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Saturday, June 15, 2002

By Timothy McNulty, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Pittsburgh City Councilman William Peduto announced his opposition yesterday to a proposed link between the Mon-Fayette Expressway and Oakland, saying the plans are backward-looking and will dampen emerging technology businesses in the bustling city neighborhood.

The councilman, who represents part of Oakland, called on the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission to throw out the $2 billion plan for the northern end of the expressway, and consider linking city neighborhoods to the highway by supporting Light Rail Transit and improvements to existing roadways instead.

He endorsed plans by expressway opponent PennFuture to develop alternatives to the final, northern link of the 65-mile toll road, which is currently planned to begin at Route 51 in Jefferson Hills and split into a Y north of Duquesne.

One fork in the Y would link Business Route 22 and the Parkway East (Interstate 376) in Monroeville, with the other following the north shore of the Monongahela River to the parkway, Second Avenue and Bates Street in Oakland. The forks would provide a bypass around the bottlenecks at the Squirrel Hill Tunnel.

PennFuture advocates are planning alternatives that include new LRT lines and improvements to Route 837, Route 51 and other roadways south of the city. Additionally, Peduto wants to consider taking over an existing rail line snaking through Hazelwood, Panther Hollow and Oakland and using it for public transportation.

Peduto wants to explain such alternatives to the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, a regional planning board that he serves on, and submit them to the turnpike commission in the expressway public comment period that runs through Aug. 14.

Public comments will be included in an environmental impact study turnpike officials will submit to federal agencies so the expressway can proceed. Should the federal agencies issue a "record of decision" on the project, turnpike officials can buy rights of way, issue final designs and eventually start construction, perhaps in 2007.

There is little legislatively that Peduto can do as a councilman to affect Mon-Fayette plans. City Council approved a nonbinding resolution supporting the project in 1997 and yesterday Peduto, who took office in January, acknowledged he can not currently muster the five council votes to overturn the measure.

Peduto was joined at a morning news conference by Richard Florida, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. The author of "The Rise of the Creative Class and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life" (Basic Books, 2002), Florida is at the vanguard of local activists, artists, academics and others who are opposed to the highway plan.

Saying Mon-Fayette "will shape our community for five decades or more," Florida warned that building a new highway link into Oakland would damage emerging technology businesses in the neighborhood, choking the district with cars and cutting it off from other parts of the city where their employees live and unwind.

Focus groups interviewed by another expressway opponent, Sustainable Pittsburgh, where Florida is a board member, have shown young workers want the opposite of Mon-Fayette. That is, fewer highways and more public transportation, he said.

"Oakland is really the steel mill, the coal mine, the factory, assembly center and the headquarters center of this emerging creative age. It has 35,000 highly creative technology people [and] 35,000 students. To bring a highway into Oakland and to think of Oakland becoming a more suburban style development would be a tragic mistake," Florida said.