity to which I am prone myself.)

Back in 2017, I absorbed Trump’s announcement of leaving the Paris accords with mixed emotions. I was visiting New York at the time, and caught the press conference live on TV in my Midtown hotel room. On the one hand, the willful aversion toward any environmental action filled me with an abiding existential dread. Yet when Trump uttered the now infamous “Pittsburgh-not-Paris” bon mot, I jumped for joy: I knew the president’s remarks would make a great anecdote for the Pittsburgh-centric dissertation I was writing.

The resurgence of the Paris-Pittsburgh kerfluffle also gives me occasion to relate my favorite personal anecdote about Pittsburgh mayor William Peduto. Peduto had positioned himself as a progressive mayor pursuing policies of technological innovation, environmental sustainability, and economic modernization throughout his mayoral tenure. His political vision for the city received global attention after Trump’s Paris accords press conference. Trump’s apparent invocation of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy prompted Peduto to distinguish the city’s modern economy from its polluted past, and to distance his own political commitments from those of the president. In a New York Times interview conducted in the wake of the president’s address Peduto promoted a range of environmental and innovation initiatives in Pittsburgh including the city’s medical centers, research universities, and local renewable energy industry.

That New York Times article also contained an off-hand aside about a neighborhood bar in Shadyside where Peduto reportedly went for a drink every day after work. A few days after the article was published I happened to be running an errand in Shadyside. When I realized that the errand would be finished shortly after 5 PM, I suggested to my partner that we have dinner in that bar so that I could verify the Times’ reporting. Sure enough, there was Peduto sitting at the bar. This must have been a Monday, because the local evening news playing on the bar TV did a story on the previous evening’s John Oliver program, which had dedicated a segment to the Paris-Pittsburgh exchange and to Peduto’s public response. From our table in the corner I watched Peduto watching news coverage of another TV show’s coverage of Peduto...it remains one of my favorite Pittsburgh memories.

Pittsburgh: driving transportation innovation

• "Ride-sharing" service Uber recently announced a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to establish a research center in Pittsburgh. As the Post-Gazette reported:

Uber, a San Francisco-based ride-sharing company, announced a joint venture with CMU on Monday creating a robotics research lab and technology center at the RIDC Chocolate Factory along 43rd Street that is already up and running. The partnership aims to develop new aspects of mapping, vehicle safety and technology with an eye toward autonomous taxi fleet development.

• From the PC Mag article:

"We are excited to join the community of Pittsburgh and partner with the experts at CMU, whose breadth and depth of technical expertise, particularly in robotics, are unmatched," Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden said in a statement. "As a global leader in urban transportation, we have the unique opportunity to invest in leading edge technologies to enable the safe and efficient movement of people and things at giant scale. This collaboration and the creation of the Uber Advanced Technologies Center represent an important investment in building for the long term of Uber."

• The Pittsburgh Business Times interviewed CMU computer school dean Andrew Moore about the partnership:

CMU, a pioneer in driver-less vehicle technology, operates the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab, which was formed after CMU's driverless car won the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007. Moore said CMU's established partnerships with companies and federal agencies on autonomous driving will proceed as planned.

• The announcement follows close on the heels of Uber receiving clearance from the state to continue its operations for another two years:

Those conditions included a requirement that drivers in Pennsylvania agree — in writing — to report ride-sharing activity to their insurance companies. Uber also must inform drivers of the specifics of its own insurance policy, conduct background checks on drivers, and ensure any vehicles used to give rides meet annual inspection standards of the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Uber and its rival ride-share company Lyft moved into the Pittsburgh area last year and have tangled with the PUC for most of that time. Over the summer, the PUC sought and was granted a cease-and-desist order, and its bureau of investigation and enforcement issued still-unresolved citations to individual drivers, and proposed multimillion-dollar fines against both companies.

• Amanda Waltz at POP City wrote about Pittsburgh as a driving force behind transportation technology:

The refurbished platforms -- which feature better lighting, overhead shelter, and a wheelchair-accessible ramp -- represent one component of the $130 million revitalization investment known as the East Liberty Transit Center. Partially funded by a $2.3 billion transportation bill signed by former Gov. Tom Corbett, the ongoing project, which is set for completion sometime in 2016, includes a pedestrian bridge connecting Ellsworth and Penn avenues, a parking garage, and additional residential and commercial space.

While residents can actually see construction progressing in East Liberty, there are many other innovative, yet less visible ways people are improving transportation for Pittsburgh residents and Pennsylvania as a whole.

• Bike lanes have been a key focus on transportation policy in Pittsburgh, as reported by Next City:

Pittsburgh was one of six cities selected earlier this year by PeopleForBikes to participate in its Green Lane Project, which takes municipal leaders on tours of cities with state-of-the-art bike infrastructure, such as Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto was one of the people to take that tour, and he came back eager to buy a bike for himself — and to position his city as a national leader in street design that accommodates bicycles.

• Alan Greenblatt wrote a profile of Mayor Peduto for Governing:

Peduto has a long list of other mega-developments about to come online. In addition, he has constructed a wish list of ambitious projects that include countywide light rail, a completely revamped sewer system, and higher wages for the thousands of Pittsburghers working for large health and insurance nonprofits. In order to accomplish all this, however, Peduto has fewer tools at his disposal than some mayors. He doesn’t control his city’s schools, and transit is largely under the jurisdiction of Allegheny County. In order to address the systemic problems of the city, Peduto knows he has to turn to a wide assortment of partners.