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liam o’connell

liam o’connell

@liamoc.bsky.social

630 followers 590 following 35 posts

city kid thinking about trains • he/him

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liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 13d

(Map credit Jake Berman, via www.publicsource.org/mapping-pitt...)

Mapping Pittsburgh-area transit from streetcars and grandiose plans to the buses and trains we see today

Like most older American cities, Pittsburgh was built by the electric streetcar. In the first half of the 20th century, mass transit in most American cities was a profitable business — one that was se...

www.publicsource.org

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 13d

With the coming of the Downtown-Oakland BRT, many of the Skybus corridors can be considered "addressed" with some form of upgraded transit. Busways do the heaviest lifting, but their total traffic separation makes them work. (Rapid transit > on-street BRT for Oakland is the biggest downgrade).

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 13d

The full Allegheny County 60-mile rapid transit system, a.k.a. Skybus, doesn't perform half-badly

Reposted by liam o’connell

Aaron W. Gordon @agordon.me · 13d

I am continually impressed by Alissa's coverage of LA transportation and also how insane LA's transportation spending is.

Alissa Walker @awalkerinla.bsky.social · 14d

LA is building a new $1.5 billion freeway into LAX.

The very same airport where we just spent $2 billion on the people mover — actually, more like $3 billion, plus another $900 million if you count Metro's investment in the LAX station; so let's just say $4 billion — to make cars go away

Air traffic control

The LAX-pressway must be stopped

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 14d

Other than the crosstown "urban line," the majority of Skybus miles were part of the group of "suburban lines," structured in a very S-Bahn-esque trunk-branch structure. (As such, I have given them numbers starting with S.) Only two short branches, to Etna and Carnegie, remain to be built.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 14d

Substantial progress building out the rest of the "suburban system:" the lines to Rankin (on the PRR main line, essentially the rest of today's East Busway), the North Hills, and the County Airport (how times have changed).

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 15d

monroeville ridership update:

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 15d

2. Adding a Morewood stop on the Oakland line, because it seemed like a large destination that the Skybus proposal missed, and definitely *not* because of my own experiences waiting for overcrowded 61 buses at this location. It gets 4k daily riders, only slightly lower than the other Oakland stops.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 15d

Actually, though I said I'm building to the study, I've made a couple "editorial" changes:

1. On the M'ville line, adding the Busway's Negley stop. Shadyside is pretty residentially dense. The Baum-Centre Skybus stop *isn't* on the Busway—an odd miss, as it's right in front of Shadyside Hospital.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 15d

(I'm building only study-proposed alignments—but would be curious to compare the performance of the two. FWIW, Subway Builder's demand model, unsurprisingly, posits that most Monroeville workers live in adjacent suburbs, thus probably won't contribute to the ridership of Downtown-bound rail.)

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 15d

One interesting quirk of this proposal is that the rapid transit study *slightly* predates the development of the Monroeville Mall and growth of US-22 into a suburban commercial corridor. Were this being proposed today, a rail line would almost certainly just follow US-22 to hit the mall.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 15d

Next: the Monroeville line. This extends the South Hills line, mostly following the PRR thru the East End. The canceling of Skybus that turned the South Hills line into LRT turned this line into the East Busway, a very successful early example of North American BRT.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 16d

unsurprisingly,

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 16d

New Skybus line dropped. (Sorry for the hard-to-see blue).

The "urban line" from the 1967 report combines two segments that run thru Downtown: the Oakland line, running east to Homewood, and the Ohio River line, serving the inner valley suburbs to the north and west.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 16d

yeah! i suspect the "people" in this game may be slightly more rational about picking transit over driving than their irl counterparts

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 17d

Before getting to this second construction phase, this is how we're doing so far: ~12-13k daily riders on the yellow line here, which includes only the South Hills line as outlined in the engineering docs above.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 17d

It is quite a significant job cluster to have no dedicated-ROW transit service! (In this quick pull from OnTheMap, Oakland is the cluster to the right, Downtown to the left). SoI am most curious to see the travel pattern impacts of a metro to Oakland (even w/ Subway Builder's modeling limitations).

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 17d

Downtown<>Oakland has long been one of the city's busiest transit corridors, but never got a rail ROW. Several earlier 20th century proposals were never built. Skybus' South Hills line advanced first...because a ROW already existed for streetcars. (And was later converted to the above LRT).

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 17d

PGH's rail corridors largely follow rivers & valleys. Between downtown and the East End, the PRR's main line tracks a series of ravines and valleys, remnants of a preglacial course of the Monongahela, skirting north of Oakland.

www.wesa.fm/arts-sports-...

How ancestral rivers carved up — and flattened — Pittsburgh

The large arc of flat land curving through Pittsburgh's East End seems out of place, but it's actually an ancient riverbed marking where the Allegheny and Monongahela once flowed.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 17d

Before continuing the build, a quick detour thru PGH rail history.

We tend to build transit infra where it's easiest. PGH topography makes the overlap of "easy to build" & "high ridership potential" rail corridors quite narrow. Oakland—the "eds & meds"-anchored second CBD—is the biggest victim.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 18d

As the South Hills line got the furthest, its engineering docs provide instructions from which to conduct (virtual) construction:
historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/ob...

So it's the first built—I'm hoping that getting started on the Oakland line ASAP will bolster the mid early ridership stats.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 18d

The line was never built, but if the route above looks familiar, it is because it is essentially the route of today's Red Line LRT; the consolation for the failure of Skybus cancelation was the renovation of two South Hills streetcar corridors into a modern light rail system.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 18d

Skybus was the nickname for the "Transit Expressway Revenue Line," a 1960s proposal to bring rapid transit to the Pittsburgh region using automated, rubber-tired cars. A 60-mile system was initially planned, but only one line—the one to the South Hills—ever advanced to the engineering stage.

liam o’connell @liamoc.bsky.social · 18d

For decades, everyone has been wondering: would the Pittsburgh Skybus actually have worked? 50 years after the project was canceled, we have the tools* (Subway Builder) to find out.

(*This is, at best, half-serious.)

Reposted by liam o’connell

Vishnu Reddy @vishnu.red · Sep 15

New Haven’s fascinating parkitecture, part 2