The fact that Pittsburgh men live outside of Pittsburgh goes to give her the fourth largest suburban train service in the country. Only New York, Boston and Philadelphia surpass her in this wise. Even San Francisco has less. One hundred and fifty miles to the northwest is Cleveland, the sixth city in the country and outranking Pittsburgh in population. There is not a single distinctive suburban train run in or out of Cleveland. From one single terminal in Pittsburgh four hundred passenger trains arrive and depart in the course of a single business day and ninety-five percent of these are for the sole benefit of the commuter.
So congested have even these railroad facilities become that the city cries bitterly all the while for a transit relief and experts have been at work months and years planning a subway to aid both the steam roads and the overworked trolley lines. At best it is no sinecure to operate the trolley cars of Pittsburgh. Combined with narrow streets, uptown and downtown, are the fearful slopes of the great hills. It takes big cars to climb those hills, let alone haul the trailers that are a feature of the Pittsburgh rush-hour traffic. When the New Yorker sees those cars for the first time he looks again. They are chariots of steel, hardly smaller than those that thread the subway in his daily trip to and from Harlem, and when they come toward him they make him think of locomotives. The heavy car gives a sense of strength and of hill capability. But the company staggers twice each day under a traffic that is far beyond its facilities—and it staggers under its political burdens.
For it is almost as much as your very life is worth to "talk back" to a street car conductor in Pittsburgh. The conductor is probably an arm of the big political machine that holds that western Pennsylvania town as in the hollow of its hand. The conductors get their jobs through their alderman, and they hold them through their alderman. So if a New York man forgets that he is four hundred and forty miles from Broadway, and gets to asserting his mind to the man who is in charge of the car let him look out for trouble. Chances are nine to one that he will be hauled up before a magistrate for breaking the peace, and that another arm of the political machine will come hard upon him.
A man, who was a life-long resident of Pittsburgh, once made a protest to the conductor of a car coming across from Allegheny. The passenger was in the right and the conductor knew it. But he answered that protest with a volley of profanity. If that thing had happened in a seaboard town, the conductor's job would not have been worth the formality of a resignation. In Pittsburgh a bystander warned—the passenger—and he saved himself arrest by keeping his mouth shut and getting off the car.
But the Pittsburgh man had not quite lost his sense of justice, and so he hurried to a certain high officer of the street railroad company. When he came to the company's offices he was ushered in in high state, for it so happened that the born Pittsburgh man was a director of that very corporation. It so happens that street railroad directors do not ride—like their steam railroad brethren—on passes, and the conductor did not know that he was playing flip-flap with his job.
"You'll have to fire that man," said the director, in ending his complaint. "If that had happened at the club I would have punched him in the head."
The big man who operated the street railroad looked at the director, and smiled what the lady novelists call a sweet, sad smile.
"Sorry, Ben," said he, "but I know that man. He's one of Alderman X——'s men, and if we fired him X—— would hang us up on half a dozen things."
Do you wonder that in the face of such a state of things transit relief comes rather slowly to Pittsburgh?
Pittsburgh men have been trying to worm their way out of their difficulties for about a century and a half now, for it was 1758 that saw a permanent settlement started there at the junction of the three great rivers. Before that had been the memorable fight and defeat of Braddock—not far from where more recently Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie have been engaged in a rivalry as to which could erect the higher skyscraper and most effectually block out the façade of the very beautiful Court House that the genius of H. H. Richardson designed—more than a score of years ago. At Braddock's defeat George Washington fought and it was no less a prophetic mind than that of the Father of His Country which foresaw and prophesied that Pittsburgh, with proper transportation facilities, would become one of the master cities of the country.