Getting Around: New (football) game plan for Heinz Field traffic

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Getting Around: New (football) game plan for Heinz Field traffic

Sunday, August 19, 2001

By Joe Grata, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The Steelers and Pitt Panthers will play their home games this year at Heinz Field, only a long football toss away from the site of the old Three Rivers Stadium.

So getting there, and getting around, should be no problem, right?

Wrong. At least not until fans become acquainted with the new digs, new transportation plans and new road construction/disruption.

The challenges bode especially big for Steelers fans, inasmuch as the 10 exhibition and regular season games are expected to draw up to 65,000 fans each. The action gets under way when the Detroit Lions visit town for the opener at 1 p.m. Saturday.

It is the same day the Pirates play Houston at PNC Park at 7 p.m., when early-arriving baseball fans will run into tailgating dawdlers from the Steelers game. You can count on a few beer-bellies fighting over North Shore bar seats and macho men contesting squatter rights over the same $20 reserved parking spots.

The influx of people for the two events will approach 100,000, counting ushers, staff, security, peanut vendors, ticket scalpers, the media and other freeloaders.

Colleagues and city officials have been pointing to the fact that a day-night doubleheader against Houston July 28 did not cause the transportation and parking problems that had been predicted. But total attendance for that day was 25,000 fewer people than are expected in town for Saturday's football-baseball doubleheader.

Also consider:

Many Steelers fans will be seeking out their new parking arrangements and staking out tailgate space for the first time.

About 7,500 more people will be converging on the North Shore for the Steelers game than in the past because of the increased seating capacity at Heinz Field.

Roads and bridges that were closed last year are open; roads and bridges that were open last year are closed. But not the Liberty Bridge. PennDOT will suspend repairs every weekend when the Steelers play at home.

The Pittsburgh Steelers hired engineers and consultants to prepare parking plans and devise traffic strategies for Heinz Field.

The experts drew up a transportation playbook that Kordell Stewart is lucky he doesn't have to learn. The 11-by-17-inch document contains 35 pages of narrative, various tables, 29 pages of maps and figures and an appendix so detailed it lists how many people rode each bus to each game at Three Rivers Stadium last year, and it shows where each traffic cop should be posted.

I'm not going into the details today.

But a special section about Heinz Field, being published as part of Friday's edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, covers what you should know about driving, parking, walking, boating, busing and coping with construction for both Steelers and Pitt football games.

As for me, I've got a reserved seat for Saturday's game -- the living room couch, equidistant from the TV screen in one direction and the refrigerator in the other.

Yak, yak, yak. A bus rider reports the driver yakked on a cell phone during her entire recent ride home from Downtown to Monroeville.

That's a no-no.

Using cell phones while driving in private cars has grown into a national safety issue and is against the law in some places. It also violates policy at the Port Authority.

Operations manager Don Bell said the transit agency had issued and reissued its policy a number of time: No talking on cell phones when buses and light-rail vehicles are in service and/or when riders are on board.

Antiseptic bus seats. Cloth seats on buses bring a bit of concern to Carol MacMillan of Monroeville because, every now and then, a rider will sit down wearing clothes that are stained, spotted and look as if they hadn't been washed in months.

"One can only imagine what invisible but teeming populations of bacteria, viruses, lice, crabs, scabies, etc. are inhabiting the micro-jungle of fabric on these seats, besides plentiful stains and gum spots," she e-mailed. "Vinyl seats would be much more hygienic."

Dear Carol:
Cloth seats are considered to be a little more comfy, "rider-friendly" and resistant to graffiti and other acts of vandalism. They are not unlike the seats in trains, planes, interstate buses, theaters and other public places.
However, almost half of our bus seats are not cloth-covered. They're padded but covered with a durable, vinyl-like material that can be wiped clean. Seats in the back of buses are often hard plastic and can have padded inserts, because rear seats are typically more prone to abuse and vandalism.
How often any of the seats are cleaned ... that's another matter.
Believe it or not, the authority gets complaints about the vinyl-like seats being too cold in winter and too hot in summer.
Fortunately, really dirty riders are the exception, not the rule, in Pittsburgh.

Plate du jour. Port Authority spokesman Bob Grove recently spotted the personalized Pennsylvania license plate EXQQQME on a car traveling the Parkway West. We'll excuse the Port Authority, too. This time!

Send your transportation questions, complaints and suggestions to Joe Grata c/o The Post-Gazette or e-mail him at jgrata@post-gazette.com. Include your name, address and a day phone number. Not all transportation questions, suggestions and complaints are addressed.