When the actual physical widening of the street takes place, through absorbing the restricted zones on each side of it, the damages for land taking will be comparatively small, because at that time most of the abutters will want nothing so much as that very widening, if only to bring the sidewalks in contact with the fronts of their buildings. But regardless of its clear financial advantages to the City, in reducing its total payments for street widening and especially in distributing the burden of that cost over a long period without running up a large bonded indebtedness and interest charges, the fundamental argument for this method of procedure is that it avoids the absolute dead loss to the whole community resulting from the destruction of valuable buildings. It is not practicable to avoid this in any other way and still accomplish the result of widened thoroughfares. Theoretically, it could be done by a direct widening of all the highways in the ordinary manner, if it were to be done promptly; but there are comparatively few cases in which there would be enough immediate advantage in the increased width to make the proposition attractive; and it is obvious that any such wholesale immediate action would involve a sudden and enormous financial burden which it is utterly impracticable for the City to assume.
If, after the gradual piecemeal process of widening at moderate and distributed expense has been begun, the City thinks it would prefer to have the process over and done with promptly, it is just as able to complete the widening immediately, by wholesale condemnation, as if the gradual process had never been entered upon. If the City begins on the gradual process, it can always change to the other when it feels rich enough, or when the buildings on the old lines have become few enough; and in the meantime the erection of new and costly buildings, obstructive to the proposed widening, has been prevented at comparatively slight expense. If the City does nothing, pending such time as it can afford to make the widening at a single operation, the cost of the operation is liable to mount at least as fast as the City's ability to pay for it.
While the method proposed is peculiarly adapted to handling the problem of a thoroughfare along which the majority of the frontage is not yet occupied by buildings standing on the street line, it may be objected that it is not suitable for widening one that is built up, like Forbes Street. It is true that the patchwork appearance of such a street during the process of gradual reconstruction is somewhat unsightly,—with here and there a wide place where new buildings have gone up, and between them narrow parts, thus exposing the blank side walls of old buildings projecting beyond the new ones. Yet in cities where the sense of civic beauty is far more acute than it generally is in America, this temporarily ragged condition is accepted as a small price to pay for the economical and certain accomplishment of a great permanent improvement.
Unified Procedure For City, County and Borough
It is obvious that the flow of traffic moves regardless of the artificial boundaries of the city and the surrounding boroughs, and that if an efficient system of thoroughfares is to be involved for the Pittsburgh Industrial District it will be necessary to disregard those boundaries in planning it. This has been done in the preliminary studies which have resulted in this report, and the necessity for it must control the form of any permanent organization for preparing final plans and executing them. If these duties are to be entrusted to officers of the City, and the city boundaries remain unchanged, those officers must have authority from the legislature to deal with territory beyond the boundaries of the city, as is the case in a limited way in Wisconsin cities.[9]
The simplest and most logical procedure, if the boundaries of the city and of the boroughs are to remain substantially unchanged, would be to establish a common agency for dealing with the general problems of city planning for all of the municipalities and the related parts of the country outside of them. The Constitution of Pennsylvania apparently prevents the formation of a special metropolitan board for the Pittsburgh Industrial District, but general authority might be obtained under which the County could establish such a board. If the difficulty should be met simply by extending the boundaries of the city, it is important that the new boundaries should include not merely those areas which are now seen to have close physical relations with the city, but a great extent of territory within which the beginnings of urban or suburban growth have started, or are likely to start, during the next generation.
Whether the duty of planning and providing for the main transportation lines is made a city affair or a county affair, those who are charged with it should be free to go as far in any given direction as the demands of the traffic lead them. They should neither be limited by arbitrary boundaries in those directions where scattering but connected urban development may reach out furthest from the center, nor compelled to extend their operations to an arbitrary boundary in those directions where such development falls short.
SPECIFIC RECOMMENDATIONS
MAIN ARTERIES
Penn Avenue Artery
As noted earlier in this report, one of the two main eastward thoroughfare routes, from the Point District, must lie along the flat land between the Allegheny River and the bluff southeast of the Pennsylvania tracks. Through this bottle-neck must pass the trunk line (or lines) of one of the largest thoroughfare systems leading from the down town district of Pittsburgh. At the foot of the Lawrenceville hill the system branches into two main lines of extension. On the one hand are Penn and Liberty Avenues, extending, by different routes, through the Garfield, Bloomfield, Friendship and Shadyside Districts to East Liberty; and from there connecting directly to Squirrel Hill, Highland Park, Homewood, Brushton, Wilkinsburg and all points further east. On the other hand is Butler Street, following the low land along the river through Lawrenceville to Morningside and Highland Park. Via the Forty-third Street bridge, this line reaches Millvale and the country north thereof; via the Sharpsburg and Aspinwall bridges it reaches Etna, Sharpsburg, Aspinwall, and Shaler and O'Hara townships, and connects directly with the Freeport Road, the only thoroughfare leading up the Allegheny River. The trunk line of this system is composed of two narrow streets, Penn Avenue and Liberty Avenue, the one 60 and the other 50 feet in width. Even now this accommodation is inadequate, and, considering the extent of territory served and the increase of through traffic to be expected as the city grows and the outlying lands develop, a much greater capacity for general traffic through this throat will very soon be needed.