Imagine a natural disaster that threatened to destroy scores of homes in Hazelwood, many of which have been occupied by the same family for two or three generations. Imagine that this disaster also destroyed hundreds of homes in other towns, including Rankin and Braddock, while cutting huge unlivable swaths through the towns.
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| | | Frieda G. Shapira is a founding member of GASP (Group Against Smog and Pollution) and a longtime civic volunteer. She lives in Squirrel Hill. | |
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Imagine that this disaster would choke areas of Pittsburgh already congested with more traffic and worsen air quality causing related health problems. Faced with a natural disaster of this magnitude, what would we do? Call in the National Guard? Ask to be declared a disaster area? Probably these steps and more.
In fact we do have a pending disaster of this magnitude and these are but a few of the disastrous results. It's called the Mon-Fayette Expressway, and it's anything but natural. It is instead a scheme cooked up by state legislators and the highway lobby, supposedly in the name of bringing economic relief to the Mon Valley. The reality would be much different.
The fallacy of the supposed economic benefits was exposed in an April 2002 report prepared for Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future. The report, "A Truly Dismal Use of Public Funds," examined the proposed project from an economic development perspective. Speaking of the Mon-Fayette Expressway and Southern Beltway toll projects, the report stated as follows: "Claims that the toll roads will stimulate economic development are based on hopes, not facts, and no credible case can be made for the toll roads as economic generators. The costs of the projects far outweigh any benefits by more than $50 million annually, with the repayment of funding for the projects expected to take nearly 60 years."
And, as stated by national transportation expert Walter Kulash, the author of the report: "This $4 billion boondoggle will make the region less attractive, less competitive, and actually add to traffic congestion. For every dollar of cost for this project, there will be only 20 cents of benefit. This is an extraordinarily unwise investment that will never repay its own cost."
So, to add insult to injury, the price tag would be huge. The cost of the toll road from Route 51 to Pittsburgh would be, according to the Turnpike Commission's own numbers, $1.89 billion!
The communities of the Mon Valley suffered devastating losses when Big Steel shut down. Families and communities alike suffered when over the course of just a few years thousands and thousands of very hard-working people lost the ability to provide for their families, suffering the destruction of a way of life that was the bedrock of our region. The economic disaster was nearly complete and efforts at economic revival have had only limited success.
We have seen some very positive developments in recent years, however, and I believe that we as a region need to focus on the Mon Valley as an area that has in large part been bypassed by the rebirth of the Pittsburgh region.
What we absolutely should not do is to inflict another huge disaster on the Mon Valley in the form of this ill-conceived highway scheme at the very time we are seeing hopeful signs.
Many of us remember all too well the words of the Army officer in Vietnam who spoke of having to destroy a village in order to save it. The Mon-Valley Expressway would be the public works equivalent of that earlier disaster.
To many Pittsburghers the towns of the Mon Valley are an abstraction -- they are out there somewhere, but many of us never have any reason to visit. I suggest that we all start to think about the situation there and dedicate ourselves to finding creative solutions, rather than an approach that would essentially sacrifice the valley for the area beyond.
The Mon-Fayette Expressway is sometimes offered up as a means of keeping our young people in the Pittsburgh area. I have no idea how anyone believes this to be true. When we ask our young people about what they value in a place, it's a lot of things, but it certainly is not a return to the practice of building big destructive highways that gobble up green space and destroy communities. Instead, they tell us that they want urban amenities, trails, the preservation of green space and other features of life that are the antithesis of a 1950s-type highway project.
In short, they spell out a vision that is diametrically opposite the claims of some supporters of this toll road. I think that the project's supporters come up with whatever rationale might attract public support. Some are just odder than others.
Some of us in Western Pennsylvania display defensiveness about the Pittsburgh region. I think that it is completely misplaced. The extraordinary collection and diversity of people and resources in this region make it one of the great cities of the United States. Our region's relative success in recovering from the loss of so many basic industries and the stable and well-paying jobs they provided for thousands speaks volumes to this fact. Many other American cities have never recovered from the kind of economic dislocation suffered by Pittsburgh.
Building this toll road would, however, give us a lot of reason to be defensive. Cities across the nation are going to great expense to remove highways from their riverfronts and to undo other highway blunders. With rare exceptions, we have stopped building big highways through urban areas.
When the highway boom started in the 1950s, we were also in the business of urban renewal. This often meant that government declared a neighborhood to be "blighted," destroyed it and replaced it with an urban renewal project. Local examples abound.
Just as the community-wrecking approach of "urban renewal" is now recognized for what it was, so too have we begun to recognize the real costs of our highway program. The world has changed, for the better in this regard, and we need to recognize this fact and move beyond 1950s solutions to the challenges of the new century.
The idea of building a superhighway through long-established communities should horrify us. If our goals include functioning communities, do we destroy towns up and down the Mon Valley in the name of saving them?
Where do we go from here? I have a few suggestions.
First, let's acknowledge that the Mon-Fayette Expressway may never be built. The money is not there to build it and I don't think that is going to change. I also believe that opposition will grow as people begin to realize the impacts -- environmental, community, financial and otherwise -- of this proposed project.
Until the project is abandoned, we will experience the worst of both worlds. We will consume lots of energy and time fighting about the merits of a doomed project instead of concentrating our energy and resources on an approach that could provide real benefits. During this period there will be a general freeze on areas that would be gutted by the toll road. So long as the cloud of condemnation is overhead, property owners (residential and business) will not know what to do. They will certainly not be inclined to invest in their properties. Investment initiatives that might otherwise go forward using sites in the proposed highway alignment will be effectively frozen. This condition could last for years until we recognize the obvious.
Second, we need to acknowledge that the Mon Valley has transportation needs and work to address them. We need answers that really serve the population and the communities, not the needs of those with an entirely different agenda.
A group of organizations convened by Penn Future has been hard at work these last few months developing an alternative approach to the Turnpike Commission's plan. This development of alternatives is designed to provide transportation assets on a human scale to accomplish what the Mon-Fayette toll road would not.
Third, and finally, I propose that we think about how to establish a fund to support Mon Valley economic development efforts. Remember that $79 million per mile that the Turnpike Commission wants to spend on this leg of its project? We know that the $1.9 billion isn't there, but what if we were able to use just a part of it. The commission proposes to build the toll road with state and federal tax dollars. If we could use a fraction of the proposed cost and make it available for investment, we might actually accomplish some of what the toll road would not. Call it the Mon Valley Development Fund.
Funding it with the cost of a few miles of the proposed toll road and an intersection or two could finance an investment fund that could have real impact and confer real benefits on those who would otherwise pay the price for living in the path of the proposed expressway. For those who support the toll road because it would provide jobs, it is important to know that alternate road and other transportation improvements being considered would also provide jobs.
The renovation of homes and businesses in the Mon Valley communities would provide more jobs than the toll road project and much sooner that the 10 or more years that we might wait for highly uncertain federal and state highway funds to materialize.
We recognize that Pittsburgh is the educational, medical, cultural and commercial heart of southwestern Pennsylvania, and our goal is to make it easier for people to come into the city. We expect than the development of alternate routes will promote better access for the Mon Valley communities, to each other and to Downtown Pittsburgh for the benefit of all.
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