City staff advance draft South Neville streetscape plan, favor 10‑ft shared‑use path

PITTSBURGH — Officials from the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure on Wednesday presented a draft streetscape plan for Boundary Street/South Neville in Oakland and said they would advance a 10‑foot shared‑use path as the preferred alternative for the corridor.

The plan, staff said, is intended to identify safety improvements, produce an implementable design and generate cost estimates to pursue funding; it is not a construction authorization. “This is a plan. This is not a construction project. We don't have the funds for final design or implementation at this point,” George Barrow, the planner leading the presentation, told the meeting.

Why it matters: the corridor connects neighborhoods and trail access points and has a history of crashes at the Fifth Avenue intersection; staff said the corridor has been studied in previous city plans and received extensive community input through two outreach phases. Phase one (Feb. 24–May 5) drew 613 survey responses; a second outreach on alternatives generated about 148 responses.

What staff proposed and why: project staff presented two alternatives for the constrained middle section: a 10‑ft shared‑use path separated from traffic by up to a 3‑ft landscaped buffer, and a sidewalk with a protected climbing bike lane. City staff evaluated the options on safety, intuitiveness, future capacity, maintainability and cost and said the shared‑use path (Alternative 1) scored higher on safety, was easier for maintenance crews to keep clear in winter and appeared substantially less expensive.

“We ultimately decided to advance Alternative 1, the shared‑use path,” Barrow said. He added the difference in earthwork and cross‑sectional width produced a cost gap of “a few million dollars” between the alternatives, a factor staff said was important to the project’s fundability.

Estimates and scope: staff provided preliminary, segmented cost estimates intended for grant applications: Section A (Junction Hollow trailhead to the proposed CMU raised crossing) ≈ $5.5 million; Section B (raised crossing up to, but not including, Fifth Avenue) ≈ $2 million; Section C (the Fifth Avenue/Neville intersection) ≈ $1.2 million. Barrow stressed the numbers are preliminary and will be refined during engineering.

Transit and intersection compatibility: because the Fifth Avenue corridor is the subject of separate planning for a potential University Line BRT extension, staff inserted a compatible Fifth Avenue cross‑section in the draft showing a westbound bus lane and a two‑way cycle track on the south side so the two projects would be mutually compatible regardless of which moves forward first. Staff also highlighted the Fifth/Neville intersection as a location with concentrated crash history and said the plan will study bus/bike/ped interactions at the intersection in more detail during design.

Design details and constraints: staff described hillside constraints that prevent continuous western‑side sidewalks in portions of the corridor and said they plan to tie into a proposed raised crossing at Carnegie Mellon University to connect pedestrians and cyclists to a new campus building. The draft includes measures to address drainage at the John Care/Boundary intersection and reserves space for potential pedestrian or road lighting decisions in engineering.

Public input and next steps: staff said the draft plan is posted on the project Engage page and a follow‑up survey is open through April 8. After the survey closes staff will review feedback, incorporate final changes, aim to release a finalized plan in April and then pursue funding for engineering and construction. “We want to gather one last round of input from the community,” Barrow said.

The meeting moved to a public Q&A after the presentation, with residents raising concerns about downhill bicycle speeds on a shared‑use path, debris and snow management, lighting and how the design would accommodate bus movements at the Fifth Avenue intersection. Staff repeatedly said many of those details would be resolved in the engineering and maintenance coordination phases.

What’s next: the project team will collect survey and written feedback, finalize the draft, and pursue funding for detailed design and construction; no construction schedule or funding has been approved.