BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Over the Hot Metal Bridge and up the Panther Hollow Trail. At the end of the trail you can ride up Joncaire Street or take Boundary Street up to Neville Street.

I don't get over there that often, and have yet to be past there on a bike since they began the Bates construction. (Just once down Second Ave in the dark, in a car, driving.)

So, the trail detour does not affect getting from Hot Metal over to the trail up into Oakland, on a bike?

Trail detour does not affect that route. That's also what I'd suggest - Hot Metal Bridge -> turn right; take the trail to the end. Go through the lot, turn left on Second, then left at the underpass, then immediately left on Saline, left on Boundary, then into the park and pick up the Junction Hollow trail- take that all the way through, then back onto Boundary, left onto Joncaire, up the cobblestones to Oakland.

I always take Neville in Oakland all the way to Bayard. Bayard turns into O'Hara -- this is a good route to Pitt upper campus area.

(JZ's description may sound more complicated than it actually is - somehow getting through there always seemed pretty intuitive for me.)

thanks!

Go through the lot, turn left on Second, then left at the underpass, then immediately left on Saline, left on Boundary, then into the park and pick up the Junction Hollow trail- take that all the way through, then back onto Boundary, left onto Joncaire, up the cobblestones to Oakland.

pittsburgh is the only place in the world where you can make seven consecutive lefts and never cross your path.

(i'm also counting the left off the trail, plus the left onto swinburne st., incidentally.)

Ha ha. That's good stuff.

OT - I was attempting to get from Oakland to Northside, and ended up slightly lost somewhere north of the river, stopped at a stoplight, had no idea where to go (or where it was legal to go, the obvious choices had red or orange arrows indicating otherwise). Mentioned to my passenger that I was sorry I didn't borrow a GPS for their visit, he pointed up and said "wouldn't have helped" - there were at least two roads above me that we could see, one of which I actually knew what it was and where it went (and wished I was on it upon the realization, but had no idea how to achieve that).

We are neither a grid-like nor a 2D type of city. Nonlinear, with multiple non-homogeneous solutions.

HV, that's 'cuz you're doing a spiral.

ejwme, the solution for that is a car-incline, like Johnstown has. But first we need a porkmaster like Johnstown had.

I took a vermicomposting class at the CCI building on the Southside a couple months after I moved here. It was a nasty cold, windy, snowy day. I took a bus there from Oakland after work, and was going to walk across the river over to 2nd Ave to catch a 56E home after the class (only bus that goes to Greenfield at that time ~9pm). I had a real shitty bus schedule map I printed out earlier. I get out of class, start walking along Carson and crossed at the first bridge I came to. Turns out it was the Birmingham Bridge. From the map, it looked like it went where I wanted to go. I walked across the not very short bridge, holding a big plastic bin full of rapidly freezing worms in ripping wind along the river, with this stingy ice/snow mix.. I got towards the other side, and noticed there isn't much of a choice of where I get to go.. the sidewalk only goes to Forbes, and gave me a nice view of 2nd Ave, where I really wanted to go. The snow piles weren't quite big enough for jumping I ended up walking the entire way home through Oakland and the park. Total topology fail, and I learned a very hard lesson of what bridge does not cross over to 2nd Ave.

The intersection of California & Marshall is only a few feet east of Chateau & Island. On a paper map, they look like they touch. A 50-foot cliff and a bunch of railroad tracks suggest otherwise.

The fastest way from one to the other is a staircase.

@dwillen - but did the worms survive?

They weren't moving when I got home, but they thawed out after I had them inside for a while. Their great, great grandworms are still munching away on my veggie scraps.

@dwillen: Seems like a failure of signage more than anything. Brady Street (right there under the bridge) would have taken you down to Second Avenue in 2 minutes, but I don't think there are any signs saying so from up on Forbes.

I see that now. At the time, they were doing some sort of construction, and there weren't even sidewalks at the end of the bridge, let alone signs. It was dark and snowy, and everything looked like freeway ramps. I remember looking for a stairway at the time. I really only blamed myself, for not figuring out where I was going before I left. I should have walked down to 10th street, or over to hot metal.

dwillen - good to hear about the worms surviving! And your story explains a lot of my confusion away...

I seem to always have the same sort of experience as you did, except I end up driving back and forth on the north shore looking at bridges either above or below me, trying to figure out how to get to them, and almost with out exception end up accidentally going through some form of tunnel and getting spit out on the back side of Mt. Washington, where I do a U-turn, give up, and go home.

Last week when I ended up on top of Mt Washington instead of on the other side I considered it a small victory in my 10 year battle to independently get to the South Side. I ended up parking and taking the incline down so that I didn't jinx myself and end up headed toward the airport, again. I convinced my out of towner passengers that it was a planned "enhanced tour" of Pittsburgh with bonus scenic incline ride.

Only once was I capable of independently locating the South Side on the first go, but I cheated since I was coming from Duquesne (town, not University). How the drunks find it I will never understand, but I suppose this is one of the things that makes me Not A Yinzer. It'd be easier if I had the sense to print out google map directions first, but I seem to always convince myself that "I'm a Pittsburgher", or "I don't need directions / they wouldn't help".

I figured out getting from Monroeville to the SSide when I first moved to Pgh by devising what I learned to call "the Miltenberger loop". There are three little streets you can turn right off of, if coming inbound on Blvd of the Allies from the Parkway -- Gist, Miltenberger, and one other. (Doesn't matter what the names are, there are three before Mercy Hospital, and you can't see the signs in the dark with a tractor trailer on your butt anyway.) But if you do manage to turn on one of them, and turn right on Forbes, another right puts you on the Birmingham Bridge, assuming, of course, you pick the right right at the light. If you cross a bridge, you're on the SSide. If you go down a hill, a right and a left a mile later puts you on the SSide. Problem solved.

For a newbie to Pgh, that was good enough.

"Getting back home is left to the students as a homework exercise."

Getting from Oakland to SSide by car, bus, bicycle and on-foot, all require different solutions. You are not a complete Pittsburgher until you know and can describe all four, in error-free detail.