Before I get started here, I'd like to establish some context: I personally organize and lead 2-3 group bike rides every week for my bike club, GIVE UP. I do this every week, twelve months a year, and rarely cancel for weather. Every Friday morning around 7:30am I collect about 15-20 folks looking for a casual social ride and we all go to a locally owned coffee shop, get coffee and pastries, and have a good time of it. We have not canceled a single Friday morning coffee ride in the entirety of 2024, even for weather. This includes when it was raining, snowing, and all of the other shit weather we had in January / February. I actually can't remember the last time we canceled.

And this is just me and the events I personally organize. Within our club we have at least three other regularly scheduled rides organized by other GIVE UP organizers, a bunch of one-off events (my favorite being rides to PNC Park for baseball games,) and informal meetups to local breweries, pizza shops, ice cream parlors, etc. Over the winter, we did a nighttime ride on a 20 degree evening to one of my favorite Indian restaurants just because I wanted to give them business in hopes that they don’t rethink their late hours. These are just some of the things we do within our club. I'm friends with a lot of organizers of other bike groups around the city and I know that they're doing similar things with their groups pretty regularly, year round, with significant numbers of people involved.

GIVE UP’s first baseball outing of 2024. I can’t stress how easy the Pirates make it to buy tickets for group outings. Big thanks to their salespeople for making it easy whenever we want to go root for Jalapeño Hannah.

I'm opening up this piece this way not to boast about the cool stuff I'm doing (okay, maybe a little bit,) but to establish a few facts:

I know what I'm talking about
I regularly bike all over the city
Bike infrastructure is used year round
We directly contribute to the local economy in a meaningful way

This is my heatmap for this year to date. I’ve biked about 1,200 miles so far locally in 2024. I’ve seen some shit.

Now, before you dismiss me as some culty bike nutter, I will also mention that I personally own two cars and my wife also owns a car, making us a three car household. I drive cars too, people. I drive from one side of the city to the other at least five times per week, which (in my opinion) gives my opinions on the matter of city bike infrastructure at least as much weight -- if not more -- than a lot of people who simply commute in from the suburbs to park in the same place every day. I get it. I know the score when it comes to local infrastructure. I also follow a lot of local news outlets on Facebook and see the comments sections of any article that mentions bikes: I'm familiar with the criticism. I will also admit that I find a dark, almost perverse sense of entertainment in the fact that people still call Bill Peduto "bike lane Billy" years after he was voted out of office. It's kind of like "Let's Go Brandon" in that I find it funny, but for much different reasons than the people who say it unironically.

Knowing this, whenever the subject of new bike infrastructure comes up, it often gets a lot of pushback from non-residents, residents, and business owners alike. I will be very frank about my biases and admit that if you don't live in the city (actually in the city proper, in a place where you can vote for the mayor of Pittsburgh,) I don't care about your opinion, and that goes whether you agree with me or not. I'm sure you're all lovely people, but I don't expect you to care about my opinions regarding public policy in Robinson or Cranberry or any other far-flung suburbs out in the boonies you live in. I'm not saying you're not entitled to an opinion, I'm just saying that you're not entitled to me taking it seriously. For the purposes of this article, that leaves pushback from residents and businesses to address:

For city residents, I am honestly somewhat empathetic to a number of the criticisms. If you live on a street and you're used to ample on-street parking that gets sucked up by a bike lane, it can be frustrating. I get it. I'd be a bit irritated in that situation, too. I also recognize that I don't own the street in front of my house though, and that I'm basically just mooching on public property whenever I take the parking on my street for granted. I also understand that getting stuck behind a slow person on a bike on a narrow uphill stretch can feel a bit tedious when driving, but personally I just take that to mean bike infrastructure is inadequate in any place where this happens to me. Where I start really pushing back on city resident complaints about bikes is when people respond to plans for new bike infrastructure with bizarre arguments like "we can have bike lanes when bicyclists start paying to keep up the roads" or the absolutely absurd "they need to just get out of our way and stay on the bike trails."

On the first point regarding paying for the roads, once again: I own three cars, live in the city, and pay taxes locally. If we made a list of people actually paying to maintain the roads, I'd be pretty high up towards the top. Bikes aren't exactly known for their significant impact on wear and tear of roads, so if anything, I'm probably paying proportionately more for upkeep of roads than the folks who drive three blocks to get their Mrs. T's pierogies at the North Side Giant Eagle (which is not, regardless of anything you've read recently, the worst grocery store in the country, the city, or even the North Side.) If you're one of the millions of people who incorrectly believe that gasoline taxes and state registration costs pay for road maintenance, well, I am sorry to be the one to tell you that you are incorrect on this. Put these facts together and it's pretty easy to argue that every mile I bike locally is subsidizing the folks who insist on driving everywhere. On the second point regarding bikes needing to stay out of the way of cars, if you truly want us to "get out of the way," you're in luck: we want to get out of your way. We want nothing more than to be out of your way. I'm not usually one to speak in general terms about what people want, but I can say with reasonable certainty that the last thing we want is to be stuck on the road in front of some drunk 20 year old named Cody from Fayette County who is in town for a Kenny Chesney show and has no idea how to drive in the city. Give us adequate bike infrastructure and we can blissfully go back to ignoring each other.

The real meat of what I want to get into today though is neither residents or non-residents. It's that last category of people who push back: business owners.

Roundabout brewing spent the past couple years operating with little more than a glorified kegerator on a dilapidated loading dock surrounded by nothing else worth going to on the least traveled side of the North Shore trail. The owners recently closed shop as they were finally able to move to New Zealand, but that place was absolutely packed until the moment they poured their last beer. In its last few weeks, even before they announced they were closing forever, it was standing room only from the moment they opened to the moment they closed every night. You could say that I spent a lot of time there in April "doing research" for this piece you're reading now.

“Doing research” for this article at Roundabout shortly before they closed for good. RIP Roundabout, it was a real party. Thank you for all of the good times.

On the opposite side of this spectrum, when the city recently held a meeting to get feedback from locals regarding bike lanes and related infrastructure in the Strip District, though, local business owners lined up to preach doom and gloom about how this would kill their businesses. These are people who own long-established businesses in one of the flattest, most walkable, centrally located, and easily accessible areas of the city. These people are absolutely terrified of the idea of making the neighborhood less hostile to people coming in and going through on bikes. Once again: Roundabout saw opportunity in the most dire of circumstances and embraced it. The "business owners" that supposedly prop up the local economy -- the people who (by contrast) had opportunity delivered to them gift-wrapped on a silver platter -- are absolutely shook to the core. We need more people like the former and I don't really see much reason to listen to the latter. If that's a bit too blunt for your taste, I don't know what to tell you. Sorry. Not sorry.

I have a theory that a lot of these businesses are sustainable despite their ownership, not because of it. These are people who are actively and intentionally driving stagnation of the best parts of the city because they do not know how to grow their businesses through adapting to ongoing changes in customer behaviors. These are folks who possibly bought cheap real estate 30 years ago when the Strip wasn't a cultural destination in the same way it is today, and basically operate the same business in the same way since then, resistant to change because they don't know how to do anything else and never have needed to. (Please note that I don't lump all old businesses in this category. La Prima has been down there since the dawn of time and I have no notes: please keep doing what you're doing.) And despite these people going out of their way to constantly demonstrate that they are incapable of adapting to changing consumer behavior, people seem to have a tendency to give more weight to them because of a misguided belief that the local economy relies on their judgment. I would argue that the local economy is hamstrung by their judgment, and it cascades past their immediate vicinity across the entire city: There are five roads that traverse the entirety of the strip district (Railroad, Smallman, Penn, Spring, Liberty) and none of them have adequate bike infrastructure. For people trying to get through the Strip to connect (for example) downtown and the East End, bike traffic basically has to share narrow roads with impatient drivers. Once again, we're paying taxes and actually contributing to the local economy, but one of the flattest and most theoretically easily bikeable stretches of the city is openly hostile to our presence. It's real fuckin' dumb. Safe access from one side of the city to another is actively kneecapped by "local business owners" who are only provided a platform because enough people don't realize that these peoples' opinions aren't any more important than anybody else's.

Did Wayne Gretzky actually say "skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it's been?" I don't know. It's an apocryphal quote. Let's just pretend he did. Regardless of its provenance, it's still a valid point in this instance: The puck in this hamfisted analogy is consumer behavior. There are a number of businesses -- largely on the Penn Ave coordidor through the Strip -- whose owners are constantly wringing their hands over how to keep the same stream of yinzers buying knockoff sports memorabilia in the exact same manner they did thirty years ago instead of looking at the parts of the city that are eating their lunch catering to what people are actually doing today. If you ask these people what the Strip needs, they're going to say "more parking for cars" and "more lanes for car traffic" because they're still trying to support the only business they've ever known how to run. There are a ton of new residents in this neighborhood moving into new condo developments behind the Terminal building and in adjacent areas, residents who these businesses would in any normal situation be fighting to make their businesses more accessible to for a constant stream of neighborhood walk-up traffic, but somehow they're still fighting for surface parking to keep things attractive for people who visit the city once or twice a year for a Saturday afternoon trip. Like I said: real fuckin' dumb. It's like watching people put as much effort as they can to fumble the bag, and not being satisfied until the pooch has been screwed every way possible. And yet we still give these folks opinions more weight than those who see which direction consumer behavior in that area is actually going.

Just another 15 degree January morning where 20 people followed me up the hill from Downtown to Brighton Heights for a cup of coffee in an otherwise empty coffee shop

Right about now, you may be asking "is stagnation really bad?" And I think that's a fair question. I mean, if somebody wants to sell fish to the same people in the same way for decades and only asks that we don't fuck up parking for his customers, is that really bad? No, not on its face. But when the customers stop coming because there's a better fish market in a more easily accessible part of town, and all of the surrounding businesses see a similar drop due to lack of foot traffic and stubborn attitudes towards changing behaviors, those businesses aren't going to be replaced by locally owned small businesses. Just ask Oakland. Or Market Square. The future of stagnation isn't new local businesses moving in to replace the old ones that couldn't adapt; The future is bank locations and chain restaurants. To be more blunt: you better hope that nobody figures out how to sell fish off of a spartan loading dock in the middle of nowhere or else your storefront is going to be a First National Bank or Dunkin Donuts by the end of the decade.

So to wrap up this piece which has admittedly become more of an aimless venting session than it is a call to action, I can't tell you what to think here. I can only tell you what I think based on my own experiences. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you're giving knee-jerk reactions to new information because it doesn't meet the same patterns you've known your entire life, ask yourself whether you might not be better embracing change and adapting for the future instead of insisting on a status quo that might not be around for much longer.

Anyway, as I mentioned towards the start, I know the score. I know how people react to articles like this. Sadly, I don’t have a comments section to hurl ignorant comments at, so you’ll just have to send me obscene angry DMs at my instagram account @fattyintospace if you want to weigh in on anything I’ve written above.