By SHANNON O. WELLS
For a department with eight faculty members, and a handful of staff and students, the School of Medicine’s Department of Structural Biology has experienced a seemingly inordinate share of pedestrian-related incidents and tragedies around its offices in Biomedical Science Tower 3 at Fifth Avenue between Lothrop and Darragh streets.
“We’ve had two (faculty) members hit by vehicles while on pedestrian crossings, one requiring three weeks hospitalization, and one requiring three months of hospitalization,” said James Conway, professor in the department, of incidents going back 10 to 15 years. “We’ve had two deaths recently on Terrace and a cyclist killed on Forbes and Bellefield, and I’m sure there are others I’m not remembering.”
As a special guest at the Campus Utilization, Planning and Safety committee (CUPS) meeting on Jan. 3, Conway shared his concerns about pedestrian safety and offered a list of possible improvements. He received thanks and feedback from Ted Fritz, vice chancellor for public safety and emergency management.
In addition to the series of injuries and deaths, Conway shared personal “close call” experiences by what he described as “(service) drivers who do not respect pedestrian crossings stop signs or red traffic lights.”
“An obvious problem is that we have a large population of pedestrians mixing with a two-, three- or four-lane arterial reach through the middle of Oakland,” he said. “Construction makes it worse, but it was dangerous before, and it will still be dangerous after the building and PRT (Pittsburgh Regional Transit) work is completed, even without the inevitable future work.”
Short of the beyond-daunting task of “somehow reducing traffic in Oakland,” Conway offered what he called a “few things … we can consider immediately.” They include:
Repainting crosswalks: He said there’s “no excuse” for the “worn, partly visible crosswalk” at the bottom of Lothrop Street.
Drivers coming into Oakland, some who have not been here before and are here for medical appointments are often “stressed by all the traffic and nowhere to park,” he said. “They’re just not paying attention. And I sympathize with them, but they’re going to blow through that …”
“All of the pedestrian crossings should be visible. Who is responsible for this? I don’t know who to contact. It’s probably not the University. Maybe it’s the city. Good luck with that.”
Scrutinizing regular sources of traffic congestion: Conway said his office overlooks the valet parking service behind Salk Hall. “And I can report that cars frequently back up along Lothrop, up and down and back up along Fifth Avenue,” he said, noting that drivers coming off Meyran Avenue often take the crooked “dog leg” in the road to Lothrop. With nowhere to go, they “block up both Meyran and Fifth Avenue, even if they’re not going to the valet parking.”
“This morning, my bus couldn’t reach the bus stop outside Falk Clinic because of a long stationary queue of traffic waiting to turn up Lothrop. Instead, the driver and other buses moved to the middle lane, stopped abreast of the bus drop, and we had to get out and cross the lane of traffic to get to the sidewalk,” he said. “Who decides that the slow valet service behind Falk Clinic is allowed to have this impact on safety? And it’s been going on for years. Who regulates this?”
Vigorously policing congested streets: Conway asked where is traffic enforcement when cars are “driving at speed, not giving way to pedestrians and driving through red lights?” and about the “numerous drivers who block the right lane on Forbes Avenue to pick up food orders, causing backups that may extend as far back as to the (Interstate 376) Parkway.”
“(Delivery) trucks stop outside the shop on Forbes to load and unload, taking away a lane, and other trucks stop to do commercial drop offs,” he noted. “I wait for the bus outside the Starbucks there, so I see this just repeatedly. How can this blocking of the lane, especially during rush hour traffic, be justified?”
He also noted the higher volume of buses along Forbes Avenue now that the Fifth Avenue contraflow lane buses switched over. “As a consequence, I think it’s even more important to have flowing streets to avoid driver frustration. Why can’t the traffic and safety laws be enforced, at least during rush hour?”
Lowering campus speed limit: Noting the proliferation of speeding drivers, “especially on Fifth Avenue,” but also on Forbes, he said, “even 25 miles an hour is lethal when hitting pedestrians. … Let’s make it formal for safety.”
“I’m sure other things will occur to other people, but I appreciate at least that you took the time to listen to me,” Conway added.
Positive feedback
David Salcido, CUPS chair and assistant professor of emergency medicine, thanked Conway for sharing his experiences and ideas.
“It is amazing to think that in such a small department, two members of your department have been hit. That’s staggering. But also, I think you brought some really practical ideas,” he said.
Salcido asked Ted Fritz about the practicality of added signage and influencing city of Pittsburgh officials to repaint crosswalks.
“I guess we can’t directly repaint the crosswalks, but what is Pitt’s influence to get something like that happening quickly, especially if the lines are … just faded?”
Fritz also expressed his appreciation to Conway.
“One of the things I had mentioned at the last meeting was to come forward with ideas, and James, I think you have some good ones. I really appreciate you giving some thought to that,” he said. “As users of roadways and sidewalks, I think people who are using them sometimes have the best ideas. So, coming forward with that is great.”
Even though Pitt may not formally own a roadway or sidewalk, “we can certainly get those to the people that need to know about it in the city and try and effect some change,” Fritz added. “Actually, we’ve been pretty successful with that.”
He called the recently eliminated contra-flow bus lane on Fifth Avenue a “terrific example, although maybe not a speedy one, of a constant refrain from Pitt saying how dangerous this was to our community. … They took that into account in their planning, and did indeed get rid of that,” he said. “Overall, I think that’s just a great thing for Oakland.”
Fritz added that Conway’s point about commercial truck drop-offs is “an excellent one. We would like to enforce that as much as we can. We have hundreds of traffic stops per year, so we are doing enforcement to the extent we can.”
Regarding parking lines and painting crosswalks, “those are definitely things that we can get taken care of when we know about them, or someone flags them,” he said, adding that the Office of Planning, Design and Construction or Facilities Management “certainly made that happen” on Terrace Street recently “with the repainting of a lot of those lines and curbs up there.”
Bad signs
Fritz expressed less enthusiasm, however, for additional signage.
“People don’t really read signs, or they do and they don’t care what they say,” he said, noting that he’s come to believe that “we can actually have too many signs, not only for motorists, but pedestrians. For example, where there was the construction up on Fifth, there are clearly signs that say, ‘Don’t walk here. Walk here.’ And people would ignore those and they just go around it anyhow, as if it were optional, I guess.”
Fritz also shared the “good news on the construction front” that the Fifth Avenue and Atwood Street sidewalk project is complete. “So that’s opened back up, and that’s going to help a lot up there as well.
“The issues will always be here in this busy urban area, but we’ll always try and take steps to mitigate those and get to the right people that can make that happen,” he said. “There’s a lot of stakeholders, a lot of property owners, and that makes it complicated, but that’s not an excuse.
“We just need to make sure we work through that and have ways to mitigate those problems … We certainly are dedicating more resources to this than we ever have, and we’ll continue to do that.”
Shannon Wells is a University Times reporter. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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