Both areas are hilly and that needs to be taken into consideration. landslides do occasionally happen. There are also a number of mines under the hills in Pittsburgh that have caused issues over the decades.

There's nothing unsafe about The Slopes, and some of the streets are insanely convenient to catch a bus over to Oakland. Be cautious of structural issues with houses here and be ready to deal with steep narrow streets and bad parking (though that applies to Greenfield as well!)

I adore my neighborhood and think it's a fantastic place to live with good access to many amenities and a really unique charm. I looked at places in both neighborhoods when I was buying a few years back. If you have more specific questions feel free to message me!

But we don't really need that much transportation to the airport, compared to other routes.

Hell, the airport is in the process of being downsized.

I think fixing some of the inner city transit issues would provide a lot more bang for the buck.

Electrifying the busway for example would be much cheaper and provide those long term cost savings.

Hell, our current It's rolling stock is well beyond it's original expected life. I bet that's higher on the list for light rail spending.

Crafton

The PRT 25 year plan describes options they are looking into. They are considering a trolly extension to Bellevue or Ross. They are also considering a train from new Kensington to downtown using existing AVRR tracks. The Bellevue trolly extension is a phased approach for extension to the airport but given state and federal funding constraints that’s a long long way off. Given the limited funding, an incremental approach to expanding busways is more practical than building long light rail lines because buses can use existing roads beyond the end of the busways while trains can’t. PRT is investing in bus only lanes and traffic signal priority in Oakland as a lower cost effective improvement to the system. There is not a good right of way to use through Oakland and tunneling is very expensive. Light rail needs high density neighborhoods to justify the cost and a lot of neighborhoods dense enough in Pittsburgh already have good transit service. There is already a high volume of buses to Oakland and PRT is looking into more routes that bypass the downtown hub and go directly from suburbs to Oakland. They are also looking into extending the west busway at both ends to improve the speed of the bus from oakland to the airport. I encourage anybody who has an opinion on what Pittsburgh needs should read the report first

https://nextransitdraftplan.blob.core.windows.net/finalplan/NEXTransit%20-%20FINAL-web%209-16-21.pdf

I definitely would have preferred T expansion to Oakland before we spent the money to take it to the North shore.

I just worry that it's another high cost short distance project and suspect a longer distance project would be more helpful to more communities.

Greenfield is a great area, and safe. It skews a lot older, so it depends on if you want peace and quiet, or access to nightlife.

Greenfield is also pretty big, but depending on where you are, it's easy to walk from there to Oakland or Squirrel Hill. Also handy access to the Waterfront for big box stores.

I lived there for seven years, so let me know if you want more details.

I meant what I said. I didn’t insinuate anything. I stated, that he may regret that word choice. It comes off in a bad tone. Again, context matters.

Two different kind of lifestyles in my experience from living in both. Greenfield is much quieter, but both are easy commutes to Pitt.

Your money will probably go farther in the slopes in terms of house size vs Greenfield.

This is the real concern—there simply isn't enough ridership potential. (and I'm a huge proponent of MOAR TRAINS)

Alon Levy covers the topic a lot on their blog. A critical point is that "any air-rail link must go to the areas that people are likely to want to connect to." The Pittsburgh metro is not monocentric, so there's no easy way to bring everyone to where they need to go next.

People assume that airport transit would get used a lot, but it's orders of magnitude lower than everyday transit riders. The most frequent users would be airport employees, and even at bigger airports there usually aren't enough employee commuters to make it worth it.

Marks against a PIT train:

• small airport
• far airport
• nothing in between the airport and the central city
• small metro region
• weakly centered urban development plan

Instead, we should focus on "duh" improvements to bus transit to the airport:

• dedicated airport traveler-friendly busses (with luggage racks like Boston's Silver Line)
• run more frequently
• don't make non-airport stops
• take advantage of existing bus rapid transit features (like the East Busway)
• run a few variants (like, 3—maybe northside, east end, and southside)

In parallel, we need to build up transit capacity and reliability in the core so that it's the default way to get around.

To be fair, those people wouldn’t know what an invite was, let alone send one out—mainly because they’re skipping school en masse and smoking their way through life and destroying Squirrel Hill South.

But this person does, and welcomes you to come on down from behind your keyboard and experience firsthand what those people are doing.

Slopes are safe however greenfield will be more convenient

This also crossed my mind. An extremely valid concern, seemingly taking the correct steps in going to the school board…. But then topped off with very questionable wording. I’d be afraid of retaliation against the business and owner for that comment, before any action is taken by the district

Clean reliable convenient public transportation seems to consistently come up in conversations about what makes cities great. It seems like investing in such would be wise for Pittsburgh's long-term future.

I'll admit that as a culture we seem to have adopted attitudes that care more about our current tax burden than the future greatness of our society but that's more of a rant about our school system than our public transit.

The poppyseed milkshake was so good

3 bedroom 1600 sqft…104 years old. Electric and gas (68° thermostat setting) are $100 a month each, water is $35, sewer is $40, trash is included in city taxes.

It’s just me in be house though.

Keep dreaming. The cost alone for any extension of the T would put a bad taste in everyone who doesn't use transit mouths.

What business did the shop owner assault happen? (Not doubting, I just hadn’t heard of that one)

There’s two different thoughts as to how it could work:

1. It could stay on the North Shore side of the Ohio and cross near Sewickley to service the high population centers on that side of the river, as well as RMU and Moon Township. This would be slower for travelers to the airport from downtown, likely around an hour to an hour and a half all told. It would be more for the connections to the communities than for connections to the airport from the city.

2. It could cross the Ohio near McKee’s Rocks, follow the NS right of way, travel along Stubenville Pike near Thornburg, and connect with the 376 ROW near Robinson. This would be faster for Downtown-Airport commuters (~30-45 min), but would service fewer population centers/have lower ridership/community building potential.

As for the most critical T expansion, it is obviously between Downtown and Oakland that is needed the most. There’s overcrowding on current bus lines, which means a higher density mode of transit is necessary. Buses cannot meet the demand, and the only solution with buses on these lines is to run more buses more frequently, which pulls an already exacerbated workforce of drivers away from less busy (but still critical) routes throughout the rest of the county. The T could just add more cars to better meet demand, which would better serve this corridor, and would free labor to better serve all the other corridors in the area.

It's a matter of timeline and perspective. Even the most efficient electronic buses are not predicted to be able to operate as cheaply as rail is. Over the long haul as long as transportation will be regularly needed along the route rail always comes up cheaper to my understanding.

If you didn’t mean it that way, why would you quote him and then say it was “tone deaf?” His…annunciation??

What else could you possibly be insinuating?

I don’t hold it against you—I was just making the observation that it was, indeed, those people, and calling someone out for a grammatical choice rather than coming out against the behaviors he described is simply ridiculous.

Just based on what I know of the traffic between Robinson and Greentree Hill if you can service a line going that direction hitting communities like Carnegie in between I could definitely see sufficient density and ridership.

Unfortunately new subway construction (dig and cover, which would close the road for years) is ~$500+ million/mile. The county doesn't have that money.

Expanding the bus service seems like a more cost effective measure.

Not necessarily. There is cost but you could build above, below, or beside.

This isn’t really the problem, there is space, it’s just that it would be expensive, and the T isn’t all that fast (45mph on the high end), so covering the ~15 miles would take longer than a bus. If we ever invested in a heavy rail system (which I think we should, particularly for between Downtown, Oakland, and East Liberty), with much higher top speeds (~80-90 mph), it might make a bit more sense given transit times.

There’s also the question of ridership potential, I think physical transit to the airport is important for a variety of reasons, but there really isn’t super high density anywhere along the corridor and there aren’t that many people going to and from the airport (particularly on transit) each day on average, so it would be a challenge in getting the numbers to really pencil out.