For Impactful Urban Bicycling Expansion, It Takes Public Officials With a Big Vision
Pittsburgh is known for its bridges. Mayor Bill Peduto wants his city to be known for its bicycling, too. Adam Nettleton / Shutterstock.com
Watch out Portland! Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto says ‘we’re going to beat every other city’ on being bike friendly.
Even in the nation’s most bicycle-friendly cities, frosty relations sometimes exist between bicycling advocates and public officials.
But that’s not necessarily the case in Pittsburgh, where Mayor Bill Peduto (pictured below) has made expansion of bicycle infrastructure a top priority on his agenda to improve quality of life and drive economic development downtown and across the city.
While Pittsburgh has roughly 25 miles of bike trails—many of them along the city’s riverfronts—there wasn’t really any substantial bicycle infrastructure downtown until recently, when a two-way protected bike lane opened along a portion of one of the city’s main thoroughfares, Penn Avenue, late in the summer.
The city is planning additional protected bike lane projects in the next two years, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Expanding bicycle infrastructure in a big way takes a lot of coordination and community collaboration.
But it also takes executive leadership with a big vision. And Pittsburgh has all that.
“Bike Pittsburgh has an incredibly collaborative relationship with the city. We have an incredibly supportive mayor, a visionary mayor who wants to see these types of facilities go in throughout the city and connect everyone,” Scott Bricker, executive director of Bike Pittsburgh, says in a video recently posted by the Green Lane Project featuring Pittsburgh’s bicycling renaissance.
“The old argument in Pittsburgh is: ‘You can’t have bike lanes because we have hills. We have bridges, we have narrow streets,’” the mayor says in the video. “We have all of the detriments to creating a bike systems that people could argue, but we’re still doing it. And we’re going to beat every other city.”
Take a look:
State of the Lanes: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from The PeopleForBikes GLP on Vimeo.
(Photo of Mayor Bill Peduto via pittsburghpa.gov)