Posts Tagged ‘The T’
Hullabaloo, too
Wednesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It was a ‘get some exercise day’ once again, and a humble narrator executed his now familiar trope of walking to the T light rail station and then heading towards the center of things here in Pittsburgh. There’s a fair amount of maintenance work being performed on the service and the transit people are rerouting the T’s through a largely shuttered facility downtown called ‘Penn Station,’ pictured above.
The drill is to debark the light rail unit you arrived in, cross a street, and then board a shuttle bus. Said bus carries you to two stops away, where you then debark the bus and head down into another light rail station to catch a T, which then travels to the terminal stop on the other side of the Allegheny River nearby the Sportsball stadiums.
The shuttle bus and the T make all the usual station stops along the way, as you’d imagine.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Penn Station sits alongside one of Pittsburgh’s ‘Busways,’ which are roadways whose occupancy is singularly restricted to mass transit, municipal, and emergency vehicles. Across the street is what used to be the actual ‘Penn, or Union, Station’ – as in the Pittsburgh HQ station of the Pennsylvania Rail Road company. This beautiful structure, clad in terracotta, has been converted over to luxury residential usage, unfortunately. There’s an Amtrak station alongside of it which now carries the passenger rail slack, but in the past I’ve described the station as looking like a Soviet orthodontist’s office and I’m sticking with that.
After my last long walk went down in flames due to dehydration and a sudden pall of infirmity, as detailed a couple of weeks ago, a humble narrator was determined to push the envelope a little bit on this one to explore the ideation that either it was a temporary thing or that there’s something wrong with me.
As it turned out, that episode seems to have been a one time thing. Yay.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Funnily enough, I felt absolutely top notch for the entirety of this walk, despite the fact that it was about three miles longer than the one which ended with me in bed at 9:30 p.m. feeling sick and old.
The weather was definitely on my side this time around – middle 70’s, with a fairly low dew point, and a steady breeze. The light was absolutely glorious on this particular afternoon, and instead of getting on that shuttle bus, one randomly decided to leave transit behind and get with the scuttling.
Back tomorrow with more.
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Light Rail Hullabaloo
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Transit was one of the deciding factors behind where Our Lady of the Pentacle and I decided to put down roots here in the Pittsburgh metroplex. Yes, we’ve got a car and use the thing frequently, but one such as myself has a distinct preference for being able to leave the automobile in the driveway occasionally.
The Pittsburgh Regional Transit people, aka the ‘PRT,’ operate a light rail service – called ‘The T’ – on the skeletal remains of Pittsburgh’s once far flung trolley system. The residential section we settled in enjoys this service and I ride it often, especially so on days when I’m taking the camera out for a walk. It frees me up to partake in a pint of beer or two after the walk is over, and allows egress to the core of the city without having to worry about parking or getting back to where I parked after scuttling about for miles and miles. I like it, and think it’s neat.
As mentioned a month or two ago, there’s a series of maintenance projects that PRT is performing this summer on the T service which has introduced a fairly random series of steps into riding the thing.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Under normal circumstance, one boards the service at a dedicated stop in my town (Dormont, which is technically a ‘Borough’). The light rail unit moves along a set of tracks with a variety of conditions – street running, dedicated and separated from vehicle traffic rights of way, underground subway style tunnels, and then back to an elevated right of way track at the terminal end nearby the stadiums on Pittsburgh’s north side. This trip is normally about 25-30 minutes long.
The phase of work that PRT has begun involves the subway section of the service, which lurks beneath the office buildings and towers of the downtown section. The light rail thereby diverts to a normally shuttered facility in the downtown area called ‘Penn Station.’
Said facility is across the street from the former HQ of the actual Pennsylvania Rail Road, a magnificent building which has been converted over to luxury residential usage. At Penn Station, T riders are encouraged to debark the rail units.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The street which Penn Station is found on is the approach to one of several ‘Busway’ corridors that snake through the Pittsburgh metro, and there’s a series of switches and tracks back there where the T can ‘turn around.’ There’s also what seems like a bus depot, but this isn’t a public byway so I can’t really say. They don’t actually turn around the T’s, I’d mention, the operator simply switches from the controls at one side of the unit to the other for the reverse trip.
There seems to be an intellectual tug of war going on with the people who care about public transit here in southwestern PA, between investing in and expanding the bus system or doubling down on the T. Advocacy arguments in favor of one or the other both have validity and solid reasoning, to my ear. There’s also a social justice factor which has to be added to the argument, as Pittsburgh’s ‘communities of color’ are largely supported by the bus network, rather than the limited corridors of the T which run through mostly suburban areas.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Personally, I think rail is the cooler choice (especially so if you’re suffering from a disability), but it doesn’t mean that it’s the best fiscal or political decision for municipal investment. The buses offer a much greater range and versatility as far as servicing the more far flung sections of Pittsburgh, for instance, and provide reach into communities which are experiencing economic hard times and providing a pipeline of access to the employment possibilities of downtown, and the stadium area with all of its service sector jobs. It’s also fairly easy and relatively cheap to increase bus saturation, as opposed to rail.
The light rail, on the other hand, is far more reliable than the buses – but the upfront costs of acquiring land, building the tracks, and populating the rails with passenger units is frightening. Saying that, there’s parts of Pittsburgh that the T doesn’t touch by design, which is somewhat baffling. The Oakland section with its multitudes of college students, for instance, would benefit massively from T service. So too would areas with functional but unused tracks like Allentown and the South Side Slopes.
There’s also ‘hot’ real estate zones like Lawrenceville which are entirely dependent on buses instead of rail, which is goofy.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At any rate… my drill right now involves riding the T from home to Penn Station, debarking the train and crossing a street to catch a rail shuttle bus. The shuttle bus subsequently stops at the two stations which have been isolated due to the reconstruction work (they’re replacing the concrete plinths which the actual rails are anchored into) that is underway.
The bus snakes through downtown Pittsburgh, whereupon it drops you off at another rail station at the end of the T’s Subway section, and then you board another T unit to complete the journey. I didn’t ’stopwatch’ the trip, but in estimation it took about 25 minutes longer for me to get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ than it normally had.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
The shuttle bus carries you to another station, whereupon you ride an escalator down to the platform level and board another train set. This unit accomplishes the final two stops on the service, including the terminal stop on the north shore of the Allegheny River nearby Acrisure Stadium. Personally, I found the entire thing quite interesting, but I’m a known transit nerd, ‘out and proud.’
Things are about to get even more interesting for me at the end of May, when the concrete plinth replacement project rises up out of the tunnels beneath downtown and begins nibbling up the dedicated right of way and street running sections of the service closer to home. That’s meant to take about three months, according to the PRT, which will be followed by a long timeline project that’s meant to rehabilitate the bridge which the T uses to cross the Monongahela River. That should be a pretty interesting situation to take shots of.
The PRT’s plan is to run buses on the route during the construction, which lends some weight to the argument offered by proponents of doubling down on road vehicle oriented transit in the area. This, of course, risks increasing vehicle congestion and air pollution.
It’s going to be interesting to see which side wins out, in the end.
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
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Back to HQ
Friday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
After a long walk down a steep hill and a thousand feet of steps, my dogs were barking. Thereby, I was quite pleased when a T light rail train set arrived to ferry me back to HQ, some five miles distant.
This option is pretty much going to not exist for the entire summer, which sucks, but the transit agency people are going to be reconditioning the concrete and rails which the T rides on. Necessary repairs, they say.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
It’s going to be brutal for a lot of people, having this particular rug yanked out from under them. There’s going to be shuttle buses working the route, but a bus ain’t a train, and it’s going to take a longer time to get where you’re going. What are you going to do, fight City Hall?
If this was NYC, and MTA was running the project, the three month ‘T’ outage would probably balloon into five years.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Limping at this point, as all of those steps had triggered my ‘trick left foot,’ I managed to make it back to Dormont where HQ is located. That’s the block where all things Pentacle revolves around these days.
Back next week with something different – at this, your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Goldurnit
Tuesday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Sigh… so… the local transit outfit, which operates the T Light Rail here in Pittsburgh, is called ‘Pittsburgh Regional Transit,’ or simply ‘PRT.’ Compared to the monstrous political patronage outfit and financial black hole back in NYC which calls itself the MTA – PRT is comparatively a small family sized business that runs buses, inclines, and a truly tiny light rail system around the Pittsburgh metro area. The PRT does a better job of all this – with far fewer resources – if you ask me, but they’re still the ‘Gub’mint.’
Recently announced, there’s a series of repair and maintenance projects barreling down the pike towards Pittsburgh. Several of these will specifically affect me, so when PRT announced they were going to stage a public meeting to present on and discuss the situation…
As always: They’d show up with their PowerPoint presentations, and a consolidated ‘This is how it’s going to be’ message. Somebody from the community always has to show up, ignore the social contract of not questioning your betters, and say to them ‘not good enough.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I said that I was never going to another Governmental meeting, didn’t I?
I’m done, I said.
Despite that… there I was, with my big mouth flapping open and saying it – “Hi, I’m Mitch Waxman, and…” Before I knew it I was asking how they’d combat decaying headway times during the construction process, and questioning their (highly optimistic and flawed) metrics about the time factor of loading shuttle buses versus the light rail system.
Damn it. The battle with darkness never ends, does it.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Suffice to say that you’re not going to be seeing shots here of the T running between the end of May and September, and that I’m finally going to be taking a ride on a Pittsburgh bus. Looking forward to checking out the busway system, I am, with its private rights of way separate from private vehicular traffic. That’s the plus, the positive side of things.
The negative is that the summer of ‘24 outage in T service is just the beginning of a long series of projects which are scheduled to play out over a nearly five year interval. Even worse news is that I’m supposed to attend a meeting of the local transit advocacy group, tomorrow night.
Back tomorrow.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
Disfunction Junction
Monday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
A gorgeous spring-like day saw a humble narrator walking all over Pittsburgh, as detailed in last week’s posts. The end of my longish scuttle occurred, and I settled in at an often visited brewery which is located along the Three Rivers Heritage Trail and the ‘Colors Park,’ where outdoor seating and active railroad tracks used by the CSX outfit are found.
I’m very fond of this spot, as it’s a grade crossing (the tracks intersect with a local street) with signal alarms that alert you when a train is nearing, and thereby you have ample warning to get into position and frame your shot. Also, there’s beer.
Choo Choo.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One ended up having more than one glass of beer, I’ll confess, and it was dark when I set out for the T Light Rail station to acquire a ride home. I was testing out the ‘fail zone’ of a newish 50mm f1.8 lens on this leg of the day, I should mention.
The 50mm lens is pretty bare bones, electronics wise, and doesn’t offer ‘image stabilization’ technology inside the housing. My camera has an internal sensor based stabilization system, which gives me about three stops of wiggle room, but when I attach a stabilized lens to the thing I get an amazing eight stops worth of mechanical assist. The lack of stabilized glass on the thing caused me to throw away a few train shots, which just weren’t sharp enough to ‘make the grade.’
I made a mental note about sticking with my stabilized f1.8 35mm, or 85mm f2, for handheld night shots like the one above.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Back home in Dormont some five miles away, and just as I was leaving the T Light Rail station, a Pittsburgh bound T train set was seen leaving the station. Couldn’t resist.
Back tomorrow with something different – at this – your Newtown Pentacle.
“follow” me on Twitter- @newtownpentacle
Buy a book!
“In the Shadows at Newtown Creek,” an 88 page softcover 8.5×11 magazine format photo book by Mitch Waxman, is now on sale at blurb.com for $30.
The Newtown Pentacle 