Port Authority should be ready to move ahead within a year on a major overhaul of the Negley Station on the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway.
Plans for the station, at the end of Summerlea Street in Shadyside, call for about $2 million of improvements to increase safety and access at the site. Negley would be the first of a series of sites scheduled for upgrades under the agency’s station improvement program.
Breen Masciotra, the authority’s outreach coordinator, presented plans the agency developed in conjunction with GAI Consultants to the authority’s Planning and Stakeholder Relations Committee last week. The plans, similar to those presented at a September meeting in East Liberty, will go into final design over the next year and should be ready to move to construction in 2019.
The station sits under the Negley Avenue bridge with access from a paved path from Negley down to the station or street-level access from Summerlea on the outbound side of the station. To make the station more obvious, planners are recommending better signs and covered plazas at the Negley path entrance and on Summerlea, where some riders are dropped off.
In addition, the path from Negley would be revised to make it twice as wide and less steep for better handicapped-accessible access.
On the inbound side, the agency wants to reinstitute stairs from the bridge to the station that were removed several years ago. But that project will wait until the city rehabilitates the bridge, which has been delayed until 2020.
The station also would have bike racks, machines to distribute or replenish prepaid ConnectCards and wayfinding stations.
On the busway itself, plans call for installing concrete barriers between the lanes to create a formal crosswalk with flashing lights to protect commuters who are crossing from the inbound station to the outbound side. Right now, no formal crosswalk exists, and commuters cross at various points.
Another key to refurbishing stations is encouraging transit-oriented development around them, either on authority property or in the surrounding neighborhood.
The authority has about 16,000 square feet of property it owns on a slight hillside east of the outbound platform on Pierce Street. Early next year, it will seek proposals from developers for the land, which it envisions as a good site for mixed residential buildings with the potential for retail on the first floor.
Ms. Masciotra expects to present similar plans for refurbishing the authority’s busy Station Square Station next month.
Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470.
First Published: February 18, 2018, 7:09 p.m.
