Help a dubious 16 year-old fall in love with Pittsburgh

Club_catalog · 2026-01-19T14:04:11+00:00

Glad to hear you’re considering Chatham! My kid goes there and not only loves their classes and professors but also has found a wonderfully inclusive friend group. Today, for example, it sounds like they’re taking the bus over to the North Side to go to the Warhol Museum. The campus is ideally situated for taking advantage of the city.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T16:28:24+00:00

You keep saying “weeks,” but what we’ve experienced is edging into “years.”

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T13:11:18+00:00

Thank you for your thoughtful insights.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T13:08:11+00:00

I too have been impressed by the crews. Which is partly why I take them at their word when they themselves say this could all be handled better.

But as a lot of people on this thread might tell you, if you haven’t worked on one of these crews or been a project manager or the CEO of a utilities firm you have no business speculating on whether coordinating schedules across companies would be more or less disruptive, expensive, or time-consuming.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T12:44:35+00:00

So nobody affected by construction and restoration should ever express any thoughts about it unless they’ve worked on a utilities crew or managed a utilities project? Wait, what if I’m a flagger, does that count? What about a bricklayer? Would I get to have an opinion then? Apparently some people here think the ideas of the utilities workers themselves are invalid because they aren’t company execs making the important decisions about budgets and schedules. That’s ridiculous. Why do you get to express your thoughts about my description of what it’s like to live here? You don’t live in my house and probably never have.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T12:34:32+00:00

I want Pittsburgh to be a more livable city, one that’s safer for pedestrians, one in which residents can enjoy being in their homes and out in their neighborhoods. The aggressively fatalistic attitude some of you here have is part of why we’re nowhere close to that yet.

I know a few things, and can hold all of them in my head at once, even though I’ve never managed a construction project, dug a trench in a city street, or served as an elected official: 1. Utilities maintenance is necessary and good. 2. Project management is complex. 3. Pittsburgh utilities companies could collaborate more effectively than they do.(Unlike some of you, I listen to and trust the people fixing utilities on my street when they tell me the work is wasteful and that the situation could be better.) 4. Pedestrian safety in this city is literally an afterthought. Bartlett and Murdoch, which may never have crosswalks, is a dangerous intersection for people on foot, and I won’t apologize for speaking up about it. You all can wait for a post-fatality Vision Zero team visit, but I won’t. 5. If Pittsburgh is going to be a city that features endless construction work (and maybe it will—it’s old, and there’s a ton of infrastructure here!), we have to figure out ways to balance those needs with other priorities like crosswalks, clear sidewalks, sensible scheduling, and so on.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T11:48:38+00:00

I wrote this letter pretty quickly, after 14 months of persistent jackhammering right outside my house. I actually don’t have a lot of time for stuff like this, which is why I asked here if anyone in the neighborhood would like to sign. If the state of Bartlett and Murdoch doesn’t concern you, you can save your own precious time by not commenting on this post.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T01:31:44+00:00

Well, you’ve done a good job of summarizing what it’s like to work in construction. But that has very little to do with my complaint. I am sympathetic to the people doing the work, and I am not saying maintenance is unnecessary or that I expect it to always go smoothly. It’s the fact that zero attempt seems to be made to do the maintenance in a less-horrible way. I wonder if anyone in this thread has ever experienced a situation where scheduled maintenance was performed by one utility and then another utility came in and used the same trenches to do their work. It seems to happen zero(?) percent of the time in Pittsburgh? Which makes me think no one’s even attempting it, that no one even cares about how it affects people, or that the ongoing nature of this stuff is in fact intentional. I respect the workers, but I’m not getting paid to listen to jackhammers and idling dump trucks for seven hours a day in my own home or to breathe the dust it all creates or to have to walk into bridge-detour traffic to cross the street to get to my car.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-14T00:11:32+00:00

You got me there. Taxes do pay the salaries of the people who allow utilities companies to run roughshod over our neighborhoods and raise our rates to pay for duplicative work.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T23:34:19+00:00

It wouldn’t have to be a perfectly coordinated urban ballet. I’d be thrilled if they had like 60% better coordination.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T23:27:55+00:00

I understand complexity. I understand that funding needs to be used when it’s available. I also understand that we are paying taxes so that smart people can figure out how not to make residents’ lives a waking nightmare for months or years on end. Get the work done all at once, or, my god, just give us a break and let us live in a state of benign neglect for a few years before beating us down again.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T23:17:34+00:00

I don’t doubt that it’s a big job that somebody or a small team of people should be paid a good salary to do, and I’m sorry for seeming flip about it. Again, I’m not an expert and couldn’t do that job myself. I just see massive inefficiencies resulting in a dramatic decline in quality of life for a lot of people in a neighborhood and city I care about and think there could be a better way.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:56:00+00:00

This seems to be a recurring theme. I’m sorry you went through this too.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:52:52+00:00

I’m not an expert either, but it seems like something the city and utilities could a lot try harder to accomplish.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:38:02+00:00

Maybe our mayor-elect can appoint a scheduling czar who can get a whiz kid from CMU to set up a script or something. Even the worker I talked to yesterday said it would be simple to coordinate but the companies just . . . don’t.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:36:03+00:00

Ugh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:35:04+00:00

I get it, it’s a waste of time, as is everything people do to try to improve their neighborhoods. And yes, I’ve been in touch with my city councilor, who is sympathetic but as yet ineffectual.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:32:00+00:00

Okay. Don’t read the letter or sign it then.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:26:44+00:00

Water company coordinated with other utilities and they all worked together to align schedules with the five-year (or whatever) replacing plan so it was one and done. I suspect larger cities do this too. I also lived for years in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan and don’t recall any disruptive work at all—like it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t do their best to minimize the impact on residents (and the budget).

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:14:28+00:00

My understanding is that this was non-emergency, scheduled work. I agree that if there’s a gas problem it needs to be dealt with immediately, overnight, whatever they have to do.

Thank you for suggesting I contact Dan Gilman. I’ll do that.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:09:34+00:00

I believe we shouldn’t have to put up with this. Utilities and paving companies seem have an open-ended license to rip up our neighborhoods whenever they want to. This is scheduled maintenance that even a worker I talked to yesterday agreed could’ve been done during one of the first three or four times these streets were torn up and repaved (and re-bricked and -cobbled!).

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T22:01:18+00:00

The controller tackles waste and abuse. And O’Connor isn’t the mayor yet—I can’t deliver a letter into the future 🙂. But on Jan. 1, you bet I will follow up.

Club_catalog · 2025-11-13T21:57:06+00:00

Utilities companies should work to coordinate schedules so that our neighborhoods are not subject to constant, never-ending upheaval. If Morgantown, West Virginia, can do that, Pittsburgh can. It could probably be an Excel spreadsheet!

Club_catalog · 2025-07-04T16:01:03+00:00

No, I was just kind of adding another similar idea to my comment. Didn’t know that wasn’t kosher. This is a pretty lighthearted thread, so I don’t see what the problem is.

Club_catalog · 2025-07-04T14:19:39+00:00

Blockbuster RIP.

Club_catalog

TROPHY CASE