2023 Pittsburgh City Council District 5 Candidate Survey
🗳 Update: The results of the 2023 municipal primaries are in! Check the county’s website to see all the details, and see below where we’ve made note of the winner. Thanks again to all of the candidates who participated in our survey.
District 5 spans Squirrel Hill, Hazelwood, Greenfield and South to Lincoln Place
Biking and walking are not only quality of life issues, they are political issues. Elected officials determine how much is invested in our streets, and whether or not those investments make biking and walking safer and less stressful. Biking and walking are healthy, affordable ways to get around, and positively address air quality and climate change. They are good for the economy, and biking and walking infrastructure make our streets safer. If our streets are dangerous for biking and walking, the outcomes affect us all.
In Pittsburgh Council District 5, Councilperson Warwick was elected in a special election last to finish out Corey O’Connor’s term. Warwick now needs to run to keep the seat, and is being challenged by two candidates: Lita Brillman and Matt Mahoney.
We wanted to be sure to give these candidates an opportunity to talk directly to the voters on these issues, so that you can better understand where they are coming from and make an informed decision for who to cast your vote for on the May 16 primary and November 7 elections.
We’d like to offer a sincere “thank you” to the candidates for participating.
Note: Matt Mahoney did not respond to our survey.
1. We envision a Pittsburgh where people can thrive without needing to own a car. What role do you think city council plays in making Pittsburgh an easier place for people to live and visit without a car?
City Council works closely with the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure to identify places within each district that are in need of pedestrian, transit, and bike access improvements. At the neighborhood level, the Councilperson plays a critical role in helping identify the places where pedestrians and bicyclists are unsafe and transit is inaccessible. This is especially important in underserved communities that need these types of improvements the most, but where residents are less likely to persist in demanding the sidewalk improvements, traffic calming, and public transit infrastructure they so desperately need.
Council members should also be communicating regularly with Pittsburgh Regional Transit to help identify where public transit services need to be increased/expanded. It’s not enough to simply throw up our hands and say, “Well, that’s a PRT problem. There’s nothing we can do.” There’s so much we can be doing as a City to improve public transit ridership in order to get the masses out of their cars. To begin with, the City of Pittsburgh can start by providing monthly bus passes to its employees. This is something the District 5 office is already working on with the administration and PRT, with hopes to see implemented next year. We can also focus more of DOMI’s time and funding on improving our public transit infrastructure – from better, more accessible bus stops to dedicated bus lanes. At the end of the day, a car-free dedicated bus lane with bike access gives transit riders and cyclists a fairer share of our right of way while also putting a barrier between car traffic and pedestrians along the sidewalk. But it only works if we are collaborating with PRT to ensure that they can provide a level of service needed to give drivers a viable alternative.
City Council can really make a difference in limiting car dependency both infrastructurally and attitudinally. We live in a culture where cars are always considered the first option, and everything else is just an alternative that you need to have a certain lifestyle to maintain. Not everyone can bike – Pittsburgh is hilly and many of our neighbors are disabled, elderly, or otherwise not able to use a bike for transportation. However, the biking community and public transit users often overlap, and share the same goal of making transportation safer, greener, and easier, and this can only happen if we move away from a car-first attitude. Making bus stops clearer and safer and adding more frequent buses so that you don’t have to check a schedule all the time are mostly county-wide decisions, but City Council can certainly use our position to advocate for these things to improve public transit in our own districts. City Council also plays an essential role in determining infrastructure including speed humps, bike lane implementation, and traffic changes are absolutely within City Council’s authority. Speed humps and traffic calming are an essential tool to make biking safer, but there needs to be carefully drawn impact reports and a 360 data-driven approach to determining where they go. Speed humps are often unpopular, and cause some drivers to avoid them. We put them on Beechwood, causing some people to move over to Shady instead. Now there is talk of putting them on Shady, which can move traffic over to Murray. That will not work. That’s already a densely congested street, and that will only cause more idling, less bike and pedestrian safety, and more emissions from cars. Overall, we want Pittsburgh to be a place where bikers are not just tolerated, but encouraged, as are pedestrians and public transit users, and that starts with taking methodical approaches to our traffic calming attitudes.
2. As with roads, sidewalks and public transit, biking only works well when there are complete networks of safe streets people can use to get around. What are your thoughts on the current bikeway network. What’s working? Where can the City improve?
As far as recreational biking, Pittsburgh is super. Our riverfront trails are great and getting even better. And if you live and work along one of the major bike corridors, then Pittsburgh is a very bike-able city. But outside of that, you need to be pretty daring to get around Pittsburgh on a bike. A lot of this is driver behavior – I know that personally I don’t feel comfortable riding in the street with cars. I would like to see more robust painted infrastructure for bikes (a faded bike symbol in a busy lane of traffic isn’t worth much…). And we need speed humps along basically all but the smallest streets. I think this is doable and should be a part of our paving program. In other words, if we’re doing any work at all along a street, we should be evaluating whether we can include some traffic calming and a painted bike lane.
As far and promoting bike culture, the POGOH program is great – especially with the introduction of e-bikes. The topography of Pittsburgh is tricky, but generally, introducing the e-bike as an alternative to a car is something I can see working. The key is to actually make it less convenient to drive – by adding bus service, dedicated bus lanes, increasing parking rates, creating car-free pedestrian promenades, etc. Pittsburgh probably won’t ever be like Amsterdam, but with the right vision, commitment, and collaboration between County and City leadership, I think we could someday look like Stuttgart or some other comparable city.
Complete streets are great and need to be encouraged, but if it’s only “complete” for a few blocks, it’s hard to get excited about it. I go to Pitt where we have this great complete street by the Cathedral, but it only takes you so far. It’s right by Schenley, which only has a bike lane in the golf course, but doesn’t even encircle the whole park. We also need to prioritize physical barriers for bike lanes in the city – flex posts aren’t enough, but they’re at least something physical as opposed to just paint which as we can see commonly in places like Liberty Ave, are just ignored and allow drivers to treat bike lanes like parking lanes. The data shows that protected bike lanes lead to increased safety for everyone. Adding protections for cyclists, as well as making sure bike lanes are connected well, is important to completing a streets network. Finally, an interactive map on the City of Pittsburgh website of bike lanes in Pittsburgh with details about grade, bike lane protections, usual traffic conditions, etc., will help people feel more prepared and confident to bike.
3. What transportation project in your district are you particularly excited about? How will it benefit people who get around without a car?
I just learned that POGOH is coming to Hazelwood. I’m very excited about that. I’m also glad that Second Ave is part of the Smart Streets program. Apart from that, I’m really focused right now on traffic calming along Greenfield Ave. and Hazelwood Ave. These two corridors are horrendous for biking and walking and there are accidents all the time – especially at the top of Hazelwood, by Magee pool and rec center, and by Greenfield School.
Unfortunately the only project in District 5 on the PRT website is an extension of service from Homestead to McKeesport, which hasn’t been updated since 2021. However, my district is extremely hilly and has a lot of stairs for pedestrians to use that would take cars much longer to go around, and it’s been exciting seeing the efforts to improve the stairs and adding ramps for people to walk their bikes alongside the stairs and I fully support infrastructural improvements to our great stair and trail networks. I also love what Free Ride has been doing with helping people recycle their bikes, teaching bike maintenance, etc., and I’ve been really happy with the advocacy from Car Free PGH and Bike PGH have been doing with their events and information to show us what a less car-centric life could look like. We have lots of places that should be closed to cars, it’s just a matter of allowing ourselves to imagine!
4. What’s a particularly dangerous problem or location in your district for walkers, bikers, or people with disabilities that you would like to fix?
We need traffic calming on Greenfield Ave, Hazelwood Ave, Beechwood Blvd in Greenfield, and Mifflin Road.
Squirrel Hill South has gotten so much attention in terms of street safety over the past few years – it’s time for the rest of District 5 to get the attention it needs. I’m really glad that Glen Hazel is finally getting traffic calming, but it unfortunately took a kid on his bike getting struck by a car for us to get there. I’m going to keep pushing hard for those other projects, so we hopefully don’t ever have to see that again.
As far as serving the disabled community, I want to see the shared e-scooter pilot either completely eliminated or drastically changed. As a city, it can be extremely hard to build safe, accessible streets that can be navigated by our most vulnerable residents. So that fact that we are actively making it harder for the disabled community (and bicyclists and people with strollers and the elderly, etc.) to move by littering our sidewalks and bike lanes with scooters is inexcusable.
There are a few. I previously mentioned flex posts – they do not count as “protected” bike lanes. We need physical barriers to make bikers feel safer. We need dedicated bike lanes on major streets – we have plenty that are wide enough for sidewalks, bike lanes, bus lanes, and cars, but we don’t use them to our full potential because we assume cars are the default. I’ll reiterate the danger that can come from speed humps not taking impact into account and leading to more traffic and congestion on other streets. I’m also greatly concerned about sidewalk conditions. Not only do sidewalks in poor conditions make life harder and more dangerous for our elderly and disabled populations, they’re also a gender equity issue. Women are more likely to be disabled, and more likely to be pregnant or pushing a stroller. We much approach sidewalk maintenance as a gender equity and disability justice issue and make sure they are being appropriately maintained.
5. Why should people who care about safe streets for biking and walking vote for you?
Before being elected in Nov. of 2022, I worked with my neighbors to stop the Mon-Oakland Connector project, which would have introduced motorized shuttles into an existing car-free bike/pedestrian corridor through Schenley Park. I also worked closely with Pittsburghers for Public Transit to instead increase transit access between Glen Hazel, Hazelwood, Oakland, Squirrel Hill, and Lawrenceville – successfully petitioning PRT to add weekend service on the 93. And I continue to advocate for extending the 75 into Hazelwood to improve transit access to Oakland even more. As a community leader and Councilperson, I’ve been dogged in my advocacy for traffic calming and sidewalk improvements in Greenfield and Hazelwood, and since being elected, we are finally starting to see some of those projects come to fruition.
After gun violence, I consider cars to be our number one public safety hazard. We live in a city where most people do not feel safe allowing their kids to play in front of their homes for fear they will be hit by a car. Parents don’t feel safe letting their kids walk to their local school because we don’t have the stop signs and speedhumps we need to slow these cars down. This is unacceptable to me. Having lived in Germany for 11 years before moving to Pittsburgh, I know what it’s like to raise kids and live in a city without owning a car.
Building a city that runs on public transit and is therefore conducive to walking and biking isn’t complicated. It doesn’t take a lot of fancy technology. It just takes money and political will. With the right County and City leadership, we can get there. And I want to be part of that.
Because I am the only candidate in the race that takes a data-driven, expert-advised approach to transit and road infrastructure. I have heard from multiple constituents that when they call our current councilperson to get an idea of why certain initiatives have been taken such as speed humps or traffic pattern changes such as the change to one-way at Dallas and Beechwood, she has no answer or understanding of why the changes are being made. This is dangerous. Even well-intentioned traffic changes can lead to less safety. When we divert traffic from Dallas and Beechwood, we create more congestion, cause more cars to drive down residential streets, and create less safety and more pollution in those areas. Similarly, requests for information on why certain areas are chosen for speed humps are met with a lack of the necessary data-driven information. We can’t make infrastructural improvements that just look or sound good, they need to be backed up by a combination of research and community input. Mismanaged or arbitrary road infrastructure can cost pedestrians and cyclists their lives
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