Mayor Bill Peduto announced a comprehensive transportation and place-making initiative for Downtown streets at Thursday’s annual meeting of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership.
“Envision Downtown starts today,” he told a packed ballroom at the Westin Convention Center Hotel. “In the next five years, the city will invest $35 million to [begin to] make our streets complete streets.”
The amount is closer to $32 million in capital expenditures earmarked by the city over the next five years, according to Mr. Peduto’s press secretary, Tim McNulty. These include upgrading traffic signals, street and sidewalk improvements, bike sharing and bike lanes.
“We’ll be asking corporations, foundations, the county, state and federal governments to help us,” Mr. Peduto said.
The intent is to make streets safer, more aesthetic, designed with the latest traffic technology to reduce congestion, with better networking of transportation modes and programming to induce more public interaction, public events and public art.
Envision Downtown, a public-private partnership, will be housed at the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership — whose members are business property owners and other stakeholders who pay an assessed fee for services the partnership provides. The initiative will be run by Sean Luther, a former CEO of Downtown Roanoke (Va.) and, more recently, a program director at the Green Building Alliance.
Mr. Peduto said the protected bike lane system, which includes several blocks on Penn Avenue, “will continue to grow” as part of Envision Downtown.
A committee will be established in the next few weeks to begin planning, he said.
Mr. Peduto followed Janette Sadik-Khan to the stage, asking for another round of applause for the former commissioner of New York City’s Department of Transportation.
“Janette, you give me hope,” he said. “When you hear her speak, can’t you envision that we can do this?”
Ms. Sadik-Khan, now a transportation principal at Bloomberg Associates, said that during her tenure with the city’s transportation department, 2007-2013, in spite of some opposition, “we moved quickly, in days, not decades,” turning traffic islands into green plazas, creating wide crosswalks, bump-outs to calm and slow traffic, 400 miles of protected bike lanes and 60 plazas that had once been roadways, including Times Square.
“It’s easy to forget that our cities were once really shared spaces that changed with the invasion of the automobile,” she said. “Better streets mean better business.”
New York City spent less than 1 percent of its capital budget on these changes, she said, “so it’s not something you can’t afford. In fact, you can’t afford not to.”
People complained that congestion would worsen with more bike lanes and that more injuries would result, she said, “but the opposite happened.”
Jeremy Waldrup, CEO and president of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership, said Envision Downtown will advise and guide new developments Downtown.
The initiative has foundation support to begin the planning process, he said, although details were not immediately available.
“There will be no city money used directly, but there will be complete coordination of efforts across departments as they make their decisions about budgets,” Mr. Waldrup said. “A lot of this change will come just from rethinking how the city does projects and incorporates them into a design process.”
First Published: March 19, 2015, 10:24 p.m.
Updated: March 20, 2015, 3:25 a.m.