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Friday, 10 June 2011 16:44

Written by Diana Nelson Jones

Spent the lunch hour on the 31st floor of the Regional Enterprise Tower trying not to think about whether I could make it down so many steps in case of a fire, but the wonk in me succumbed to the topic at hand and I forgot all about the fact that the K&L GATES sign, which looks so far away when I’m on the sidewalk, was at eye level with me.

The topic was sustainability. It shouldn’t be a wonky topic. It is juicy, sexy, lush green and exciting. Its problem is six syllables. Smart growth has two and that’s the same thing, so let’s talk smart.

The Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, that august regional planning body that sometimes gets a bad rap for such things as the Mon-Fayette Expressway, is talking smart. (By the way, the MF Expy, according to transportation planner Matt Pavlosky, is “not moving.”)

It appears that SPC has been planning smart, and that is the topic of my story that’s running tomorrow. Rather, it’s scheduled to run tomorrow.

Court Gould, the executive director of Sustainable Pittsburgh, is trying to encourage more business people to get involved because, as bottom-line folks, they’re driving the sustainability bus and can help push for smart planning. In today’s session, the focus was on transit-oriented development, which means “put stuff where the buses stop.”

Cafes, shops, schools, houses, office buildings, bus stops, no brainer.

In a little workbook I got at today’s public input session to benefit the contents of the 2040 Long-Range Transportation and Development Plan for Southwestern Pennsylvania (wake up!!). SPC admits that transit-oriented development is “often spoken but seldom accomplished” in this region.

SPC started getting the sustaina... smart-growth thing when it was updating the plan five years ago, Court told me.

A few years ago, SPC studied success factors among transit-oriented development (TOD) in the region and came up with a nifty how-to guide for municipalities to identify the qualities they have and the qualities they lack to make a TOD work.

I won’t go into it. You can check out the plan and other goodies here. www.spcregion.org.

What I want to share here is the passion for this stuff that SPC transportation planner Tom Klavon shared with us when he talked about their session yesterday in Wilkinsburg.

There they did a walking tour and applied their TOD formulas to determine where Wilkinsburg is vis a vis successful ransit-centered development.

He said something that made my ears go pointy: That a presentation by Mark Minnerly of the Mosites Co. — the guys who brought us Eastside in East Liberty — made him feel that Wilkinsburg today is where East Liberty was 15 years ago.

The 2040 SPC long-range regional plan sounds like something passed down from on high, but you and I and all the other animals in this zoo have something to say that might land in that plan. Well, not I. I have to maintain my otherness.

But, as Tom put it, “this starts at the neighborhood level. In Wilkinsburg, planners were talking about being in a neighborhood, realizing that people in one and people in another all have the samwe concerns. The coolest slide [in a slide show] had cool ideas on it. That came from their [East Liberty’s] planning process.

“If Mayor Murphy hadn’t had that picture to take to Whole Foods, they might not have located there.”

(Whole Foods, in case you don’t know, is on Center Avenue in East Liberty.)

Tom said of Wilkinsburg: “It was once a model TOD place,” with the Pennsylvania Railroad station (in photo above) as its anchor. The station, which has been vacant since the 1970s, “isn’t dead. It almost cries for life. ‘Bring me back! Make me something!’”

The SPC has a guy who can hear an historic building cry for help. If nothing else made me happy today, that did.

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