Five years ago, BikePGH Executive Director Scott Bricker told PennDOT it was embarking on a dangerous design for West Carson Street.
“No matter what we did, no matter how many other organizations were telling them or elected officials were telling them that they also disagreed with their direction, they just put in what they wanted to put in,” he says. “And within a week and a half, a cyclist was killed on the brand-new street.”
Just being at the table and asking questions, 99 percent of the time you can help the decision-makers come up with the best design for everyone. In this case, that didn’t work, Bricker says.
And as much as BikePGH has become an expert at team building, obstacles like West Carson Street still come up.
“The biggest challenges have been changing enormous bureaucracies and advocating for change at the PennDOT level,” Bricker says.
With big organizations, you don’t work for them, besides being a taxpayer, so it’s difficult to do anything except organize people to advocate for change, he says.
“There’s been a number of fatalities on PennDOT roads that we’ve been trying to raise awareness about and get PennDOT to change their design standards and how they go about doing community outreach and really try to get them to change their ways,” Bricker says.
So far, BikePGH is still trying to find the right approach for this kind of advocacy, such as circulating a petition calling for West Carson Street’s layout to be redesigned and sending it directly to state officials.
Engaging its grassroots constituents to call for change at a higher level is not something the organization has much experience with — but BikePGH will keep trying until it finds the best way.
“I’m not holding my breath,” Bricker says. “At the same time, there’s a lot of people who have called for change and I’m hoping that something positive can come of that tragedy.”
Growing into its role
Fifteen years ago, BikePGH got its start as an all-volunteer organization with a minimal budget. It got grants to contract with an engineering firm to create bike lane work orders that the city would then approve and install because Pittsburgh didn’t have a traffic engineer on staff.
Today, BikePGH has found its niche as a connector, team builder and advocate, linking neighborhoods together and making Pittsburgh streets safer for everyone to use them.
