Cyclists,

Many of us use Schenley Drive through the golf course as a bicycling route between Squirrel Hill and Oakland. It is an attractive route in large measure because of the 8′ shoulders, which accommodate both bicycle and automobile traffic without apparent conflict.

The Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy is planning a project that will eliminate the 8′ shoulders, thereby decreasing safety and increasing the chance of conflict. I describe the project and the obvious cycling concerns in the enclosed open letter to the Conservancy.

Please spread the word that people should contact Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy or Bike Pittsburgh or the city Mayor311Office@pittsburghpa.gov (or any more personal contact you have) and ask them to revise the design to improve the bicycle friendliness of the road instead of degrading it. I’m sure there are designs that serve their stormwater management goals without ruining a good bike route.

Mary Shaw

[open letter follows image]

——– Original Message ——–

Subject: Open letter about Schenley Drive through the golf course

Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 12:11:55 -0400

From: Mary Shaw

To: Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy

Dear Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy,

Recent news articles about the Beacon/Bartlett project have mentioned eliminating the 8′ shoulders of Schenley Drive through the golf course as a “future project”. However, I see surveyor’s marks along the roadway now. A week ago I sent you email asking about the status of this project. You haven’t replied, so I turn to this open letter in the hope that someone who reads it will have your ear.

The bicycling community has raised serious questions about this project, and I know that Bike Pittsburgh has met with you to discuss these concerns. I thought the project had been dropped, or at least deferred a few years to allow for continued discussion with interested stakeholders, but the surveyor’s marks lend a sense of urgency. I have looked for a detailed project description, and the best I’ve found is at

http://www.pittsburghparks.org/userdocs/PantherHollowWatershedMay2013.pdf where

slide 20 (attached) shows the two current 8′ shoulders replaced by a separated, 6-8′ path.

Schenley Drive is heavily used by bicyclists for commuting, recreation, training, and general transportation. The current configuration is not ideal by current standards, but it actually works pretty well. The shoulders allow cyclists to ride alongside traffic with the ability to move into the driving lane to pass pedestrians or slower cyclists. Downhill traffic, which easily reaches 25mph, is well separated from uphill traffic, which is going more like 5-10mph. It is depicted on the bicycling map of Pittsburgh as an “on-street bike route” (whereas nearby Forbes Ave is a “cautionary on-street bike route”). The good cycling on Schenley Drive was a factor in my decision to buy a home nearby.

Your proposed changes would create an unsafe, dangerous, hazardous situation. Moving the bicycle and pedestrian traffic from separate 8′ shoulders to a single 6-8′ path would put the 25mph downhill traffic and the uphill 5-10mph traffic brushing elbows at closing speeds upwards of 30mph with no way to escape; this is asking for accidents. There would be minimal space for passing, thereby increasing congestion. There would no longer be the ability to use the traffic lane during a break in traffic to pass slower people. The result would be that many cyclists would choose to use the road, where they would no longer have the safety of the shoulder for separation from car traffic.

Further, your analysis is flawed. Slide 11 of your presentation assesses the impact of several projects according to several environmental and economic criteria, but the criteria do not include other important factors such as contribution to the green transportation infrastructure, compatibility with city initiatives, and so on. In addition, you rank this project “Best” for “increased usability”, whereas it would in fact very substantially reduce the usability of the park.

The benefit also seem small — the proposed project reduces the width of the pavement by 14′ for a distance of a little less than 2600′, a little over eight tenths of an acre in a 456-acre park. That’s less than one-quarter of one percent of the park area.

In addition, maintenance would be problematic. The current shoulders eventually get cleared of snow, and the driving lane is available for patches that aren’t cleared; it seems much less likely that the path would be consistently cleared, and there would be no way to go around uncleared sections. I know of no local experience with porous pavement for cycling, either the quality of the surface for cycling or its durability through Pittsburgh winters. If the surface deteriorates from winter conditions, the path will become unsafe for cycling. It is extraordinarily risky to replace a working piece of infrastructure with a speculative one.

I applaud most of your projects, and I definitely support stormwater management. You should certainly go ahead with grading swales and berms near Schenley Drive to control golf course runoff. You should certainly go ahead with the rain garden aspects of the project. But narrowing Schenley Drive would yield a miniscule increase in pervious surface at an extremely high cost in risk and usability to an important user group.

Please revisit this project with the stakeholders who walk and bicycle on Schenley Drive. Try out the porous pavement path somewhere that doesn’t now have good cycling, for example on the path through the Bartlett/Beacon meadow. Send someone to next week’s Pro Bike/Pro Walk conference at the convention center to discuss better ways to achieve your water management goals in ways compatible with improving bicycle structure. But please, please, please do not destroy cycling on

Schenley Drive by making it unsafe.

Mary Shaw

Squirrel Hill Resident

A.J. Perlis University Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University (for identification only, I speak for myself here)