pghpatsucks

[pghpatsucks]

A Modest Proposal

Once upon a time, I was short on cash and I had word that there was work for me over in Lawrenceville on a construction site. It seemed like a good opportunity and a good work for a good wage. The only problem was the commute...

(Fig I. A Lengthy Commute)

To get from my apartment in Oakland over to work would require me, essentially to get there almost an hour before work started everyday, for me at the time; a prohibitively long amount of time to spend in traveling. On the map, the two places seemed so close, only a few miles, a few minutes if I had a car. Why is it so difficult to get from place to place in this city? Again and again I wish to go places and find it very difficult to get there. Often times I long for a sojourn down to South Part to commune with the resident herd of bison, or haunt my favorite bait shop towards Verona. These things make me happy, and trying to get there by bus leaves me damnably unhappy. Wasn’t  it Hegel who said something about how we only start to see how structures are designed when they stop working?

I find that my experience is not unique. A lot of people can’t get near where they want to go, least to mention within a reasonable amount of time. What are the effects of this inefficient mode of travel? Why, it reduces mobility, not only geographically, but socially, economically, spiritually. I posit that this is by design. It is no coincidence, but a vast and insidious conspiracy against those who ride the bus, to prevent them from matriculating in communities other than their own. The bus routes carry concealed barriers, barring travel between social, racial, class boundaries.

(Fig II. Entangling Pittsburgh Port Authority Routes)

I think the difficulty in traveling from Oakland to Lawrenceville for instance. is an artifact of a different dynamic between the neighborhoods. Before Lawrenceville was gentrified, before the trendy strip of bars and restaurants opened on Butler Street and the gleaming ziggurat of Children's Hospital rose above the rooftops a decade ago, people in Oakland probably seldom had a reason to stray in that direction. Thus there was no necessity to bring people in and around the universities into the working-class neighborhood. Now though, an upwardly mobile class of young people, churned out by Pitt and CMU clamber to spend time and money in the newly hip environs. But the infrastructure of getting from one place to another, the routes demarcated by bus lines have yet to catch up with the new character of the neighborhood and the influx of youth and capital. The disjuncture here is telling, and speaks to a system arbitrating access in a crooked way. That transit barrier is another facet of the system of social and racial segregation built into the urban geography.

As a gesture toward some kind of empirical confirmation of my assertions, here is an EarthTime Map cross referencing city bus routes with redoing maps. They seem to be in some sort of harmony.(https://earthtime.org/explore#v=40.44742,-79.96648,10.773,latLng&t=0.04&ps=50&l=transit_paac_stops_all_routes_served,bdrk,pa_redlining_pgh_choropleth&bt=20180101&et=20181231&startDwell=0&endDwell=0)

These are the sort of dimestore sociological observations that you can glean from just about anyone riding the bus, with and without credentials and expertise. We can understand the PAT System to be a web of malign influence, a means of obstruction and occlusion. It’s a rotten way to attune yourself to the rhythms of a living city, an organism all its own. It’s sprawling and diverse, and a motivated party can find themselves experiencing a variety of situations and stimulations following a progress of their own devising through the city streets. I think the way to escape the implicit ideology and social programming hidden in the bus system is pursuing the opportunity of the latter fact, to foment a sort of counter-conspiracy in opposition to the machinations of the Port Authority.

That practice might be, borrowing from the French Situationists, “The Dérive”. This is a psychogeographical practice of drifting in order to disrupt the mundane strata of urban commerce, defined by Guy Debord as, “the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiences." By prioritizing psychic atmosphere and play within our travel, slowing ourselves down, ambling through urban space instead of rushing through it, we can augment our understanding. By taking alternative routes, embracing digression, getting lost down discursive alleys we reject the civic regime of alleged efficiency implemented by public transit. 

(Fig. III. A Quest for Fried Plantains)

A few weekends ago, after visiting my grandparents in Regent Square, I had a hankering for some fried plantains. My favorite plantains come golden brown, served with salsa verde at Chicken Latino in the Strip. Finding myself frustrated in devising a way to get there quickly by bus, I chose instead to pursue this quixotic goal on foot. I trudged from a bus stop in Squirrel Hill, back through Oakland in the afternoon, crossing Forbes and working my way through Polish hill, doubling back through byways to find my way down toward the Strip. It was around 5 miles, and I admit, the journey did much to make me relish the plantains once I arrived to dine. All the places I would have passed, carried inside a vehicle, were made vistas of exploration as I cut across various grades of pavement. It wasn’t a speedy journey, to be sure, but it did instill a kind of refreshed appreciation and wonder toward the variation and energies of all the city blocks between me and my destination.

In sum, I probably can’t cohesively remake the Pittsburgh transit map to be more functional on my own. Neither am I holding out hope for broad reaching institutional reform. Instead, I am proposing smaller acts of independent inclination, resisting social engineering, through journeys of self determination and curiosity.

*The pictures of buses in this post are made using Deep Dream, mixing found photos of Pittsburgh busses and mixing them with the brushstrokes of renaissance paintings depicting damned souls in perdition.