BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

thanks sara

the panel discussion is about to start.

http://bike-pgh.org/2009/02/25/tonite-watch-a-live-webcast-about-the-stimulus-package-and-what-it-means-to-pittsburgh/

watching it live right now! just saw bill peduto walk into the background and steve bland is sitting all by his lonesome on the couch

i see replacement of east busway pavement is on there. seems like it could be an opportunity to get bike access on there.

wally burlach, they're zoomed in on the back of your head right now!

the diversity of the crowd is...um...well...let's say it doesn't look like pittsburgh

i gotta admit, the technology is pretty cool. go pittsburgh!

this is ridiculous. It's been an hour and all filler, no meat. I submitted my question, three times. I hope there is a transcript of this, because I don't have time to watch all of it...

yeah, it's become background chatter for me

anything to gleam from it all? I received no response by email of my questions submitted.

HA! I just looked at the spc list of projects. First one is a county project that they have been fighting with penndot for years over planning and funding - Brownsville @ Broughton. A few are Port Authority of Allegheny County and others, while the remaining projects are PennDoT - no suprise.

a bike lane next to the bus way east would be super cool. as long as there's dividers, i have trouble trusting them busses.

there was the moment where eve picker was grilling steve bland on why there's no bike path on the busway. he talked about "studies being done" and the administration's interest in this, which is true. i did see two projects on the TIP amendments that had to do with the East Busway, slope stabilization and repaving. maybe with some magical engineering this dream could be a reality.

one of my favorite highlights was when an older lady (sorry don't remember her name) got up and talked about how she's been working with the city since the caliguiri admin, and has been to so many forward thinking talks with high caliber people like this, but they rarely, if ever move beyond talking. she was basically saying that pgh's leadership needs to stop patting themselves on the back for being so smart and actually go thru with some of the things they talk about. it all to often (always?) resorts back to business as usual.

pretty much sums up a lot of my thoughts.

oh, and steve bland mentioned how about 15 years ago there were two scofflaw cyclists that used the buslane and were killed.

does anyone remember this? this was before my time

I don't remember that, but I do remember Sunday, May 22, 1983. It was the last day that Port Authority did NOT run service on the East Busway, which had just opened for six-day-a-week use a couple months before. ARC Allegheny (now Achieva, http://www.achieva.info) held a bike hike on the East Busway as a fund raiser. I helped stage the event.

Separately, the early plans for the West Busway included a bike path between Carnegie and Ingram. Not sure what happened to that.

Doesn't surprise me if people were killed on the busway. People in their cars are bad enough, but I cannot even begin to count the number of times bus drivers have literally tried to run me off the road, run me over flat out, etc etc...

Didn't they have to install those guardrails along 5th Ave in Oakland because they were killing another college student every week through that stretch? That's what I was told when I first moved here in 1994.

I even had the pleasure of being on a bus where the bus driver completely freaked out and went postal, drove up onto a sidewalk and almost ran people over... Everyone got off at the next stop (except me and my roomate, who just wanted to get home and we figured this guy was in such a hurry we would get home even quicker)...

Everyone got off the bus at the next stop and ran to the payphones (this was back when "pagers" were the rage), like when Otto crashed the school bus on the Simpsons.

Needless to say we never saw that bus driver again. They told us he was done when we called up PAT and they said we were the 50th complaint about it.

I was on a bus once going down South 18th street, approaching the street where the churches are and the light turned red while the bus was about 6 or 7 bus lengths behind the light.

The bus driver FLOORED it and went through the red light going about 35mph. The people who had the right of way saw him barreling toward the intersection and just let him go through it.

We pulled the chain to get off at the funeral home at Jane Street and the prick was kind enough to slow down to about 10-15mph when he opened the door so we could jump off the moving bus while yelling at us to get the hell off.

Man I miss the days of riding the bus, it was always such an adventure!