When Pittsburgh bid for Amazon‘s new headquarters, access to the airport was a major factor. Other major cities are connected by rail to their airports. It’s the modern standard. Philadelphia even has two rail lines to its airport and three rail stations inside its air terminal.
Imagine, if you will, boarding a rapid rail vehicle in the City of Pittsburgh that whisks you into the airside terminal at Pittsburgh International Airport 20 miles away in just 10 minutes. You would be closer to your flight in the city than you would standing in the airport parking lot. It would effectively move the airport into the city rather than continuing to move the city out to the airport.
The time to pursue rapid rail to the airport is now. Plans to demolish and replace the airport’s landside terminal are moving ahead. A new landside terminal could just as functionally be located in the city where you could process your ticket; check your baggage; and pass through TSA security screening before boarding a secure rail car for ticketed air passengers, from which you’d walk to your flight at the air-side terminal.
We could even go one further by connecting rapid rail to Allegheny County Airport in West Mifflin and extending service up the Mon Valley. Adding capacity for containerized air freight would open new possibilities for old industrial sites that still await reuse, greatly enhancing their potential for just-in-time manufacturing and the latest high tech companies. Our region could offer a full multi-modal combination of highway, rail, water, and air transportation services the likes of which are available nowhere else. – That, in and of itself, could do more to breathe life back into the region’s struggling communities than anything yet to be attempted or proposed.
So why aren’t we, and why haven’t we done it before? We easily could have over a quarter century ago. Adequate federal funding was procured for a “fixed guideway” to the airport. Instead its $326
million was squandered building only half of the so-called Airport Busway in order that a real estate speculator would get $7 million for a worthless right-of-way left over after converting an old rail yard into an industrial park (it’s now called the West Busway because it only goes to Carnegie and nowhere near the airport).
Allegheny Conference is the name; real estate speculation, the game!
The Allegheny Conference on Community Development (aka the Allegheny Conference or simply the Conferenece) was organized during WWII by the ultra rich, the heads of major corporations, and the politically well connected. Pledging among themselves to use their economic, social, and political influence as a unified force, they formed an organization using the Conference’s name – a virtual corporate state, it functions as an elite shadow government, setting public policy and telling public officials what to do.
Disgusted with the region’s dirt and grime and concerned that with the end of hostilities in sight the local war-based economy would collapse leaving the area desolate, the Conference set forth to reinvent the region. They would do so piecemeal, deliberately maneuvering over the years to replace its heavy industrial, blue collar, working class culture with a modern office, white collar, corporate culture. They would begin with, and have continued to this day, to employ real estate speculation and large construction projects as their modus operandi.
The traditional European, pedestrian, human-scaled urban form was to be either torn down to make way for multi-block, scorched earth “urban renewal” projects or abandoned and left in place to rot as public policy instead focused upon the construction of modern, automotive-scale architecture and sprawling suburban land use.
Transportation being the primary determinant of settlement patterns, rail transit was conducive to the compact nodal land use of the region’s existing communities and did not fit into the Conference scheme of things. On the other hand, new highways made farmland accessible for real estate speculators to convert into spread out housing plans and strip commercial districts.
Self dealing leads to anti-rail bias
However, there was a problem. With Allegheny County heavily reliant upon mass transit and buses able to travel sprawling roadways, its 33 private bus companies were, for the most part, struggling toremain viable. Meanwhile, Pittsburgh Railways, the largest transit provider, maintained hundreds of miles of its own track, provided good service, and was profitable.
The Conference, though, saw an opportunity for some of its members to benefit. By placing all transit operations under a single public agency, bus service could be consolidated and subsidized to serve new spread out suburbs. Rail could be eliminated and replaced by a proprietary Westinghouse technology, Sky Bus, with its rubber tired vehicles using elevated guideways 30 feet in the air in place of streetcars. Alcoa could provide aluminum for Skybus vehicles, and Gulf Oil could provide diesel fuel for more buses.
It took a decade of legislation, through the 1950’s until the early 1960’s, to transform the Port Authority of Allegheny County from river transport into a public transit agency. Also called “Port Authority Transit;” “PAT Transit;” or simply “PAT,” its first board chairman was an executive vice-president of Gulf Oil, which obtained the diesel fuel contract.
Pittsburgh Railways fought ardently, though in vain, to keep from being taken by eminent domain. (The legislation allowed PAT to contract with private operators, but that wouldn’t fulfill the agenda.) For a while, PAT operated with two executive directors, one running its operations and the other in charge of dismantling the steel rail streetcar network.
With an anti-rail bias baked into PAT’s core from its inception, there should be no surprise that it underlies PAT’s planning and operations. To this day PAT focuses primarily upon rubber tired transit, with busways the centerpiece of its transit strategy.
More importantly, an anti-rail bias is essential to the Conference’s current agenda and a public policy that has spent three decades using massive public expenditures to subsidize the movement of businesses and jobs out to the airport area. The stated goal has been to make it into the region’s new central business district – its buildings so spread out, a la Brazilia, Brazil, one must drive between them. Moving the city out to the airport will increase traffic congestion (it’s projected the city to airport trek will take 90 minutes), justifying the construction of new highways, turnpikes, and the plum – a magnetic levitation system running from Greensburg to the airport.
The region held hostage
In the 1970’s, Pennsylvania Deputy Secretary of Transportation Ed Tennyson refused to release state funds for Skybus which until then had held the region hostage, preventing the potential of rail transit. PAT claimed if it didn’t build Skybus, the federal funding would be lost – as PAT said about the Runnel, PAT’s light rail river tunnel. Nevertheless, Tennyson forced PAT to restructure its application and use the funds to build the T.
With Skybus out of the way, nonetheless the region continued to be held hostage as the transportation policy came under the spell of Conference players speculating to get billions in federal funds for MagLev. Rapid rail to the airport would make MagLev unnecessary. Though MagLev never got off the ground (pun intended as it, too, would operate 20-30 feet in the air), it is still on the Conference agenda and remains part of current public policy. While languishing with no real possibility, MagLev is blocking the full potential of rail transit and, with it, rapid rail to the airport.
PAT points to its T as proof that it embraces rail, but its history has been exactly the opposite. Instead it has pursued the conversion of rail lines into busways costing several times more than reusing them for rail transit while claiming exactly the opposite. With Conference approval, PAT is spending over $200 million for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a controversial project that actually stands to impede transit usage and is really just to provide massive public subsidies that will foster more real estate speculation and gentrification in the Uptown area.
The region’s governance since WWII has been a Faustian bargain: Conference staff manage a sacrosanct agenda stuffed with real estate speculation projects for Conference players who fund campaigns of local politicians who then carry out the agenda by voting for project approvals, public funding, and other subsidies. Overturning the agenda holding the region hostage can happen if a bottom-up groundswell of citizen efforts take up the issue and organize to hold the feet of public officials to the fire and force them to step away from the Conference agenda. The BRT is underway as a project, but we can back rapid rail to the airport as the region’s most needed major transportation project.