-Gargle Razor Blades

-Walk on Flaming Coals

-Have Major Surgery

-Visit Cleveland

These are all things I’d rather do then drive in the South Hills.

When I first moved to Pittsburgh I heard everyone joking about crossing rivers being a big deal and I thought they were being silly. Then I learned the vast difference between the North, East, South and West.

Now don’t get me wrong, the South Hills seems like a great place to live, with some of the best schools, parks, and homes in the area. But the roads are just dumb. For some reason, even though a considerable portion of our population is here, there are no highways that run through the South Hills.

Instead of highways, there are old school undivided roads that are a mix of concrete, blind turns and strip malls. If you’ve ever taken the South Hill’s “highway” (Route 51) during rush hour, you know you were probably better off walking.

If you ever map a route using Google Maps to a point in the South Hills, it will undoubtedly have at least 19 turns to get to your destination.

The South Hills will surely provide all sorts of fodder for this blog, but @kickflipjr reminded me of one of the more notable messes on 51, the intersection of 51/Library/Ivyglen/Hillview/Glenbury. Yes, it’s another multi-intersection thing.

It has one of my favorite things, a stop light about 10 feet from the last stop light.

The obvious solution here seems to be to reroute Glenbury St. I know there are some challenges with topography here, but we just have to pick and choose which streets are the major arteries and reroute the rest instead of just building on top of everything!

Not too far from this intersection is another one that almost killed me. If you are driving down Provost Rd towards 51:

You’ll be driving along, and what seems like the continuation of your road is suddenly ONCOMING TRAFFIC!

Yes, there is a little Do Not Enter sign there, but if it’s late at night and no one is coming the other way, it’s very easy to think that is a continuation of your road… beware.