You've got the name wrong: it's the Mon Valley BYPASS. The entire project is a gift to developers who wish to turn Fayette County into Cranberry Twp. It will ensure that the Mon Valley is dead, forever and ever, as people zip pass it to their McMansions in Fayette. The whole purpose of exurban development is to exploit the resources of a city without paying for them. Need high-tech medical care? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to put your kids in private school? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to send them to college? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to see a concert, attend a play, go to a ball game? Sure thing, drive up to Pittsburgh. Want to help pay for those things? No way, that's why we live in (fill in the blank).

Brilliant essay. And damnably hard to dispute, also.

I suppose an alternate solution would be DON'T DO ANYTHING. I appreciate your point about our fetish for high speed highways right now ... but is there any CLAMOR for more traffic between the regions it services? And if there is, what is the quality of the clamor?

And if you need another tiebreaker ... these things cost money. LET'S RESOLVE TO DO NOTHING.

We did have rail service until sometime in the 1980's or 90's. I can remember as a teenager taking the train from McKeesport into Pittsburgh for the day.

Too bad we can't demonstrate how essential the Mon-Fayette expressway is to the War on Terrorism. Get some Homeland Security bucks. Maybe we need to protect the jetpack factory you guys are going to build as an alternative to the Mon-Fayette expressway (thus creating a time loop that would eventually result in Scott Bakula showing up in town to shoot a pilot).

Holy cow.

The roads in the Mon Valley are crap largely because of the money that's been diverted away from them for the Mon-Fayette. This one project has been on the books so long, and it's sucked all the air out of any kind of land-use or transportation planning in the Valley -- to the point where now it's the only thing on the table.

The thing is, it's not really on the table.

1. We can't afford it. Floating a bond for $3.6 billion, which is what the MF leg to Pittsburgh/I376 would cost, would ultimately cost the Turnpike (and by extension, PA taxpayers) $235 million a year for 30 years. Getting Harrisburg to approve a toll on users of I-80 in order to raise just $750 million for highway/bridge maintenance and public transit STATEWIDE was like pulling eye-teeth, and even then the amount they approved was less than half what the Governor's Transportation Funding & Reform Commission recommended as the minimum needed to just cover our asses, er, assets. No way will anyone be willing to sign on the dotted line for an additional $235 million/year for a project that will only "benefit" a small corner of the state. The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission had to put $19 billion worth of unmet maintenance and operations needs for roads, bridges and public transit on their "illustrative projects" list in the last long-range plan -- stuff they wish they could do in the next 30 years, but they don't have the money. It's not a joke. The money really isn't there.

2. It doesn't fit with the regional plan. You may say it's too late to think about planning for post-peak oil and halting sprawl, but the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission just finished its regional visioning process and found that pretty much everyone in SWPA wishes we would prioritize infill and transit-oriented development. Like Traveler said above, this project is and always has been about development in Fayette County, new suburbias where currently there's just cornfield. That's totally contrary to the SPC's long range plan.

3. It'll never pass muster for federal air quality standards. The Liberty-Clairton non attainment area is already off the charts with their PM 2.5 particle pollution, and the Pittsburgh leg of the MFX is proposed to go right through it.

4. Even if some sucker wrote the Turnpike a $3.6 billion check tomorrow, and waved away any of the legal hurdles with a big ol' magic wand, there's no way the Pittsburgh leg could be finished in less than 15 years -- probably more like 20. It's that big, it's that complicated, there's that many objections to the project in its right-of-way, and furthermore the railroads in the right-of-way aren't returning the Turnpike's calls. There's a whole bunch of issues that would have to be ironed out before they could even get started, and construction itself could take 10 years. If you think McKeesport, Clairton & Duquesne will be dead by then, why bother building the road at all?

So: all of this to say, it's just plain irresponsible and unfair of the toll road boosters to be spending all this effort to drum up support for this project now, when there's just simply no way it'll ever get built. They're diverting attention away from the real work that needs to be done, and they're stringing good people along with a whole bunch of false promises and hooey.

Since the local mills are mostly gone and most people in the Valley now have to commute to get to work, it seems like the biggest need is for better commuter options -- and an expressway isn't the best commuter option. Rapid transit is ultimately less expensive, more sustainable, and more efficient.

But the existing roads and bridges in the Valley need a lot of love, anyway. 51, 837, the Glassport-Elizabeth Road, Braddock Ave., not to mention the McKeesport-Duquesne Bridge, etc., etc. -- you know how awful they all are. You really want to put the MFX ahead of repairs and improvements there for another 30 years? Because it really is a choice between one and the other -- you can't have both.

Andrea, I agree with everything you say.

But I'm going to repeat: It doesn't matter. The public can understand highways. They can't understand particulate PPM from Clairton Works, or the benefits of in-fill development, or anything else.

As for greenfield development ... most people LIKE greenfield development. They LIKE suburban sprawl.

When I talk to people in my demographic looking to buy a house, a large percentage of them want a NEW house in a new development: "Ew, I don't want to live in someone else's old house."

So, we can make 1,000 rational, reasonable arguments against sprawl, and they will still go looking for a house in a new Ryan Homes development in a cornfield somewhere ... next to a highway off-ramp.

Is it insanity? Yes. But is it the way the free market has moved for the last 50 years? Also yes.

I don't know how to fight the tide.

That's just it, though - there is no tide -- there's just a lot of hot air. What's needed is for sensible folks to start calling the MVPC's bluff. Whether or not people want it, it's just never going to be built.



The real problem is the persistence of this vision, which is total fantasy -- the idea that we could ever have this expressway that would solve our transportation needs and rescue the Valley from its decline, or that we can all have new houses in the suburbs and somehow still afford to pay for the public services we all use every day. It's a hallucination that gets in the way of people seeing where they're going, and it makes it harder to actually solve the real problems we're all dealing with, here.




I mean, heck: until the Turnpike convened those Design Advisory Teams, no one in Duquesne or Turtle Creek or Braddock had ever participated in any kind of land use planning process. But instead of expending all that effort to figure out how to accommodate an imaginary expressway, which is just a waste of everyone's time, why not figure out what kind of economic development people really need and want, and then decide what kind of transportation investment would really serve that vision best?



So: call the bluff. Trust your feelings. Come back from the dark side.



People don't really like sprawl. They just don't necessarily see the collective effect of their individual desires. It doesn't help if leadership isn't willing to talk turkey about real costs. Look at what W's tax cuts and delusional talk about bringing democracy to the Middle East has brought us. Is it really better to just let everyone persist in believing this kind of vision is achievable and that the costs are somehow worth it, even though the suffering is ultimately pointless?



Sorry, I know that's probably overly dramatic, but gosh darn it, we're talking about the future of the Mon Valley, here. This isn't academic. Sure, I think the road is an awful project; but on some level the mere idea of it is almost as bad as the road itself -- it's fooled thousands of people into deferring needed investment, impoverishing their own neighborhoods and wasting years and years waiting for Godot. IT WILL NEVER BE BUILT. We need to get over it, or we'll all end up looking around for trees to hang ourselves on. (pace, Mr. Beckett.)

one other thing - those Ryan home plantations aren't just spontaneously popping out of the earth. without expressways, there's no market to support them.

ya gotta consider who's really backing this project. it's not the good folks of the Mon Valley. this project is pure pork, and the hogs at the trough are the bond traders. the construction guys would be just as happy to work on fixing roads as building new ones -- but there's more money for the white collar engineers and LOTS more money for folks like RRZ if the Turnpike gets to put us all into hock for another generation making pretty designs for big concrete monstrosities, whether or not they ever get built.

don't give up, Jason!

I hate the Mon Valley (bypass) Toll Road. By all means, we need to stop it from hitting the city of Pgh. We need to stop it wherever.

It isn't prudent.

If people want to live in a new home, that can be done in the city and in plenty of other more urban settings.

The talk of HEAVY RAIL as an alternative would be welcomed. The freight lines can often be diverted. We've got plenty of lines. We have a glut of lines. I think they can live in harmony. Other cities have trains. And the line from McKeesport didn't stop just at Station Square -- it went to Sewickley (years ago).

PA Turnpike makes new PA toll roads. Go figure. PAT (a bus company) isn't well suited for light rail either. Go figure. We can do better and think again about rail, the rails for human cargo, and freight elsewhere.

"Is it insanity? Yes. But is it the way the free market has moved for the last 50 years? Also yes.

I don't know how to fight the tide."

3. some billion in tax money doesn't have a lot to do with the free market.

You fight the tide by fighting the tide, otherwise you are just part of it.