My comments to the PA Turnpike Commission about the Mon-Fayette Expressway

Today was the deadline for public comments on the proposed Monroeville extension of PA43, the Mon-Fayette/SOuthern Beltway project (MFSoB, for short). Here is what I sent them.

I oppose construction of this road. The desired connectivity of West Virginia to Monroeville is already available in limited access form via PA43-Interstate 70-existing Interstate 76 Turnpike, and the slightly shorter US119 path is only local access for a few miles. To get to Pittsburgh itself, I-79 to I-376 works well enough not to spend $2+ billion for a new parallel.

The long depressed river towns of Clairton, Glassport, Duquesne, and McKeesport, will not benefit from the road in any meaningful way, any more than Trafford benefits from being four miles from the existing PA Turnpike interchange at US22. There already are plenty of other roads in and out of these towns. Fix those first.

The reasoning for building this road dates to at least 40 years ago. I have lived here 35 of that, long enough to see how little difference the construction of Toll 66 made to the New Stanton area, where I own a house and land since the mid-1980s. That road never did live up to its hype, and the traffic it was expected to carry (25-30K/day) simply has not materialized (~15K/day), while 20K+/day still use US119 through Youngwood. Why should we believe that the same arguments used in 1987 to justify building that road will work 30 years later when they did not work then? Do you really believe that argument is worth spending two billion?

I dispute your financial strategy. While it is true that no federal or state funds will be used, funding still comes from two general state taxes, one on motor fuel, the Oil Company Franchise Tax (OCFT), and one on a public service, the Motor License Fund (MLF), ultimately borne by the average motoring public who will rarely if ever use this road, and most will rarely use any other part of the Turnpike system at all. If your financial justification is the OCFT and MLF, and if their main purpose is to fund the Turnpike, then eliminating both this project and the OCFT and MLF will actually benefit the average PA motorist by lowering fuel and licensing costs statewide.

The road itself would serve no useful purpose that cannot be obtained faster and cheaper through other means. If you want to move lots of industrial materials to and from these river towns, that's what railroads, pipelines and the rivers are for. If you want to improve commuter travel, the old PATrain and transit in general will accomplish that. If you want to improve accessibility inside these business districts, do like Carnegie, Millvale, and Bellevue just did with pedestrian improvements, bicycle facilities, improved stream flow, and traffic flow treatments. If you want better roads between the Mon Valley and downtown, then fix those existing roads! Those will cost far less than two billion dollars, be realized much sooner than 2036, and will actually work.

Then there is future maintenance. I-279 in the North Hills, another road that took decades to build, is now old enough at 27 years to need major reconstruction. The PTC is already in the news for not being able to make ends meet. Do the tolls on Toll 60 and Toll 66 even pay for plowing and salt in the winter and grass mowing in the summer, let alone future bridge replacements? If it does get built, are we then only 20-some years from closing it anyway for lack of funds to keep it fixed?

Enough. Other cities are tearing down expressways. Why are we even thinking about building yet another? No, we don't need it. Stop thinking that we do.