June 13, 2025
Apparently YouTube thought I hadn't been watching enough infrastructure videos lately, because it gave me a video of the most Pittsburgh-looking dude ever talking about the Squirrel Hill interchange.
You can see glimpses of it in the video, but I used to live there: For a couple years I lived in a duplex on Beechwood Blvd. If you look around in Street View near where I lived, you can see that Beechwood is basically on the side of a hill -- the houses have about a two-story climb to get to the front door from the street. The street itself is separated: Along the curb is Beechwood Blvd., on the other side of the Jersey wall is the off-ramp from the parkway. Beechwood isn't a one-way street; the other direction is on the other side of the off-ramp and about 13 feet lower. If you pan around so you're looking towards Forward Ave. you can see the little bridge where the tail-end of the street goes across westbound traffic. That was super-fun, going anywhere involved making a U-turn either coming or going.
On the hill you can see across the other side of Beechwood is the parkway itself; the Squirrel Hill Tunnel is the large structure you see on the other side of Forward, to the left of the Murray Ave. Bridge. As the video says, and as you can see, space is very tight there. To get on the parkway headed east, I had to go west, make a U-turn, then go the better part of a mile past the house to turn onto the on-ramp. If you follow that route on Street View, you'll see my favorite stop sign ever -- the one at the end of the ramp. There's no room for a merge lane here, and the exit for Beechwood Blvd. starts a couple hundred feet farther down. And you were coming down the ramp at a pretty good angle so you couldn't see if there were cars coming anyway. No, your only choice was to get to the stop sign, look over your shoulder until there was a gap that looked almost big enough, and gun it. Loads of fun in a Civic.
I may write about the house someday, I never did while I lived there even though that was when I started this blog. But one more thought about the parkway: Since the house was old it didn't have air conditioning, which meant that from spring through the the fall me and my housemates would have the windows open pretty much all the time. Semi trucks aren't supposed to Jake brake in the city, but plenty of them do it anyway. It took a few days each year to get used to the noise at random times during the night. Nothing quite like being startled awake at four in the morning by the dulcet tones of a twelve-cylinder engine illegally compression-braking with direct line-of-sight to your house.
Fun times.
The video has a good description of the mess starting at 3 minutes and 58 seconds. I'd forgotten about the bus stop (or maybe it wasn't there in 2000) but in fairness nobody with a choice rides PAT anyway. The three options PennDOT is proposing for the revamp (coming soon™) all look interesting. I don't have any real opinions on it -- I haven't lived there in close to 25 years -- but it's good to see that one of the worst interchanges I had to deal with on a regular basis is going to possibly get some sanity added in.
