BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Cool, thanks for doing this! Btw, we also saw a lot of people out doing maintenance on the south side trail today, any connection?

Saturday morning I woke up and decided to improve Pittsburgh's trail network, so I cleaned up some stairs and sidewalks of Glenwood Bridge. The turnout was light -- it was just me :-( -- but "we" got a lot done. See pictures at https://picasaweb.google.com/111415749895648787719/GlenwoodBridge These stairs help connect the (future) GAP trail and Homestead, south of the bridge, with Oakland, Hazelwood, Duck Hollow Trail, Frick Park, Squirrel Hill, Wilkinsburg, etc, north of the bridge. We should do more cleanups on the SW stairs, among other areas, in the coming months. Want to help? email me at ph@cs.cmu.edu As I was wrapping up the work, a jogger and a cyclist came along, and enjoyed the rubble-free stairs. Salty: I don't know anything about work on the Southside trail. That could be Friends of the Riverfront volunteers (I do work with them too, but it's hard to keep track of everything).

Paul, this Saturday a lot of people we busy pedaling for pantries. Could you provide an early warning next time?

Mikhail: Yes.

Great work Paul. It's a huge improvement.

Thanks for doing that Paul! It looks really nice.

Nice work. I agree with the others that some lead time would have helped. A couple of years ago I would go through there with shears and cut back on the bushes. but cleaning up the surfaces will make a significant difference. I should point out that some bit of government (the state?) is responsible for that bridge and that it's it's perfectly reasonable for (multiple) people to call in and suggest that the bridge be maintained for people as well as cars. It's our tax dollars too and they should be working for us.

I've adopted the Denver Street steps between Gold Way and North Craig Street, after doing a similar cleanup there in 2006. I spend maybe 15 minutes once or twice a year on brush clearing and trash pickup, though the first pass took two full mornings. I wonder how many other steps need a thorough going-over like this?

Ahlir: thanks for your past cleanups! About contacting the government about maintenance of those stairs and sidewalks - absolutely, it would be great if the city, county, and state each kept our sidewalks in good repair and coordinated well with each other. Hah! That was a nice dream, while it lasted! Although it sometimes feels like we may be "enablers" of their neglect when we clean a public space, the reality seems to be that if we don't do some simple maintenance, nobody will, and the sidewalks & stairs will become unusable. On a related issue, when I reported broken glass on the sidewalks of the 40th St Bridge to Pittsburgh in 2010; they told me it was a county bridge, so I reported it to Allegheny County; they told me it was a state bridge, so I reported it to PennDOT, and I got back this reply: "Customer complaint has been resolved. Resolution: cleaned area". It's better than nothing, but it was a one-time cleanup, not regular cleaning, as far as I know. Incidentally, some info on the Glenwood Bridge here: http://pghbridges.com/pittsburghE/0590-4472/glenwood.htm

So if we put calendar alerts on for all the bridges at a regular interval and said they had glass on them, which isn't far from the truth, we'd have clean bridges

feel free to clean the Highland Park Bridge and that sort of sidewalk that heads towards the zoo. I am tired of doing all that by myself, but I probably will do it again. I cut the trees down enough that it may last through this year along that sidewalk. I was hacking away with a chainsaw. People probably thought I was crazy. Anyway, I will be cleaning that mess in a couple of weeks. We all know PennDot doesn't care about sidewalks.

Maybe when we do volunteer work we should post little signs: "This sidewalk cleaned by volunteers , NAME DATE, NAME DATE, ..."

Last month I and two neighbors picked up trash along Glass Run road just a short distance from the end of the Glenwood bridge. We picked up 32 bags of trash in four hours along about one mile of roadway. We do this twice a year and it's always over thirty bags (60 bags a year!). People are pigs.