PITTSBURGH Airport toll road must move — chief planner

PITTSBURGH

Airport toll road must move — chief planner

An Airport toll road and new river crossing are now high priority in Pittsburgh, according to the head of the local metropolitan planning organization. The $465m Pittsburgh Airport Tollway (PAT) has been an idea for some years, but Robert Kochanowski, executive director of the SW Pennsylvania Regional Planning Commission (SWPRPC) told us in an interview that he now wants to move the project forward more aggressively. He says the airport tollway as a standalone project has always been a good one. It has “by far the highest benefit-cost ratio” of all the major trnasport projects in the greater Pittsburgh area, he says. A 1994 analysis of 14 major transport projects showed B/Cs ranging between 0.3 and 2.5 apart from the Airport pike which scored 5.1.

But the project has gotten little attention, especially so long as a new busway promised to provide improved access to the downtown and take buses and some HOVs off existing routes. When it comes to votes for highways in the state and US legislatures, it is the rural and fringe metro areas that lobby the hardest. But Pittsburgh is growing rapidly out west around the airport which got a major new terminal just a few years ago and greatly improved highways in the immediate vicinity. There’s a hive of new business dveelopment around the airport.

As the crow flies it is 19km from the downtown to the airport entry, but the rough topography of PA means that mere earthbound creatures even with the aid of tunnels and cuttings travel much further than the crow — about 23km via the only motorway-standard route which consists of the doubledeck Fort Pitt bridge, the Fort Pitt tunnels, the Parkway West (I-279)/US-30/PA-60. Most is a mere 4-lanes and is carrying 105k vehs/day. It is extremely difficult to widen because of the limitations of the existing tunnels (2x2-lane tubes) and the bridges, and heavy development alongside. Another shortcoming on I-279 is a long section — Greentree Hill — with a 5% grade which causes problems with trucks. This route takes around 40 mins downtown-airport, average speed 21mph, for some 6 to 8 hours each day according to Dwight Schock who has studied the toll road at the Michael Baker engineering company.

Schock headed up a group of consultants who studied alternatives for upgrading airport-downtown links 1994-96 for the Allegheny Co Planning Council. They recommended 14km of new toll highway heading almost directly east from the airport (the existing US-30/I-279 curves southward) to the Ohio River just south of McKees Rock and proposed a new bridge at Brunot Island, which would dump traffic on the east bank’s PA-65, which is an underutilized mwy standard road well-connected to the northside highway network, and to downtown Pittsburgh over the Allegheny River via 2 mwy bridges and 3 arterial crossings. Dumping airport and western subsurbs traffic on the northside puts it near the sports stadiums and cheaper parking lots well connected to the downtown by shuttle buses, and in the future plans by some kind of people mover over the Allegheny.

The Airport Tollway would be slighly shorter (22km) and without grades over 3% so if tolled to be free of congestion should provide a 20 min journey downtown-airport, at a conservative 42mph average speed. A rudimentary traffic and revenue study suggested a flatrate passenger car toll of $2/trip would maximize revenues and with a projected 30k veh/day generate $23m in 2000 rising slowly to $27m in 2020. At this rate operating profits would only cover about half the debt service on capital outlays, so the report recommended seeking 50% capital funding from governments. It argued for an “Innovative Financed Public Toll Road.” As such it has gone nowhere since the report was published 18 months ago.

Schock says that the traffic and revenue estimates were limited by the assumption the toll had to be a constant through the day. He’d like to see the financial modelling redone with a variable rate toll able to more fully capture the value of time savings in rush hours, while still gaining significant revenue with a lower toll rate out of rush hours. In rush hours not only is the existing route slow, but it is inconsistently slow, often clogging up to make the journey as much as an hour. People might well pay a $4 or $5 toll during the peak hours, over twice the amount assumed on the basis that a toll would have to be constant through the day.

The original roadway was also handicapped by having to provide for local enthusiasm for a maglev line sharing right-of-way and siphoning off some of the toll road’s passengers. That would require huge capital and operating subsidies from governments — if it is even technically feasible. Maglev has near-zero federal support now. A more practical way of bringing transit into the corridor and supporting the expensive bridge over the Ohio River has suddenly arisen from heavy cutbacks forced on an Airport busway project already underway along an old rail right-of-way a bit south of the proposed tollway.

Busway-Tollway synergy: The $325m+ Airport Busway project is the Pittsburgh area’s largest transit expansion and work is proceeding on renovation and conversion of old railway tunnels and right-of-way to produce a 2-lane dedicated busway from the Ohio River westwards. That part of the busway is well on the way to completion. As originally designed the busway was to proceed in to the city center along the western (and southern) bank of the Ohio and Monongahela (Mon) Rivers and to then cross the Mon river into the central business district at Market Street via a new bus/HOV-only bridge. This river bank and dedicated bridge leg has been abandoned recently because of difficulties acquiring property and cost overruns on the southbank section from an original $325m to over $500m total. The federal government has refused to increase its grant for the project to the Port Authority of Allegheny Co, the transit agency which will own and operate the busway. Under a heavily scaled-back version of the project the buses will simply join regular traffic on that final leg along the western/south banks of the rivers. But that will do nothing for problems of overloaded Mon river crossings, due to be accentuated for several years by rather urgently needed rehab of the Fort Pitt bridge, the only major way to the west over the Mon.

At the local metro planning organization the director Kochanowski and his transp specialist Chuck Dipietro think there should be a way of combining the busway and tollway crossing in the one new bridge — possibly at the southern end of Brunot Island — to the benefit of both. A south Brunot Island crossing could also reduce the impact of the Tollway on the heavily built-up McKees Rock and on a tributary creek. It would also shorten the journey downtown though it would require a tunnel of about 1km under Sheraden Park, that Schock says could add $80m to the project.

Part of the fallout from the abandonment of the busway’s dedicated Market Street Mon crossing has been a commitment to study other possible river crossings. The synergy of the toll road crossing and the busway has given a new sense of urgency to the tollway proposal and could help get it broader political backing. (Contacts Chuck Dipietro SW Penna Reg Plan Comm 412 391 5590x310, Dwight Schock Michael Baker Co 412 269 6375)