BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

btw, be sure to watch the video...the music is amazing

Wow. Put some wings on that bus and it would totally reflect a recurring dream of mine.

Skybus certainly blows digging under the river out of the water. Not to mention the impossibly rad accompanying video.

I'm still convinced Skybus would have worked.

Apparently it was killed politically, not practically, by the no-nonsense Democrat mayor in the early 70's. Also, some people were overly fearful of driver-less buses. In actuality the system was pretty groundbreaking and possibly could have made Pittsburgh a renowned transit model... possibly.

I still think it would have worked. It got killed basically the same way Maglev is getting killed now. Tech that is advanced, but too expensive and not meeting the most pressing transit demands of the city.

couldn't they have like, put a driver in it?

f'n cool. dude's got some serious transit love on his web page.

Now I've got 'The Simpsons' monorail song in my head.

Now this is a bus;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdJrUuoU53s&feature=related

There's a pretty good history here:

http://www.brooklineconnection.com/history/Facts/Skybus.html#bm_story

Interesting note in a bunch of these stories, the Wabash Tunnel was being renovated for Skybus in the 70s. The recent renovation to make it an HOV tunnel was completed as part of a project to build a new bridge over the Mon landing near Stanwix street. Bridge project suffered the same fate as Skybus. Has more money ever been spent on a tunnel that gets next to no use? Some have tried, all have failed, but that would be an INCREDIBLE bike tunnel under Mt. Washington.

One other thing, I read in one of these things that Skybus died in 1975 when the Governor withdrew his support. That was Milt Shapp. Pete Flaherty was mayor in those days.

I want that soundtrack.

Conceptually it would have been awesome. The design was made to allow for rapid transit service throughout the day, even in to the wee hours of the morning. Service every few minutes no matter the time of day. To accommodate for rush periods, several cars would be linked together to form a train.

Awesome idea, it's still refreshing to see that at least one time the Port Authority was dreaming big.

The 1972 Wabash rebuild was the only part of Skybus that actually got constructed. I got a tour of it in 1993.

Skybus was before my time, but I know a good bit about the "basket-handle" bridge that was to connect the Wabash Tunnel and Downtown. It was intended to be a pedestrian-friendly structure, but not bike friendly, with a direct connection into the Station Square area, and across Blvd of the Allies. I remember leading the fight to put the pedestrian touchdown on the Downtown side of the Blvd.

The I-279 bridge was the newest river crossing at that time (1989 opening), and was universally seen as absolutely unusable by anything that didn't have an internal combustion engine. Thus, there was some feeling that the Wabash Bridge should be ped-friendly. It's probably just as well that they didn't build the bridge, as the bicycle facilities were non-existent; i.e., staircases on both ends. Think of the pre-Sophie Masloff bike map.

The new Wabash Bridge originally was to touch down on Market St, but Market Street bar owner Froggy Morris put up a huge stink, long long after the public comment period ended (after busway groundbreaking, in fact), and got it moved to a Stanwix St touchdown. That would've meant a huge redesign of Stanwix, Blvd of the Allies and Ft Pitt Blvd, and the time and cost of the ensuing redesign delayed the whole West Busway project at least two years, during which time the railroad changed its mind on having the Busway on the ledge from Sheraden to Downtown, so Port Authority had to redesign the West Carson St connection. Cross off another year and requiring the roughly $20M flyover.

The only saving grace in losing the ledge was that the cost savings on not having to build the busway on it, or the bridge, is being used to pay for the new fareboxes, 10 years later.

Please, let's save discussion on biking the Wabash Tunnel for a different thread. I'm doing some research on it now, and don't want to jump the gun.

Please, let's save discussion on biking the Wabash Tunnel for a different thread. I'm doing some research on it now, and don't want to jump the gun.

Stu, no worries. Post when ready. I look forward to learning more about your research!

And of course, Froggy's space is still empty, now seven years after it closed.

Catbus!

awesome soundtrack on this PGH skybus video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpS5ess9VNc

Agreed Stu. Certainly the Wabash Bridge is one of interest to me, as it could have served to make both the West and South Busways even faster. And the problem with all those buses is that regardless of their use of a busway, they still clog up all the streets downtown and still have to fight with traffic on the Fort Pitt Bridge, et al.

I'm with Jeff, I look forward to seeing your research.

awesome soundtrack It's probably just some canned production music from a record (I used to work in radio, and we had records full of peppy 30 and 60 second background music for commercials).

I only have a dumb phone, but on the off chance the soundtrack was real music, isn't there an iPhone app you can play music to and get it identified? This would be a real test.

"..it's still refreshing to see that at least one time the Port Authority was dreaming big."

It's depressing to think about the big, grand thinking the entire country used to do, think St. Louis arch, Seattle Space Needle, etc. Now all we can seem to do is hide under the covers and worry about the Mexicans who want to sneak in and steal our lunch money.

about the Mexicans who want to sneak in and steal our lunch money.

Don't you mean sneak in and work in our restaurants washing dishes, in our hotels cleaning bathrooms, in our fields harvesting our food etc.

IIRC old school pittsburghers, like my father, a steel company executive, thought it was a silly idea because the only way it would be feasible was to use the right of way that the trolleys used - ie, that would be where the T is now.

I believe it was succeeded by the "mag lev" idea.

All these things make me want to slap someone and say "Dammit just make run busses run on time and ALL the time. If you want to live without a car, you don't want to wait from 1 AM until 5 AM to catch a bus."

New, cool technology won't do anything to get around the basic question: Are you committed to public transportation or not? The big money, i.e oil companies, the car industry, and the media in which cars are advertised, is on "not".

I believe I rode on the sky bus prototype that they had set up in South Park. Right now, the idea of putting a prototype for urban transportation in the middle of a park makes me cringe.

"Parkways" got that name because when they first put them through, they tended to use park lands. That avoided the political landmine of tearing down people's houses and businesses to put a road in.

Hence the Blvd of the Allies, an early proto-parkway, goes though Schenley Park and there is a F**KING CLOVERLEAF in the park.

The Parkway East goes through a part of Frick Park, that would have been lovely, except for the pollution in Nine Mile Run Creek.

Yeah. In my neighborhood Verizon apparently sub-contracted a Texas company for some underground cable installation, and it was a Latino crew. They had hundreds of feet of cable installed in the time it would have taken PennDot to figure out which end of the shovel to step on, and did it almost without leaving a trace. They can work in my 'hood anytime.

except for the pollution in Nine Mile Run Creek.

That's changed quite a bit in the last couple of years. The transformation is encouraging.

+1 for Mick

Suggesting a bus as a late-night mode of transportation.

Right now, if you need to get somewhere between roughly 1AM and 5AM without your own car you only have these four options:

1) Walk

2) Bike (if you have it with you of course)

3) Call for cab service (not very reliable and expensive)

4) Wake your buddy or family up for a ride.

There should be a late-night "on demand" type bus in the city that runs in a certain area/radius. My college runs one for their students, why couldn't there be one for the general public?

What killed skybus was constucting the demenstration project out in South Park. It assured that the system would not be used by anyone (because all it did was go in a loop araound the park), and when it was used during the county fairs the cars kept breaking down. Of course if you only run a system a few weeks a year, maintenence becomes an issue. Also, it was well known at the time that the city/county administration was going to go with buses because they were being subsidized, and there were rumors of kickbacks. If you want to know what the region lost by not having skybus, go to Morgantown and ride their wonderful system that runs around the WVU campus. It was built by Westinghouse (now Bombardia) located right here in Pittsburgh, as would have skybus. But we had all these local steelmill jobs...

Montreal Quebec installed a very Skybus-looking subway in time for Expo '67 in 1967. It was my first real experience with riding a subway, or transit at all for that matter. Fast, smooth, and dropped us right in the middle of things. They also had clocks in the stations! Hey PAT, what an idea!

except for the pollution in Nine Mile Run Creek.

That's changed quite a bit in the last couple of years. The transformation is encouraging.

if you walk up through there, you can imagine that neck of the woods if they didn't tear out part of the park to put in a "parkway."

Stu, you went to Expo '67? Me too! One of my most ingrained memories is hearing the song "Age of Aquarius", and checking out a little French-Canadian girl (I would have been, uh, and getting super coldly dissed. Ah, one of my very first rejections.

@Edmunds: I think I was there. I have this vague memory of hearing a band do "Age..."

Of course, I was 14 and had no use for some punk-ass 8 year old.

Mick

f you walk up through there, you can imagine taht neck of the wood if they didn't tear out that part of the park to put in a "parkway."

True, though parts of it were a J&L or Homestead works slag heap before that.

@Marko82:

Interesting prospect about the Skybus being killed more likely BECAUSE they built a small prototype. I'm not sure I fully agree, but to some extent you may be right in that if PAT pitched the project on its merits alone (better/faster commutes, frequent service and less cars downtown) and slapped a price tag on it, politics might have worked in favor of it. Who's to say it wouldn't have made life BETTER here?

Actually, track-guided buses (I'm presuming it's an electrified rail or something) would be perhaps the quietest mass transit. Rubber on concrete is actually pretty quiet (quieter than traditional steel wheels on steel rails) it's the combustion engines that account for most of the noise. Frankly, I would have had no qualms if they decided for the Skybus people-mover to use the right of way that the T does now. I mean, it's not like people are overly nostalgic about the T trains like people are with our classic Deco-y PCC streetcars. Plus, for new lines, I'm still convinced that elevated ROW's would be more cost effective and flexible than underground ones, and perhaps why any completed Downtown-Oakland connector is a few DECADES off.

How do they get the snow and ice off those suckers in the winter? It works fine at Disney World, but the rubber on concrete system we have now (i.e. roads) has it's problems.

I would be hesitant to ride a driverless bus on an ice rink 30 feet in the air.

let the cities that are hot, flat and crowded use the fixed-guideway systems (T, Skybus, Maglev, etc.). The only cheap, reliable service in this town will be conventional buses on surface streets.

there was a planning study published in 2003 or 2004 which proposed a few options for alleviating congestion along the I-376 Parkway West Corridor. The most cost effective solution was an at grade (not elevated) busway.

If people were told the actual costs of constructing electrified trains which ran along miles of elevated track, then I think the romance and nostalgia would diminish quite a bit.

@edmunds I would be hesitant to ride a driverless bus on an ice rink 30 feet in the air.

You, sir, have no sense of adventure.

I said hesitant, not saying I wouldn't give it a shot.

@ impala: My point about building the prototype in a remote area is the same as the boneheaded idea of building a 200MPH maglev from the airport to Greensburg - Huh? If you want to try out a high speed train, don’t have stops every five to ten miles. If you want to test a people mover, well, MOVE PEOPLE! How about a demonstration line from downtown to Oakland? They could have left the existing streetcars in place and ran the skybus line to the universities and seen how they compared. Which system moved people quicker, cheaper, more on-schedule, etc. None of this feedback is possible by running a mass transit solution in a park. Part of the appeal of the skybus package was that the passenger volume was scalable, so when passenger volume is high you add cars together to form a train. But the real benefit is in the down scale side, you could operate small cars on low demand times. If my memory is correct, the stops at WVU have a request button you push to let the system know you need picked up. Since the cars are automated, they don’t need to drive around empty all the time, they wait for a request from a strategic position within the system. So if no one needs to go anywhere at 3am, cars sit and wait. if I need to get somewhere and have to wait 15 minutes after pushing a button – priceless!

I'm sure the transit union politics played a role to kill this too, but who knows. Anyway, I think it was a definite lost opportunity.

here's a picture of it plowing thru snow

Criticize mid-20th Century industrial and architectural design all you want, from the photos I've seen, I think Skybus was stylin'. Walt Disney would have been proud.

Wait, if I actually recall I think he actually had a hand in showing the concept of the people mover system to transit officials in Pittsburgh...