So it’s been a while! After I covered most of the main problems that bug me that were created over the last 100 years, the city/state didn’t really do anything especially crazy. Until… The Beechwood Bumps™.

Even though our city has a million fundamental problems with its infrastructure that cause constant gridlock it seems to have turned it’s sights in recent years to speeding. I suspect the approach is something like:

1. Get a 311 call from one or more citizens 2. Do a traffic study of said area 3. Implement some solution

This is probably happening all over, but there were two notable projects near where I live in Squirrel Hill.

First - on Dallas Ave, the city added basically “wiggle poles” in the middle of the street designed to slow down traffic.

There are of course two things that make these weird

1. It’s on the uphill, where people already go slower 2. It diverts traffic right into the area where a cyclist would be, huffing and puffing up the hill.

Finally, they make it quite difficult to turn out of the cross streets with large vehicles, and are easily avoided by people who don’t care about lines/laws anyway. Given the random placement of these I’d bet $100 they got a 311 complaint from someone living on Dallas by Northumberland and Woodwell.

But this post isn’t about that - that was just foreshadowing for arguably the most controversial traffic calming project the city has ever implemented, The Beechwood Bumps™. For this I went beyond my normal lazing ranting, and did some “deep investigation” to understand how this happened.

What am I talking about? Well, if you haven’t been on Beechwood Blvd by the Frick Environmental Center, one day the city added a series of four very large speed humps. The humps slow traffic from the speed limit of 25 to 15, and have cuts in them for cyclists.

These humps are unusual for a couple of reasons - first, even though I’ve driven over 400,000 miles in my life all over the world, I’ve never seen speed humps in a through road. They are always on private roads, side roads, cul de sacs etc… This is partly because speed humps on through streets slow emergency vehicles trying to get to where they need to be. Even more odd, these particular speed humps slow you to BELOW the speed limit. Third, the cuts in the speed humps allow people to partially avoid them (at the expense of cyclists), and Fourth - before the speed humps I never really considered this a dangerous speeding area, in fact I usually take this road over Shady Ave because it is a slow rolling, relaxing drive with no road rage.

That brings us to the history of Beechwood Blvd. Beechwood Blvd is a curving scenic road between Schenley Park and Frick Park that was built right at the dawn of the automobile specifically for the purpose of giving these new car owners a place to go for scenic drives - the curves, etc.. are part of the design - it wasn’t made for thru traffic as much as just a fun road to drive on. Of course as the Squirrel Hill area built up, it’s now almost entirely lined by residential housing, and the original road has been somewhat chunked up. Nevertheless Beechwood is still a delightful place for a convertible, motorcycle or bike ride.

Then the speed humps came - and road rage followed. People who use Beechwood to commute seem to have a visceral negative reaction to the speed humps, using the bike cuts to avoid it. Where before I never experienced any road rage - now I get people furiously going around the speed hump and riding my bumper. Or you get people that practically stop at the speed humps. Then there is the grey area - police were pulling people over for going into the bike lane to avoid the speed hump, but what rules affect motorcycles, can I use the bike cut or do I need to pop a wheelie over the hump? The rage isn’t just on the road - people took their arguments to NextDoor and Twitter and evidently there is a new public hearing on this due to the outrage (which i cannot find despite my searching, more on this later…). It’s certainly made it a less relaxing road to drive on for a number of reasons.

My main beef is the arbitrary nature of the speed humps - why the single stretch of Beechwood by the low populated Shaw Ave and Darlington Rd? Especially when the Frick Environmental Center and an Elementary School are right near there, but no speed humps installed by those sites. So I really wanted to dig into this - was it some councilperson or big donor’s front yard? Why speed humps? Why here and not the many other side streets that could use them.

Well - I did a “Right to Know” request (similar to FOIA) around the project after Dan Gilman was responding to wrath of citizens on Twitter. He mentioned there was a traffic study so I figured sure, let’s see this.

From what I could gather in my digging this project happened like this:

1. Between 1-6 citizens complained about speeding by the Frick Environmental Center (the city won’t release details on citizen complaints but anecdotally i figured out someone I knew was one of these complaints - so there are indeed real citizens behind this). 2. A traffic study specifically centered on the Frick Environmental Center was commissioned 3. Funding for some of the solutions proposed in the study was secured 4. A public meeting was held around the topic 5. Something roughly 35% of the suggested plan happened

So what does the traffic study say? It seems like they put speed monitors on the north and south end of the Frick Environmental Center, and found an average speed of 33.2 and 33 in a 25 mph zone.

33 in a 25.

Otherwise known as basically the speed all traffic goes in most 25 mph zones everywhere (although shoutout the to record setters they found that got to 61 mph).

Okay… so the speeding doesn’t seem that bad. I would guess the average speed in the 25 mph Homestead Grays / High Level bridge is 48mph, so why speed humps here?

Well - they sent a physical crew out as well, and “observed” that people were hesitant to cross the street at the Environmental Center, and that is basically impossible for people coming from Dallas to get there (oh boy do I know this). So they suggested putting in crosswalks and fixing the Dallas area so it has sidewalks (currently it has a gap). It’s also worth nothing the only stretch that was slower was to an avg of 29 mph between Darlington and Shaw. This make sense because the 90 degree turn in the road naturally slows people down.

They also said “look the road is wide, which encourages people to speed”, and there were 18 crashes over a 5 year period which resulted in a total of one pedestrian injury, and no major injuries of any crash.

So let’s lay out the facts:

1. One to six people complained about the area 2. The study found people go basically the speed they go on all other roads in the city 3. No pedestrian has ever been hurt seriously in the area, and there is average of 3 accidents per year (in a section larger than the study area) 4. A public meeting was announced where only a handful of people attended (I believe the way it was marketed contributed to very low awareness) 5. A plan was implemented which only partially addressed the recommendations

One particular piece of number five was that the original study was around getting access to the environmental center - and the suggested calming was for the north and south sides of the center. However the north side was never installed, and instead humps were put near Darlington down the street (where the speeds were slower already) - why? I reached out to a city engineer involved in the project and it turns out a speed hump on the north side of the FEC would affect the Great Race, so since they had the funds they put it at Darlington because they also felt it was hard for people coming off Darlington to get onto Beechwood - but take a look how many people that affects, around 12.

So I’m still not clear why the city decided to put speed humps here - it seems like they took the concerns of a few people over the 6,000 cars who drive this stretch every day.

What’s the problem you might say - people should slow down! Okay - well why not put speed humps on every single stretch of every road in Pittsburgh? Clearly that would be ridiculous. Why this part? Maybe the city has a list of all of the major speed danger areas in the cities and is rolling out a ton of these, but I live right near this area and it wouldn’t even have made my top 10.

I personally believe these speed humps should be removed - through roads should not have speed humps. These are not major crossing areas for pedestrians - there seemed to be no study of the potential number of pedestrians that would be impacted. Even with the speed humps, I’ve still never seen someone crossing here.

It would be great if the city had a public record of total complaints of various areas to create transparency here. I have a hard time believing this is the number one problem area - people FLY down Ayelsboro, which is not meant as a through street, thanks to Google Maps. People FLY down many of our other roads including Wilkins, etc… The solution can’t be to put speed humps everywhere.

UPDATE - wow right before I posted this the city doubled down on this madness and added more poles leading up to the humps, that require you to slow down and slalom, creating a totally ugly mess of this once beautiful, scenic road. I think they might have done this because the speed hump crossing isn’t at the actual pedestrian crossing for some reason? (Measure twice, build a speed thing once?) The city has to be trolling us now, right?