The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation has started the phaseout of a downtown Indiana traffic signal.

District 10 officials in White Township said that the traffic signal at Philadelphia and 11th streets will begin operating on flash mode on Monday at 10 a.m.

A spokeswoman said the signal will flash yellow on Philadelphia Street and red on 11th Street, while stop signs will be placed on the 11th Street approaches.

A flashing yellow light means caution, while a flashing red light has the same meaning as a stop sign.

PennDOT said it will study and monitor the intersection during the flashing operation, in preparation for the removal of the traffic signal in the spring as part of the Philadelphia Street Bridge Replacement Project.

It is a planned $3.9 million replacement of two bridges or culverts, one of which carries Philadelphia Street over Whites Run. The other carries Philadelphia Street, where it is part of state Route 286, over Marsh Run.

Read the full story at indianagazette.com

Before the newly elected Butler County commissioners took office in 2016, they met to agree upon priorities and goals — not only for their local municipalities, but also to elevate the strengths that the rural county brought to the region.

That initial meeting “set the tone” for years of collaboration, said Republican Commissioner Leslie Osche — who works alongside her fellow Commissioners Kevin Boozel, a Democrat, and Kim Geyer, a Republican — and also across county and party lines with Allegheny County’s Democratic executive, Rich Fitzgerald.

“Any one of us could pick up the phone and call Rich,” Mr. Boozel said.

That bipartisan behavior has earned the four elected officials the inaugural Moe Coleman Award, named after the late social worker, public servant and founder of the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute of Politics, who was known for bringing minds together.

Planners have identified 123 road, bridge and transportation improvements needed in southwestern Pennsylvania, and said a list of priority projects — including a handful in Westmoreland County — will be adopted by next summer.

The Southwest Pennsylvania Commission, or SPC, and PennDOT on Wednesday afternoon outlined proposals that could be part of the next four-year transportation improvement plan for the 10-county region.

Among the projects considered are construction of a new ramps to the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Penn and Mt. Pleasant townships, continuation of the long-discussed Laurel Valley connector and major road improvements along Route 30.

Read the full story at Trib Live

Plans were laid out Wednesday for a Hyperloop route between Pittsburgh and Chicago through Cleveland.

The route presented Wednesday is being proposed by Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which has a test track in France and is working on a passenger system between Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Most of the proposed route between Cleveland and Pittsburgh would be built 6 to 12 feet underground and mostly on public rights of way near highways.

It would rely on solar energy power and it could move up to 6 million passengers a year. There would be two stations in Pittsburgh — one downtown and the other at the airport. 

The plan is to get a passenger route up and running in India during the next decade, and a route in the United States will likely follow after that.

View the full story at  WPXI.com

We have received an Appalachian Regional Commission POWER Grant worth over $1.4million for the Shale Power project. The project will develop a regional center to provide technical assistance to manufacturers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio that are seeking to expand into the regions burgeoning shale energy sector.

Shady Avenue in Pittsburgh will undergo nearly a year of scrutiny and planning to improve safety on the busy corridor. City officials partnered with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, a regional planning body, to analyze crash data, traffic and amenities along the road.

“It’s a very long corridor, there’s a lot of things that are going on,” said Katy Sawyer, a senior project manager with the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure.

SmartMoves for a Changing Region is the Long Range Plan (LRP) for the 10 county Southwestern Pennsylvania region. SmartMoves establishes the Vision, Goals, and Strategies for the region and also lays out actions and potential implementation partners to advance the goals and strategies, to ultimately achieve the vision. The Regional Vision is a world-class, safe and well maintained, integrated transportation system that provides mobility for all, enables resilient communities, and supports a globally competitive economy. To achieve this vision, the LRP includes a list of projects currently within fiscal capacity and projects beyond the fiscal capacity. Scroll through this application to view the LRP transportation projects.

“Planning for operations” encompasses a variety of activities that planners and transportation system operators collaborate on in order to maximize the efficiency of the transportation system and to ensure that transportation services are delivered in as safe, reliable, and secure a manner as possible. In addition to having many congestion mitigation and system efficiency benefits, planning for operations is required under Federal law.

It’s not flashy and it doesn’t have any one big employer driving its economy any more, but the Pittsburgh region continues its modest but steady growth, according to newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The data, from the bureau’s latest edition of the American Community Survey, shows that generally in 2018 poverty was down, median incomes were up, and people here continued to have health insurance.

“Obviously it’s good news if poverty is falling and median incomes are growing,” said Guy Faucher, chief economist for PNC Financial Services. “But it’s not dramatic. It’s not like there’s going to be a big driver [of job growth] like they have in tech centers like Seattle or Denver.”

Through the Safe Streets, Smart Cities Academy, Smart Growth America worked with three cities around the country to implement temporary safety demonstration projects. The City of Pittsburgh historically relied on 311 requests to help decide which streets need safety improvements, but when a team from the city looked more closely at the data, they realized they were not reaching the whole community through this process. In particular, they were not addressing key locations with high crash rates in low-income communities of color because this traditional channel of collecting complaints. In partnership with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, the Allegheny County Health Department, the Port Authority of Allegheny County, and PennDOT, they launched a demonstration project at one such site to implement safety projects and to establish new partnerships with the community. Working closely with a local school, they added crosswalks with protected refuges to help children reach school more safely, and they also redesigned the intersection of Lincoln and Frankstown Avenues to make it less stressful for all people—including drivers—in the process.