Yeah— check out OP’s name!

Butterjoint in Oakland— pretty good!

I am almost 100% sure several buildings at Pitt use steam for HVAC turbines and power generation, as well as water and building heating. I just assumed it was the same downtown, but I could be wrong!

PACT is consolidating their operations with Clearview (the system on the North Side), it is not going away. Many, many buildings use the steam, and there is no real better energy solution as of right now. Most systems that use the steam system also generate power. Steam also powers the A/C turbine systems for most buildings. The only buildings that do not use it are the newest PNC towers, to my knowledge.

It’s also not as simple as just moving that power to homes, the capacity for distribution is also a factor, and sometimes there are limits on how capacity can get from point A to B. And the major hospitals, fortunately, are on the steam network, which is why they almost never lose power.

Most large and significant buildings Downtown generate their own power with the steam system, same with Oakland and portions of the North Shore. They are still a part of the same grid, but not necessarily drawing energy in the same way a traditional home does.

I hope that you are correct, but I was under the impression that they are just going to be “sharrows” on the outer lanes on Forbes. I know there were some big victories on Beechwood and Dallas, but I thought Forbes was remaining pretty much the same…

It may be in service, you can see bus updates from PRT @PGHTransitAlerts on Twitter, and you can follow bus movements in real time via the Transit App. 5pm should be after the brunt of the storm, and I imagine roadways will be clear, but it’s hard to say for sure what conditions will be like.

The longer you wait at the airport— which I would recommend doing so in the airside terminal which has more to do/more seating area, once you leave via the tram, you will be post-security and stuck in the landslide terminal, which is much less full featured, has less seating, and will (presumably) be much more crowded— the better the roads will be. You can always check the status of bus schedules or Ubers remotely in the airside terminal before making the decision to leave.

Thank you for the lesson on cue versus queue, I will remember to proofread all of my posts on this anonymous social media platform of little to no importance more carefully going forward.

As for the data, since you’re the expert, feel free to go through PennDOT’s GIS data to prove your case, you can access it here: https://data-pennshare.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/a17c20bf71dd40fea24363bb9f0ae0e4

What I see are minimal changes in AADT for adjacent roadways over the closure period, with only a 14% increase from July 2019 to July 2022 on Penn Ave, for example.

Looking at the City of Pittsburgh’s data (which you can access here: https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/traffic-count-data-city-of-pittsburgh), I see that the average speed of travel for the October 2019 period of recording for Braddock Ave was 30 mph, with a 95th percentile speed of 38 mph. The city does not have data for the Fern Hollow Bridge, but given its speed limit of 35mph, it stands to reason the speeds of vehicles on that stretch is faster than the 30mph average observed for Braddock Avenue.

Given that the average risk of death for pedestrians involved in a car collision doubles from 25% to 50% with a 10 mph increase in speed from 32 to 42 mph (42 mph is likely very close to the Fern Hollow avg speed given the wide pattern of avg speed = limit + ~5-10mph), this difference is not insignificant by any means, and supports the general necessity of bike lanes on this stretch of roadway: cyclists are twice as likely to experience a fatal collision on this stretch versus those adjacent.

But, then again, I don’t live there, I live ten whole minutes away, so what do I, and these very absolute, quantitative data know anyway…

Yes, I think so, the combination of the wind and ice mean lines and tree branches will be heavy and easily snapped in the wind. There’s potential of it to be a truly huge outage for the area.

Well given the fact that traffic has successfully diverted around the bridge for a year with really no huge increases in traffic, it would suggest that the lanes aren’t necessarily necessary.

And a traffic bottleneck isn’t necessarily being caused by the lanes of the bridge, it is the intersection just past it on the Point Breeze side that limits flow, and causes traffic to cue * queue * on the bridge. Added lanes don’t really help this scenario, and in some cases actually hurt it by encouraging people to merge late/increasing chaos at a choke point (like we see on the outbound entrance to the Squirrel Hill tunnel, adding a lane before the tunnel and keeping the tunnel unchanged would not help traffic).

As for bike lanes, they aren’t really there for peak, standstill traffic periods. They are there for off hours, when traffic treats the bridge like a highway, and put cyclists at risk. It is the fact that people speed dangerously on the bridge, but not Braddock Ave (because it is so narrow), which is why the bridge bike lanes are necessary. It’s increasing safety on a dangerous stretch.

Eh we lost a lot in this accelerated process, notably a serious discussion about how this road is being used and if we really need four lanes for car traffic. This design should have had a protected bike lane, at the least.

What I wouldn’t do to eliminate 376 and turn the bathtub into a riverfront park/trail…

Nice pic nonetheless, kind of incredible how far iPhone cameras have come

I don’t think it is going to do damage to the Strip like Allegheny Center, Allegheny Center was way more destructive to the surrounding neighborhood, eliminating significant buildings and creating a very weird neighborhood structure that was (and remains) confusing to navigate. The Terminal is just impacting one building that was already in disrepair. The businesses there don’t seem to have any appreciable impact on the Strip staples, and are completely different businesses in most cases.

As for its future, I agree that many of these businesses will fail in the long run, and that it will be an unsuccessful development. That being said, I don’t think the space will go to waste, and I think it is likely that it might be used in 5-10 years for the public market we all want. I view this development as just priming the pump for that, renovating the building and getting things ready for a better use once this development scheme fails.

It’s there, from Chipotle’s perspective, to serve the large and growing residential market in the Strip, currently around ~8,000 residents. I don’t think it was ever intended to be a draw for people, rather just there to serve the people that live there. That being said, it is still an uninspiring use of the space.

But let’s not forget the sale informed you it was gluten free… that has to be worth something!

The text isn’t aligned the same across the two of them and it irks me more than it probably should.

Yep, part of the reason why the UPMC scare earlier this week was taken so seriously, I have never personally seen so many police officers converge on a site so quickly before.

There are stoplights on both sides. Stop signal for all sides occurs. Lanes switch. Problem solved.

Well I’m sure President Biden does agree with you, and would try to travel by train where possible, but the secret service just isn’t necessarily built for that and it is too much of a logistical headache (you have to secure the entire route versus just flying in already secure airspace) to orchestrate that versus Air Force One most of the time, which is why it was used. But I do generally agree with what you’re saying.

I believe this was just one leg of a longer journey which was why the plane was used, either way, though, there are still a huge number of people that need to travel with the president, and in some cases a larger jet makes sense and is the most efficient option for doing so. One 747 and one cargo jet moving 200+ people and equipment is more efficient than 2 757s and a cargo jet doing the same thing.

It’s simply way too hard to orchestrate a presidential visit without it, and to be fair it’s not like just the president is flying, with the senior staff and the press pool it is a fairly full jet with 200+ people for each visit. It’s not nearly as wasteful as something like a single billionaire’s private jet.

And to change it would require more attention than it’s worth, I’d rather have a president working on an emissions tax and brokering climate deals than focusing on fixing the emissions of a single jet.

My god that bus is actual hell