It's Opening Day. By that I mean not only the Pirates home opener, wonderful enough, but also the opening of the Fort Duquesne Bridge walkway after more than two years down.
The walkway -- often called the "pedestrian walkway," for reasons known only to the city's Department of Redundancy Department -- was supposed to open for football season last fall, so it's a sport late. But let's not quibble.
Let's use the new North Shore switchback ramp and staircase as an excuse to talk about one of the things Western Pennsylvania has begun doing right. This is one more link in the city's necklace of bicycle and jogging trails, pieces of which now total 20 or so miles, and one day soon will hook up with a trail extending to Washington, D.C.
Not that I expect to ever do that -- that sounds hard, and I like easy. So in this hilly city I welcome these river-hugging trails, which keep you on the level and away from those cars whose drivers no more want to see a cyclist than a pothole.
On a whim I cycled the North Shore trail the 3 1/2 miles into Millvale on Friday morning. There are city pieces between the 31st and 40th Street bridges that are pretty rough, but they're graded and ready for surfacing. Once in Millvale, I saw the new riverfront park with the $1 million red-white-and-blue boathouse and Mr. Small's Skate Park in the shadow of the 40th Street Bridge.
This is not your father's riverfront.
Mike Schiller, executive director of the Western Pennsylvania Field Alliance and a board member of the Allegheny Trail Alliance, remembers as a boy in Penn Hills, his family would have to pack bikes in the car and drive to North Park if the kids wanted to ride a ways.
"The idea of riding recreationally around Pittsburgh was kind of unheard of," Schiller, 42, said. "The ability to do this right here, without having to pack up your car, to see the city and see the rivers and see other people doing it, is a self-reinforcing phenomenon.
"People need to see other people doing that kind of stuff. We're basically social animals."
These trails are about the only subject a reporter can call Mayor Tom Murphy about these days and expect a quick return call. The map is in Murphy's head, and when I called to ask where a cyclist would go once he crossed the Fort Duquesne Bridge into Point State Park, Murphy was off like a shot.
The city is working on a way to get people from Point State Park to Grant Street without crossing a road. With foundations' help, the old Mon Wharf will get a riverfront park in 2004 that mirrors the one on the Downtown side of the Allegheny River. The city will design a ramp so folks can get up to the Smithfield Street Bridge. Cyclists could continue to a crossing at Grant Street to connect with the Eliza Furnace Trail -- better known as "the jail trail" -- and follow that into Oakland.
Murphy is working with the mayors of Rankin and Swissvale to take a trail from Duck Hollow to the Rankin Bridge this summer. On the other bank of the Monongahela River, a trail already runs from Station Square to the Glenwood Bridge.
Back on the Downtown side of the Allegheny, the trail will be extended to 28th Street in the Strip District this summer.
On the Ohio River, a missing piece should fill in and get to the State Correctional Institution Pittsburgh this summer. (If you stand on the pedals you can watch the inmates play hoops.)
The goal is "a green necklace all the way around the city" in two years. The city's trying to buy a railroad right of way in its South Hills neighborhoods, and Murphy says they've already identified 1,500 acres along this route that could be put into a park system. Most is already publicly owned.
In a city with monumental financial problems, how can all this be done? State and foundation money helps, and the city can do this fairly cheaply with its own public works crew and asphalt plant.
The way Downtown auto traffic and parking fees are getting, a bicycle commute looks better every day.
Brian O'Neill can be reached at boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.
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