Report details safe ways for reopening Pittsburgh
Sidewalk retail. “Low stress” streets for recreation. Parking lanes turned outdoor dining rooms.
These are just some of the recommendations handed down from a city-commissioned mobility report aimed at keeping commercial activity safe during a pandemic reality.
The 64-page “Street Life: Supporting the vitality of PGH people and places in COVID-19,” authored this month by the Streets and Mobility Task Force, offers guidance to business owners on ways to safely resume operations and to government on utilizing public space for
recreation.
“The work of the task force is not meant to be allencompassing. It is a rapid response to an urgent need for creative problem-solving,” former Pennsylvania Department of Transportation Secretary Allen Biehler, who chairs the committee, wrote in a letter to Mayor Bill Peduto regarding the report.
The report “must only be the beginning of input and strategy development,” he wrote. “The response to this crisis will be iterative, but the urgency requires bold intervention now, even without the typical fulsome public consultation, and the readiness to pivot and change course or design equally as quickly.”
Possibilities outlined in the report include closing streets to traffic in some city parks to allow for more socially distanced recreation; closing half of Market Square to traffic to allow diners to spread out and eat at sidewalk tables and chairs; posting signs for one-way pedestrian flows in congested areas; and posting signs for safe business pickup queues.
In response to the recommendations, the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure surveyed business owners to understand how using public space and rights-of-way could assist in their reopening; developed a program to “permit neighborhood slow streets to promote outdoor social distancing in residential areas”; and convened a 72-hour “hackathon” last weekend among local programmers and engineers to create “PittsCurb,” a tool to help manage curbside use, according to the mayor’s office.
Business, community development, design and transportation experts make up the 21-member task force and includes PennDOT, Pittsburgh Parking Authority, Port Authority of Allegheny County and neighborhood association representatives. The group convened in late April and met four times in May.