BIKEPGH MESSAGE BOARD ARCHIVE

Still on last year's projects (some of which were delayed or multi-year), I think. Doesn't look like it's been updated for this year yet.

Yup. A bunch of these were done last year.

And they have very few projects listed for 2016 when they will certainly do more. I wonder if they will update it when the asphalt plant opens for the season?

Right--I think the projects you see listed for 2016 aren't 2016-projects per se, they're projects the City planned to do but didn't get to last year, or something (that site doesn't work on my phone hardly at all, so I'm not really able to check right now). I don't know when they'll announce this year's projects. If you look back through when past years' lists have come out, I think it's tended to be in April, and kind of a surprise. It probably is a function of the asphalt plant, particularly them telling the City how much they intend to charge this year and the City figuring out how much paving they can therefore afford to do in the year...

Some of the "Planned Projects" are because of coordination with the utility companies. For instance, DPW was going to pave a segment of Pioneer last year but PWSA(I think) had a 100-yr-old pipe under it that was due to be replaced so it made more sense to wait rather than pave and have it torn up again. Prior to this admin, there was very little coordination with the utility companies to avoid these types of scenarios. Additionally, utility companies would often only pave half the street in the past but, if the rest of it could stand to be paved, there is more coordination to have them do the whole thing and reimburse them later. Asphalt prices certainly have some to do with the budget for paving and they are effected by oil prices. However, the work is also bid out to be completed by a contractor.

I assume that asphalt will be cheaper this year, then.

City releases 2016 paving plan (49+ miles!), plus "has contracted with Cartegraph, Inc. to conduct a comprehensive pavement condition assessment of all 2,400 lane miles of city-owned streets. As part of the assessment process, Cartegraph staff will travel every mile of street using specially equipped vehicles that collect detailed information on twelve different distress criteria, including previous patching, potholes, and alligator cracking." http://pittsburghpa.gov/mayor/release?id=5868 To-be-paved highlights include multiple parts of Millvale Ave between Liberty and Baum, a healthy chunk of the awful cement section of Centre Ave, the entirety of North Neville, much of South Bouquet and Dawson in Oakland, Fifth from Robinson to Birmingham Bridge, most of Sixth Avenue and three blocks of Liberty Downtown...and that's just the ones I use frequently. The list literally stretches from California and Bascom Avenues at the Bellevue line to New Homestead in the far southeast and from Fairywood to East Hills. See the whole map here: https://pap.accela.com/envista-public-web/index.xhtml?token=Pittsburgh

Worth highlighting East St as well, as that one will probably include moar bike lanes! Also, lower Federal St, Sandusky/7th in the North Side, that super shitty section of Smallman past 34th St., parts of Negley, frickin' Riverview Park (please do the downhill side. Please!), Wenzell Ave, etc. I doubt other people get as pumped for paving projects as those of us that frequent this forum

Ooooooo, of interest to about three people, Neidel St./S. Main St. in the West End, the super steep hill that Stu tagged as a potential "alternate Dirty Dozen" hill, which he also described as a "moon-like surface", as I recall. This is really nice because Neidel St. to the Elbon St. steps is my go-to Steuben St./Rt. 60 bypass to get to points west of the city.

I believe much of North Negley and (at least the uphill side of) One Wild Place are to get bike lanes, too. (Worth noting as well that Better Streets Lawrenceville has long had reconfiguration of outer Butler St to make it safer to get to the Zoo area from that direction on our project wishlist...)

S. Millvale, Center, and N. Neville St. Thank goodness. I ride all these everyday and they all are potholed messes constantly. Though I see my commute being aweful while this is going down. Time to start riding the MTB to work. Also pumped about paving in riverview (the streets here are so bad) and east street (because bike lanes) Also like that the worst part of higland ave (inside the circle) is getting paved, again a consistently bad area with lots of traffic.

I know this list is subject to change, but I was kinda wishing that they would repave Stanwix this year, but that will probably have to wait until the "GAP to Point" cycle track designs are finalized. Also, eastbound Mellon Terrace in Highland Park needs serious love.

You had me at lower Federal Street. Both directions, that bit of street is particularly difficult, partly because of road surface, partly because of cars breathing down your neck, partly because of all the pedestrian cross traffic. I have to say, the repaving of Perrysville from the city line all the way down, over two seasons about three or four seasons ago, has held up very well. I sure hope this season's work holds up at least as well.

I am concerned with the paving of urbana way between davidson and st johns way. It's a belgian block street, and unless they are planning to rip out all the blocks, this may create more problems than it solves after a season or two of freeze / thaw. This is likely why most of the rest of urbana way is a potholed mess, except this belgian block section section, because they paved over belgian block. Though, it could be partially because they just havn't re-paved urbana in quite a long time as well. I'm not an expert in paving.

Looks like the potholed mess that is Neville is getting repaved, as well as Centre. The worst part of Neville is from Centre to Bayard.

Almost the entire bloomfield to oakland bike route is being repaved between liberty and bayard. S. Millvale, Center, Neville. All 3 have been in bad shape for years, it will be a rough ride this summer, but once it's done, it will be fantastic.

Just something to note after the Penn Avenue debacle last year. If you are headed downhill on Millvale, you can see exposed trolley tracks. This may, if the city notices it, delay the paving process. If they do end up removing the tracks, it will make the road as a whole much less susceptible to potholes in the future.

East end getting love and attention. Yay.

those who have commented here so far are all east-enders, but as i noted above, the map itself looks pretty well distributed to me... https://pap.accela.com/envista-public-web/index.xhtml?token=Pittsburgh

Related (these are both State projects): - Liberty Bridge rehab to begin in four weeks…. http://www.penndot.gov/RegionalOffices/district-11/Pages/details.aspx?newsid=458 - Baum Blvd Bridge to close Monday for almost three months: https://twitter.com/PGHDistrict8/status/715635764739092484 ('detour information' link is to a PDF...) The latter especially is likely to cause problems again for riders in Bloomfield (Liberty is the official detour) and North Oakland (Centre and Craig will probably see a lot of added traffic as well). Hopefully Polish Hill won't be hit as hard this year.

One wild place!!!! Halfway done. Bike lanes coming?

And negley from Stanton to Highland Park. (For the marathon)

Negley paving seems about done. Wonder when the bike lane is going in. Haven't seen any news about it

The hilly part of Milroy (on North Side, between East and Perrysville) is done, and it isn't even on the map! (The street is, but the paving isn't on either the map or the accompanying list.)

Devonshire - Fifth Avenue to Centre is milled as of 4/17

FYI. The short term upcoming work schedule can be found at http://pittsburghpa.gov/dpw/StreetPavingSchedule Usually lists stuff that will probably happen in the next two weeks or so. Actual work varies depending on temperature and weather forecast.

ELB looked like it was milled going toward negley at negley when I went by this morning. Hoping that bike lanes are repainted quickly after paving, but I have a feeling that they won't be, and it will be a two lane highway for vehicles like it was before.

Devonshire is paved in it's entirety.

I've seen a lot of fresh crosswalk paint lately. They may be working their way to it. I'm sure they are a bit behind on the paving schedule due to the cold snap a week or so ago. The alley behind my house was milled in late march, but I'm still waiting for it to even get the coarse base of pavement put down.

Yeah, I was surprised to see Devonshire getting paved yesterday, as two other streets on my route to work, 46th and Millvale, were milled and pre-paved weeks ago but still haven't been finished yet. I wouldn't mind as much if they'd bevel the damn edges at the ends of the work zone, but the jump back onto the pavement on NB Millvale is a bit difficult to manage with traffic on your ass and gravel all over everywhere....

Sandusky St on the North Shore has been paved and is silky smooth :-)

There is a massive divot on Negley, but I forget where. Somewhere in East Liberty. Maybe right outside of (old) Babyland. Quite scary to ride your bike over if you are going full speed. It is about 2 feet long and extends the entire length of the road. There is also another one on One Wild Place right near where it meets Butler Street. I think that one only is in the right trafic lane. I was driving this time, and it almost removed the underside of my car. I assume these are all getting fixed sometime soon as they are in the paving areas, but both are fairly dangerous.

East Liberty Boulevard is paved. But no line markings, so it has returned to the 2 lane superhighway. Let's count the number of days until the lines are painted.

I was hoping that they would pave all of ELB and put the bike lane where it belongs: right next to the curb. But why would they actually do anything for cyclists that makes sense? I sure love riding past Obama school in the bike lane and trying to stay out of the door zone when there is an event, yet staying 4 feet away from moving traffic.

Two major cuts in Liberty Avenue with little notice. First one is at 38th Street. There is a base layer of paving down but the bump is enough to startle you. The second one is worse, and it is at 39th Street. This is milled all the way down with large cinders in the pit. Hit these at 30 mph last night and was, to say the least, surprised.

Still no paving done on the jail trail. Just a few days left in April. Weather has been nice.

2017 City paving projects The list of upcoming 2017 paving projects for the City of Pittsburgh has been released, and is available here in PDF: http://pittsburghpa.gov/dpw/StreetPavingSchedule A brief look at it shows

• East Liberty Bvd
• Access road from 18th St to the South Side riverfront park parking lot (!)
• Upper reaches of Federal St
• N Neville St (Fifth to Centre)
• Centre freaking Ave! (Craig to Aiken)
• Larimer Ave (rode it last Sunday. It's terrible)

And many more. An interactive map is not available yet. Dig in, folks.

I converted into a Google spreadsheet here.

Also being paved, those little alleys border the connector through bakery square 2.0 (festival st, social way). Friendship ave between Negley and Atlantic.

Also note that Fifth Ave from Kirkpatrick/Birmingham Bridge up to Miltenberger (just past the crest), Penn Ave from 31st to 26th in the Strip, and Liberty Ave from 12th to 21st in the Strip, are all due to be milled and paved this week. (Work on Fifth and Liberty is scheduled to be done at night, btw.)

Wonder if centre will be re concreted or end up asphalt?

@edronline, ideally, it would be concrete, but I don't think the city usually does anything more than milling and asphalting. Same goes for Liberty Ave and Sixth Ave downtown, which are scheduled for later this year (and got postponed last year so Comcast could do utility work). Those two have heavy bus traffic and should be torn up and repaved with concrete, but I doubt they will. Asphalt is cheaper and faster.

Concrete lasts longer but when it goes the seams are perfectly aligned with where bikes ride. And open seams don't bother cars, which is one of the reasons centre could be crap for so long. Also with concrete need to rip out entire road to base whereas with asphalt you can mill and replace a few times before ripping it down to base.   I guess you are right re the asphalt.  Didn't think about bus traffic being better on concrete.   Then again, if they can do it cheaper and thus do more lane miles this year, I'm all for that.

Sixth Avenue's been torn up by Comcast recently between Wood and Smithfield, and they (or somebody) just put in brand new concrete for the torn-up section, about half a lane wide from Wood to around Coffey Way (as of a few days ago). No idea if that means they'll be doing more concrete repairs. The list says "Kirkpatrick to Mittenberger [sic] (Mechanical Patching from Jumonville to Mittenberger)". How is mechanical patching different from regular patching? (I think I'll start referring to Miltenberger as Mittenberger too. Pittsburgh has many amusing street names already, but no reason we can't improve them.)

I think mechanical patching uses something like this -- http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-08/mechanical-road-crew-filling-potholes-quickly-and-cheaply So it patches the potholes, but does so more "professionally" and with longer-lasting results than by hand, would be my guess.

Penn Ave. should be paved from 31st St. to 22nd St. and between Shady Ave. and Centre Ave. 5th Ave from Kirkpatrick St. to Magee St., and Forbes Ave. from Armstrong Tunnel to Birmingham Bridge. Miltenberger St. Between 5th Ave and Forbes Ave is pretty bad as well.

Supposedly the city has evaluated, cataloged, and assigned a grade to all stretches of road in the city and is using their finite pot of paving money yearly to do the worst streets while making sure the money is spread out throughout all city council districts.   So, I think pgh is doing the best they can.  The very lean years led to the city not doing enough road maintenance to just break even with the road breakdown. Peduto and council have been trying to do the break even point plus extra to make up ground.   Could they do more?  Sure. But that would mean cutting somewhere else or raising taxes.   You can always 311 these stretches and maybe they'd come patch some potholes to make them smoother.

http://pittsburghpa.gov/dpw/asphalt-paving   http://pittsburghpa.gov/dpw/street-paving-program   Unfortunately the link is broken to the paving management system.   Also within the last year pgh started coordinating with other agencies to avoid the conflicting dig up the street for scheduled utility work right after freshly paving a street.

I'm wondering, is Pittsburgh still using the Roadmixer mobile asphalt plant? They said it was on lease with option to buy in 2015. http://www.wpxi.com/news/local/pittsburgh-debuts-mobile-asphalt-machine_nkt27/46284053

Parking lot under Birmingham bridge closed and they are milling the crap out of the road today.  Trail section is open.

This is a good project for cyclists. The stretch of road between the parking lot and the train tracks was in bad shape. Also, hopefully they'll fix the road drainage there, too. The inbound lane along the dog park tends to puddle up.

This is the yucky part of the trail. With some bicycle sized pot holes. Hopefully they will fix that too but I don't think that is included in the project.   Pretty sure I saw that monster milling machine there today.

To answer a few questions: The city does perform concrete slab replacement and will be doing that in some places this year. I'm not sure exactly where but can find out. However, it is indeed much more expensive than asphalt and many concrete streets will just have an overlay performed. Some roads are so bad that concrete repairs have to be made before an overlay of asphalt can even be performed. The city does not use the Road Mixer anymore. The city uses Cartegraph OMS for pavement management. Cartegraph was also contracted to do an objective assessment of all city-owned asphalt and concrete streets. That info is now being used to help make paving decisions. http://www.cartegraph.com/cartegraph-oms/ Hopefully a map of all DPW projects will be up soon. The DPW list does not include paving being performed by utility companies so there is really a lot more resurfacing that will happen aside from what is listed. Also, there is brick and block stone repair that is not included on that list. In addition, if projects come in under budget (which does happen) more streets will get added in.  

Thanks for the info!!!   re:

Some roads are so bad that concrete repairs have to be made before an overlay of asphalt can even be performed.

Does this mean that for concrete streets, even if they were going to be paved over with asphalt instead of redone with concrete, that the base concrete will need to be repaired (with concrete) before asphalt can be put over the top?

Some roads are so bad that concrete repairs have to be made before an overlay of asphalt can even be performed.

Liberty Ave in downtown falls into this category, I think. You can see how some of the concrete slabs have buckled and split into two or more pieces. Milling and asphalt won't cut it there.

Yes, depending on the condition of the street, the base concrete would have to be repaired with concrete to some extent before an overlay of asphalt could be performed.

City finds an additional $1 million for paving streets this year: http://triblive.com/local/allegheny/12330129-74/pittsburgh-finds-extra-1m-for-street-repairs

The city releases list of paving projects for 2018: http://apps.pittsburghpa.gov/redtail/images/2314_Council_Paving_List_2018.pdf The list also breaks up which projects are being coordinated with utility work. Progress!

Also, showing 5 year patching/sealing maintenance on roads which were paved previously so they may actually last longer! Also, map link here: http://pittsburghpa.gov/domi/street-resurfacing/paving-schedule-map.html

Mount Royal is not on that list. Have you ever tried to drive up it off of East? It's a moonscape.

which Mt royal? Mt royal in sq hill is a small street. Mt royal Blvd isn't in city limits.

Sorry, Mount Pleasant Rd, which runs off East St. I’m getting it confused with Royal St which runs the same direction off East, a bit south of that.

Among the more relevant paving projects for cyclists (i.e. roads that have bike infrastructure), so far I've seen the hill portion of Liberty Ave, a part of 40th St., a long chunk of Beechwood Blvd., and the remaining portion of East Liberty Blvd. I'm also glad to see the hill part of Penn Ave, and Highland Ave north of Stanton Ave. being addressed.

What does Friendship Ave from Friendship Ave to Dryden Way mean?  Hopefully they mean from Dryden to Penn.  The intersection of Friendship and Choate Way is destroyed right now...

the map shows Dryden to Penn but says it is "mechanical patching."

Royal St is in just as bad a shape as Mt Pleasant. Old concrete surface, dating to the 1988 construction of 279, with all the chunks and holes from 30 years of use.