[21] Improvement to this point is provided in the current bond issue.
PART III
Surveys and a City Plan
Pittsburgh's Need for Surveys
No city of equal size in America, or perhaps in the world, is compelled to adapt its growth to such a difficult complication of high ridges, deep valleys, and precipitous slopes, as Pittsburgh. By consequence no other city has such imperative need of accurate and comprehensive surveys, as a basis for the layout of streets, sewers, and all public works, for the purpose of avoiding the extravagant mistakes, misfits, and reconstructions that are bound to result from groping, piecemeal work done amidst such obstacles.
New York, Baltimore, Washington and other American cities, where the need is far less crying than in Pittsburgh, have awakened to the importance of modern, accurate and comprehensive topographical maps as a basis for the intelligent and economical planning of public improvements, and have provided themselves therewith. But Pittsburgh, having less excuse for the omission and paying a heavier penalty for the blunders to which it gives rise, lags in the same class with too many unprogressive cities in this country where the official surveys are merely incomplete and casual records of streets, properties and public works, gradually accumulated through a long series of years. These records consist, for the most part, of independent piecemeal surveys of all degrees of accuracy and inaccuracy, made for all sorts of purposes, and of compilations and transcripts of these piecemeal records patched together in attempts to reconcile irreconcilable data.
It is not necessary to give a long list of examples of the incompleteness and the inaccuracy of much of the old data of which the Bureau of Surveys is the official repository in Pittsburgh. Every surveyor and engineer in Pittsburgh with whom I have talked, whose work has given him occasion to use this data, is familiar with the conditions; with the fact that the tapes used in the original surveys of different parts of the city differed in length and that the errors were never compensated, so that today, measurements in different parts of the city have to be made with special tapes of particular degrees of inaccuracy in order to conform to the records; with the fact that independent bench marks are used in different parts of the city and that discrepancies of several feet, and sometimes of unknown amount, in elevation occur in the records of adjacent or intersecting streets; with the fact that an extraordinarily large proportion of the streets are not marked by any permanent monuments, and that there is no adequate system for protecting the monuments that do exist, so that the City often has no sure recourse against abutting owners who have encroached upon a street; and finally, that no general official surveys whatever exist of the complicated topography of the undeveloped areas. And yet through these undeveloped areas, streets and sewers and other public works are almost daily being extended without knowledge of what lies beyond, although from the back regions soon to be developed, somehow, sometime, outlets must be provided.
The city charter places upon the Bureau of Surveys the onerous and important duty of reporting favorably or unfavorably to Councils upon the plan of every new street proposed to be laid out by any one whomsoever within the city; yet the Bureau, presumably through lack of funds, has never had the data in hand upon which alone such a report could be intelligently based.
No criticism of the present Bureau, or indeed of its predecessors, is intended in these remarks. The blame falls upon the whole system of penny-wise, pound-foolish, hand-to-mouth procedure in regard to city surveys that has been characteristic of a large proportion of American cities in the past, and of Pittsburgh with the rest. It is earnestly recommended that Pittsburgh should take example from the cities of Europe and from such American cities as New York, Baltimore and Washington. And because its peculiar topography is bound to make the evil results of unprogressive medieval methods more serious than in other cities, it should take the pains to surpass, rather than to lag far behind, in this respect.