That Bridge in Pittsburgh is The place I Turned an Advocate – Streetsblog San Francisco
A bridge collapsed near the intersection of Braddock and Forbes in Pittsburgh on Friday morning, hours before President Biden was due to travel to that city to speak on American infrastructure.
In the summer of 2000 I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Even then, as a New Yorker, I gave up my own car and got around by bike, bus and my feet. During my two years in Pittsburgh (“The Paris of Western Pennsylvania,” as I used to call it), I lived in Squirrel Hill.
I could easily walk to get groceries and coffee, and cycle to class. But when I finally finished school and packed my apartment to move to Los Angeles, I decided to rent a car for my last few days. So I had it for necessary errands and could drive myself – and my many suitcases – to the airport.
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon and I decided to drive to a store in a mall a few miles away to get some packing supplies. Driving home with a big bag of peanuts in the trunk, excited about moving and looking forward to a new life in California, I turned off Braddock West onto Forbes and crossed the Fern Hollow Bridge.
I saw lightning out of the corner of my left eye and heard a loud bang. It was like a huge hand had slammed into the side of the car somewhere behind my left shoulder. My car turned around three times and was still moving across the bridge and into the oncoming lane. Eventually the rotation stopped, but I continued to move sideways. I looked to the right and there were two SUVs coming towards me.
I remember being unsure if they would be able to stop in time before realizing it didn’t matter: I walked off the end of the bridge into the forest and the ravine below. All that was left was to scream in terror.
And then the car came to a stop with an even stronger jolt than the original impact. Suddenly everything was quiet. The right front of my car had wrapped itself around a rusting steel utility pole, preventing me from driving into the canyon. Despite all the damage and warping of the rest of the car, my seat and side of the passenger compartment somehow remained untouched.
I forced my door open and stumbled out. I looked at the thirty-foot rusty pole that had stopped me. I looked behind me and saw a crumpled yellow Toyota stranded across the street. His driver drove over and apologized for hitting me. “My brakes were broken,” he said. Other drivers came to make sure we were okay and said the driver of the yellow Toyota was driving “like a bat out of hell”.
From what they described, he’d made his way through eastbound traffic on the Forbes straight. There is a sharp turn just before Forbes meets the eastbound bridge. As I looked at all the tire tracks and listened to the other drivers, I began to understand. The Toyota driver was going too fast to take that corner. He tried to brake, but physics took over. He lost control, crossed the bulkhead and hit the rear left wheel of my car, breaking the axle and throwing the rear of my car perpendicular to my direction of travel. At that point, my car might as well have been running on rubber skids; there was just no way to control it.
A few minutes later, an ambulance, a tow truck and the police showed up. I remember the tow truck driver, a burly guy in a short-sleeved blue uniform who looked like he could tow a car without the truck, kept staring at the remains of my car and shaking his head. “How do you breathe, let alone how you walk? You should go to the hospital,” he said. The paramedics asked if I was okay and if I wanted to go to the emergency room I said I felt fine. They took my pulse, looked into my eyes; did the usual checks. “You should go to the hospital, you could have internal damage,” the tow truck driver said. One of the paramedics turned to him and said, “You want to shut up?”
The policeman looked at all the tire tracks and listened to the testimonies. I remember the Toyota driver repeating, “My brakes locked up. You failed.” But the police officer shook his head and said, “You can’t drive the double yellow line in the state of Pennsylvania,” as he pulled out his citation book and began to write.
“But what about my brakes?”
I turned and barked at him, “The pavement is dry. Brakes don’t just lock up. You were to fast.”
I asked the paramedics if they thought I should go to the hospital. They just said they couldn’t find anything wrong. But I took the tow truck driver’s advice and drove anyway. Everything seemed so quiet in the back of the ambulance. I couldn’t believe what had happened; the one day in two years i rent a car and that! I thought about the bike lanes on Forbes. Just a painted stripe. If I had ridden a bike that afternoon, I would have been turned inside out.
A doctor examined me in the emergency room and couldn’t find anything. After about an hour of observation, they said I could go.
I left the hospital and suddenly remembered that I had no way home. I remembered that the packing material was still in the trunk of the wrecked car, which was now on its way to a junkyard. And the movers came the next day. I still had to pack. I had enough experience with Pittsburgh’s bus system to know that walking would probably get me home quicker.
So I started running. It takes an hour. It wasn’t that far, but Pittsburgh is as hilly as San Francisco. As the name suggests, Squirrel Hill is high up.
As I climbed the tree-lined streets of Pittsburgh, I noticed many of these old rusty poles, like the ones that had prevented me from going down the canyon. Pittsburgh used to have an amazing surface rail system that is perhaps only surpassed by Los Angeles’ Red Cars. But like so many cities in North America, it was all but destroyed in a colossal act of civic vandalism. The large steel rods holding the wires were all that survived. I thought of walking through “streetcar suburbs” once served by the great Pittsburgh Railways. There used to be almost 100 tram lines, but only one remained, and it didn’t go anywhere near where I lived.
How ridiculous was it that getting packing supplies without a car was so difficult in a city once riddled with such a massive transportation system? How absurd is it that a bridge in Pittsburgh that once carried streetcars now carried four lanes for car traffic, with nothing for bikes but a small strip in the gutter?
As I ran through the hills of Pittsburgh trying to stop shaking, little did I know that a few months later I would be collecting signatures on the Santa Monica Promenade to build the Expo Light Rail line on an abandoned streetcar line in Los Angeles . That’s how I met the people who would expand the Streetsblog network into California. That’s how I ended up editing Streetsblog SF
This crash would continue to haunt me. For years I woke up screaming from nightmares. The horrors of road violence do not only affect people who are physically injured. The tow truck driver was right: I wasn’t feeling well. But it also shocked me to realize how absurd our cities are, where once-great transportation systems have been replaced by land use and monomorphic, auto-over-everything policies that leave people little choice about how to get around.
I finally got back to my apartment. My landlord was sitting on the stairs. She said a nice tow truck driver stopped by to drop off some peanuts and they waited at my apartment.
It is amazing that no one was killed when the same bridge collapsed on Friday morning. The President visited the site and spoke of America’s rusty bridges. “They’ll fix them all,” he said. Certainly the collapse underscores that need. But what a tragedy it will be when the country rebuilds just a few car lanes and misses an opportunity to build protected bike lanes and restore the rail systems that once supported these bridges, taking people safely and eco-friendly everywhere they needed to go .
