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Wednesday, January 07, 1998 By Brian O'Neill
The United States Catholic Conference asked in a 1991 pastoral statement, "What can we in the Catholic community offer to the environmental movement?"
How about all those parking lots?
This thought occurred to me as I was taking the 28X bus Downtown from the airport after a holiday trip. Suffering from caffeine deprivation, my mind was wandering like a Grateful Dead fan walking away from a smoke-filled van.
I remembered reading somewhere that the Port Authority of Allegheny County intended to spend millions to upgrade its park-n-ride program, and I thought, yeah, that's just what the American landscape needs: more parking lots. As we glided along the Parkway West, acres of empty lots yawned in every direction.
Ah, but it was a Sunday morning. The next morning, those lots would be filled with workers' rigs and unavailable for bus riders' parking. If there were only a big ol' lot somewhere whose big day was Sunday, then . . .
You see where I'm going with this?
I called the Rev. Ron Lengwin, spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, and launched my pitch. Pope John Paul II has called the "ecological crisis" our common responsibility, and what better way to cut down on air pollution than to get hundreds of commuters out of their cars and into buses?
I had visions of receiving one of those papal knighthoods like Ricardo Montalban - until Lengwin cut short my spiel.
It is diocesan policy to let each parish decide the best use of its facilities, Lengwin said. The bishop wouldn't be going into the parking business.
So I called PAT. While it has some church lots in its park-and-ride fold, Lynn Colosi, PAT's park-and-ride czarina, said she had never taken a systematic look at where the church lots are.
"We're between 4,000 and 6,000 spaces shy of what we think we can fill," Colosi said. "There are probably some (church lots) we missed."
Surely, there are other churches that might follow the example of St. Anne in Castle Shannon, with a lot used by light-rail transit riders, and Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Monroeville, which recently hired Teris Parking Inc. to manage its lot. It charges $1 to drivers who park there weekdays and use the nearby bus stop.
Church member Tom Vogel said about 150 cars had parked daily since the fee was imposed five weeks ago. That's down from more than 200 cars when parking was free, but the number could go back up as more people seek ways to avoid Downtown parking rates - and knock about 150 miles a week from their odomoters.
PAT has agreed to paving, patching, painting and snow removal at some church lots, and even pays for lighting some places. But PAT is happy to get riders any way it can, so a church could go its own way like Good Shepherd, too.
"It doesn't really matter to me how it's done," Colosi said, "as long as they have a place to park and understand that (the Port Authority) doesn't have a paid parking program."
Of course, churches aren't idle during the week. People arrive for everything from day care to drug counseling to funerals. But somewhere a big ol' church lot is all but empty today, one that could save some of God's green earth from PAT's bulldozers - and possibly raise enough green to save some poor Christian from bingo duty.
The Route 28 and 51 corridors, and the city neighborhoods along the East Busway, are high on PAT's wish list. Park-and-ride information is available from Colosi at 237-7000.
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