They would pay $50 million in property tax while canceling the $1billion in free services so that’s not a great trade off. Better solutions are break them up and unionize

The strange thing is they have the best plans on the public insurance exchange. I’d be curious how their employee plans stack up to other non union employers. Most non union employers have put the rising costs of health insurance solely onto the employee over the last twenty years. If they want better pay and benefits they should probably unionize

Property taxes would be on a county and township basis. They don’t make profit because they spend any excess money on new buildings so there is no profit to tax.

The model is get big so they don’t get pushed around by out of state for profit insurance companies.

I understand union health insurance is better than non union. I’m curious how UPMC health insurance compares to other jobs. I’ve worked in tech and employees are well paid but the health insurance is usually expensive high deductible plans which really stinks if you have a chronic health problem. Does a nurse at UPMC get better or worse health insurance than an accountant at PNC or does a minimum wage worker at UPMC get better insurance than a minimum wage worker at giant eagle or eat and park?

Yeah it’s really sad. You would think the party of capitalism would be in favor of building infrastructure in productive locations but owning the libs comes above all else.

I would be in favor of that if it is in conjunction with strong anti corruption laws and we can directly elect management instead of it being controlled by psychopath Republican politicians

They are a nonprofit because they reinvest excess money back into themselves instead of enriching investors on Wall Street. I don’t think taxing UPMC would lead to higher worker pay or better working conditions or market competition. The county has said it would raise revenue by 5%. I’m just curious what else it would actually accomplish. Highmark, the second largest nonprofit hospital and insurance conglomerate owns naming rights to the Buffalo bills stadium so UPMC on a skyscraper is not unusual considering they have offices in that building. I think the biggest issue is UPMC marketshare and the most effective solution is to force them to divest two hospitals - Children’s and Mercy and employees should unionize. The executives lawyers and accountants are probably laughing at us for wasting government resources litigating their non profit status instead of just breaking them up into smaller pieces

Yes I agree. It’s mostly due to state and federal politics. Republicans don’t give funding to democrat cities and counties to build mass transit.

When I lived in San Diego we had a 22 mile DMU line. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprinter_(rail_line)

There is also a small 10 mile eastern extension of BART that uses DMU it requires a transfer to use the rest of Bart https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBART

Both these lines were in much bigger cities although the Ottawa line gets 10,000 riders. I have a hard time guesstimating how many people would use a train from new Kensington to downtown. One potential issue is both these US lines used dedicated tracks. Has the FTA ever allowed DMU trains on freight tracks in the US? I have no idea.

I look forward to the belt buses and overbrook to Oakland connections. Covid made planning difficult for transit agencies and they are moving slower than their typical glacier pace these days.

The report was discussed last week in another post

TLDR upmc grew super fast to control 60% of hospital beds in the area and they should be broke up to a more reasonable smaller size.

Im a little surprised that in Pittsburgh $15 is no longer a floor for wages and $18 in 2025 will also be too low with inflation. I wonder if upmc provides better health insurance for employees than other service jobs. Do other hospitals pay more than UPMC? I’ve heard the nursing pay is low. They probably need a union to get paid better.

I don’t think they should lose non-profit status because if they make hospitals pay taxes, we will all pay in the end through higher hospital bills

The prt 25 year plan in 2021 suggests studying rail versus bus for avrr so I don’t think they have decided either way yet. They will probably apply for a federal grant to do a study at some point. My concern with rail is all the transfers involved. From Dormont to Oakland takes an hour via the trolly downtown when I can drive it in 20 minutes in rush hour. Even if they built the trolly to Oakland they would have to alternate lines going to Oakland versus gateway and Northshore so service frequency might not be ideal

The 6-15 time frame is listed for extending the west busway at both ends to improve the 28x airport flyer.

As long as the Oakland brt has dedicated lanes it should be a decent improvement. It’s just so difficult to build dedicated right of way through Oakland for mass transit.

I like the gondola idea but I’m not sure it would match the communing patterns and how it could feasibly connect to Oakland

I suspect it might be too hard to do high commuter heavy rail with the current geographical distribution of employment. Most cities that have done heavy commuter rail are much bigger cities with dense concentrated employment areas and Pittsburgh is struggling to keep employers downtown lately. Many have left downtown for the strip and ptc/hazelwood robinson and south point/cannonsburgh.

It does appear the direction prt is moving is high frequency bus services which due to funding I think is probably the most realistic and best bang for buck investment. I would be so happy if they could implement more traffic light priority and bus only lanes so buses are on time.

I like most of their plans on page 54

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

they have claimed in the past that heavy rail is not cost effective at the ridership levels it would get in a monroeville study but that was a while ago. Not many medium sized us cities use heavy rail. Now I’m going to have to read up on it because I’m not familiar with the Allegheny river valley. A big reason I like living in the south hills is the trolley and I wonder how many people in areas like Hampton chose to live there because they want to be away from the hustle and bustle. The south hills townships are a lot more cramped and dense than the route 8 corridor

Yeah just the downtown to south hills village mall via Beechview was $500 in 1980s dollars. Even had they started ten years earlier they wouldn’t have built a lot more - maybe the would have tunneled to the north shore earlier but the steel mill collapse in 1982 still would have made it difficult. they built the east busway while the skybus debate was going on. Light rail is really tricky in a city the size of Pittsburgh and with employment so spread out geographically. Downtown lines get enough ridership but even Oakland is really tricky to do without transfers. The busways make a lot of sense because so many lines use them in the core congested areas and then branch out in all directions into the suburbs. PRT seems more favoring extending the trolly to Bellevue or Ross before Oakland and the airport but without more state or federal funds those extensions won’t happen fe atleast 15 years. All the near term projects are bus rapid transit with priority lanes on existing roadways. That might be all we get h less the population starts growing again. We get beat out on the federal funds competition by bigger and faster growing cities.

You have stumbled on the problem with building more light rail. is very expensive to build it to all the suburbs. It is a lot cheaper to build dedicated busways in the core that are shared by multiple routes while buses use existing routes further out I. The suburbs. There is a project in the 5-15 year time frame to build rapid bus transit on the sourth shore of the Allegheny to new Kensington and a project in the 15-25 year timeline for some smaller bus improvements on the north shore of the Allegheny from Etna to Natrona.

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

Map is on page 54

The county is going to put most transit funding toward bus lanes since we already have decent dedicated bus ways. Building a comprehensive light rail network would cost around $10 billion dollars and the state republicans prefer to build highways instead. There are two trolly extensions under consideration - northward to Bellevue or Ross.

Page 54 has the map of future projects

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

Sky bus would have been a boondoggle had they spent money in it but I don’t think they did. All the funding when to the trolley redline instead. They spent $500 million in 1980 dollars or $2billion in todays money to build the red line. Add another $500 billion for the blue line and $500 million for the north shore extension.

Here are some interesting pictures during the build out

https://www.brooklineconnection.com/history/Trolleys/Trolley29.html

Corrupt was a strange word choice but op probably just means rotten or spoiled and not in the dishonest moral sense of the word. The op is stressed and hastily wrote this post with SAT vocab words in odd places so that is probably what they were taught to do in a college prep obsessed privileged school district

It sounds like you are really stressed out and you might benefit from therapy. Writing out your story can be therapeutic. Sometimes people that go to good or high pressure school can develop post traumatic stress disorder. Those types of schools can make you feel like a complete failure when you mess up in tiny ways. Sometimes outsiders judge you based on your supposedly privileged background when even the best schools let a lot of people fall through the cracks. Even the best schools aren’t free from bullying and discrimination. Be kind to yourself and don’t let it define the rest of your life. The future is unwritten.

https://www.wesa.fm/2012-04-04/demolition-in-homewoods-killing-fields-marks-opening-day-for-demolition-season

https://pittsburghorbit.com/2017/04/30/the-sad-toys-of-homewoods-killing-fields/

School quality is probably is probably the bigger factor in Brighton heights than crime or blight. Perry has a much worse crime and blight problem. It’s interesting how much crime can change block to block. Point breeze is a wealthy neighborhood but borders Homewood and the infamous killing fields

Edit: source https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-pittsburgh-pa-metro/

Here are some houses in my Lebanon and bethel park that have been on the market a long time. I think you can find houses sitting in any neighborhood that are overpriced.

213 days

454 Royce Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15216

116 days

220 Broadmoor Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15228

92 days

38 Terraceview Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15243

89 days

1014 Logan Rd, Bethel Park, PA 15102

They are only worth what someone is willing to pay. It’s especially tricky bc they are priced as some of the most expensive in the neighborhood. If I had to guess 300-320 and 260-280. you could get something smaller near the trolly line in bethel or mt Lebanon for those prices with top tier schools.

I don’t think this phenomenon is unique to the north side. I’ve seen plenty of houses in bethel park and mt lebanon sit on the market when they are over priced and the seller is too stubborn to lower the price. the market isn’t crashing like 2008 but the first to suffer over high interest rates are going to be the sellers trying to get a rich price.

They are overpriced