The Blurgh

Last week I went to a Students for a Sustainable Pittsburgh meeting…I had missed a couple during the past few weeks due to other things going on, so it was good to catch up on what’s been happening. There were also a lot of new faces in the crowd, which surprised me, since in all the student groups I’ve ever been involved with, attendance was always high initially but dropped dramatically as the semester went on. Not so with SSP, but I digress…

During most of the meetings I’ve been to so far, I’ve been most drawn to the things the group has done in the past, which I guess is the result of me being a huge history dork. During this meeting, though, I got really into the new project they’re starting to work on. It’s one of those ideas that, after you hear it, you can’t believe it hasn’t been done already. SSP is planning on partnering with the city of Pittsburgh and other major cities in the tri-state area to beef up the inter-city rail connections by updating the lines to accommodate high-speed travel.

The basis for it is that since Pittsburgh’s economy has been doing so well during the past couple decades, the need for better transportation between the other nearby metropolitan areas has increased dramatically. Pittsburgh itself has its own extensive transit rail system, which has cut down on traffic significantly, but the airport is near capacity and the highways leading into the city are a mess. High-speed rail connections to nearby cities like Columbus, Cleveland, Wheeling, Harrisburg, Morgantown, Erie, etc. would help alleviate the traffic problems and also contribute to continued economic growth.

Maybe what interested me so much was this initiative’s connection to the past–back when steel was king, Pittsburgh was a HUGE rail hub, and there were trains traveling at all hours of the day to every city you can think of. In fact, a lot of those lines are still there, which makes implementation a lot easier than it could be. SSP was asking for volunteers to help them drum up support, and I decided to put my name down. I’m not sure what it’ll involve quite yet, but it definitely seems like a worthwhile thing to be involved with.