2070 Mobility Vision Plan
Plan Summary
The 2070 Mobility Vision Plan dares to dream. It reaches both forward and back, integrating numerous separate community-led plans, existing assets, and past wisdom into one cohesive vision for infrastructure and mobility.
It is bold – proposing policies, projects, and processes to address the imperatives of our time: equity, climate, and economic growth. And it is achievable – strategically targeting investments over time to build a future in which all, and the planet, can thrive.
More than most cities, transportation infrastructure defines Pittsburgh’s iconic image. The bridges, inclines, and public steps are part of the City’s DNA and constant reminders of the tenacity and innovation that built and sustain it. Infrastructure can also divide as neighborhoods are cleaved by highways and struggle to reconnect to opportunity. Legacy infrastructure, the scale of which is both enormous and complex, of a once-wealthy city is deteriorating with deferred maintenance and in some locations struggling to maintain its footing in the face of more and severe climate events. Pittsburgh has changed a lot over the last fifty years and change over the next fifty will be equally profound.
2020 was a difficult year. Changing travel during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrations against racial injustice, and dramatic environmental catastrophes resulting from climate change cast fresh light on the goals and imperatives of this Plan and a clearer lens through which to see the policies, projects, and processes contained within.
The result is a vision that is responsive to the needs and objectives of today yet flexible enough to adapt to the unknowable future. This Plan serves as a strategic roadmap to maintain past investments, address current disparities, and meet future mobility challenges. It is a long-range framework to connect our people and neighborhoods to each other, the region, and the world. It pursues the ambitious mission to provide all users the physical mobility they need to reach the economic mobility they seek. It charts a course to make small incremental progress to achieve large scale change and improvement. Through specific policy, project, and process recommendations, the Plan will move Pittsburgh closer to core goals that also align with foundational values.
Capturing the Communal Vision
Over the past fifty years there have been a lot of plans. From ambitious, almost science fiction visions of sky buses and magnetic trains to local neighborhood plans for safe crossings and better streets. Network plans, area plans, corridor plans, project plans – this Plan is a compilation of individual plans into a holistic and legible system.
The project team reviewed dozens of recent and past plans, scoured city archives and news feeds, and mined the collective wisdom of residents and stakeholders – drawing out policies, projects, and processes vital to inform this Vision. From May 2019 to January 2020, stakeholders and residents brought forward more ideas – some new, some old – through more than 900 individual comments and points of input. Participants reviewed a consolidated draft project list during a series of virtual meetings in June 2020. The graphics below show ideas that were captured during just some of those events.
last updated: 23/04/2025