east liberty station: realizing the potential - City of Pittsburgh

afternoon with about 1,250 vehicles per
hour. The volumes are likely less than
predicted due to some changes to the
development program, including projects
like the Indigo Hotel which have not yet
been realized. Even assuming the high
estimate, a single traffic lane in each
direction should be sufficient to handle
the demand. Instead, Penn Avenue east
of Shady Avenue consists of two lanes
per direction and the approaches to
Shady Avenue are even wider, including a
dedicated high-speed right turn lane from
Penn Avenue to Shady Avenue.
Clearly, the need for multi-lane arterials in
East Liberty is dependent on the storage
space for vehicles waiting at traffic lights.
Conventional traffic engineering practice
focuses primarily on the improvement to
vehicular mobility; however, East Liberty is
a true multi-modal node in the
transportation network, consisting of a highdensity
pedestrian environment, numerous
bicyclists, and serves the highest ridership
busway station outside of Downtown.
If East Liberty is committed to Transit
Oriented Development, and creating an
environment that encourages cooperation
over competition, then it should embrace
the notion of capacity constraint. This is
explained in the following paragraphs.
Continuous optimization of traffic signals
and lane configurations at intersections is a
never-ending challenge for communities
fortunate enough to be growing. The
limiting factor in urban arterial road design
is the intersection and not the number of
lanes between intersections. Flowing
freely, a single travel lane can carry 1900
vehicles per hour, but when interrupted by
a traffic signal, the capacity of a lane
typically falls to 600-800 vehicles per hour;
thus it is the capacity of a road’s major
intersections that dictates the number of
vehicles that can easily be accommodated.
For these reasons, we recommend that
Penn Avenue from Collins Street to East
Liberty Boulevard be reimagined as a
multimodal corridor that places a greater
emphasis on transportation system
capacity over car capacity. Constraining
car-carrying capacity will better utilize the
overall road network, encourage greater
transit use, improve safety for all users,
prioritize pedestrians and bicyclists, and
provide an attractive environment for future
land development opportunities.
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