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Sunday, March 21, 1999 By Brian O'Neill
Eric Sutliff is not your average Pittsburgher. He'll bicycle to Penguins games from his home in Edgewood, and he has biked to Pirates games, too.
That makes him the white guy cycling through the Hill District as the night heads toward morning.
Sutliff, 42, who manages money Downtown, doesn't see barriers others see. His bike slows the world down. He gets to know neighborhoods, and the people and restaurants within them, that his peers only read about.
The question is: How many Eric Sutliffs are out there?
A couple of dozen people, Sutliff among them, spent a couple of hours in City Council chambers one night last week to see if this city is ready for a bike station.
The idea is to get more people biking for all the obvious reasons: less air pollution, less imported oil, more open parking spaces in a city that's getting tighter than a grandmother's prom dress.
Long Beach, Calif., opened America's first city-owned bike station three years ago. Two of its pioneers led the meeting, along with a city planner, a regional planner, a Port Authority planner and an assistant secretary of the state Department of Transportation.
Suddenly, bikes are big. Federal dollars await cities that can weave bicycles into their fabric.
A Pittsburgh bike station - Downtown or in Oakland - could cost a half-million dollars. The one in Long Beach, which offers free valet parking and averages 1,500 bike trips a month, did.
That seems high, until you hear what it costs to build the average parking garage in our city: about $15,000 a space. You can park 33 cars and maybe a motorcycle for a half-million bucks.
Accommodating 150 biking commuters for the same money might be odder but wiser, particularly if the station is linked to mass transit.
Someone from Oakland could bike Downtown, using the Eliza Furnace Trail along the Parkway East, park her bike and ride the T to Station Square. Or Mt. Lebanon. Or South Hills Village.
A South Hills commuter might take light-rail Downtown, rent a bike and cycle to work Uptown.
"I think it's high time we got on with it," Bruce Ahern, the Port Authority's director of business development and planning, said.
Nobody asked Ahern whether some commuters might stop riding buses to hop on bicycles if thus encouraged, a switch that would blow away the bike station rationale. No, this was a pedal-power lovefest.
Before it was through, an informal vote suggested that the bike station would best go in Oakland, a short walk from the Cathedral of Learning. The T stop at Gateway Center, already scheduled for major renovation, finished a close second. Planned T stops for the new North Side ballpark and on First Avenue were runners up.
The $29,000 feasibility study, funded with federal and city money, won't be complete for five months. So we don't yet have all the arguments for building a place where a commuter might safely leave a bike, use a changing room, shower, rent a locker and buy a paper and a cup of coffee. Or not.
At least one money manager is sold on this investment, however. Sutliff believes that a bike station would "foster a different type of mindset."
"We'll have people moving through and around among places that they normally wouldn't find themselves in."
Some might even find themselves a city before it passes them by.
Brian O'Neill's e-mailaddress is boneill@post-gazette.com.
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