By MARTY LEVINE
A new campus parking garage is being planned, another under renovation is slated to open before the semester starts and improvements to other lots are underway, according to Pitt’s Parking, Transportation & Services office.
Improvements and other changes for the fall semester include:
Parking garages and lots
This summer, maintenance and improvement projects began at the Posvar Hall and School of Computing and Information garages.
Work at the Posvar Garage is on track to be completed before the start of the academic year, and parking spaces will be available at that time. The University is evaluating options for more improvements at Posvar next summer.
The School of Computing and Information garage remains closed to parking, as construction is still ongoing. Monthly parkers assigned to that facility have been temporarily relocated to other nearby parking locations.
Parking equipment at the Soldiers & Sailors Garage has been fully replaced. The new system is designed to improve the overall entry and exit experience for both daily and monthly parkers. In the near future, this equipment also will be integrated with Pitt’s new mobile credential system.
Pitt Park app
The Pitt Park app has been “highly effective in streamlining access to available parking spaces,” the parking office said. By requiring single sign-on (SSO) authentication, the app ensures that only eligible Pitt users can make reservations, which has significantly reduced unauthorized use.
Demand has been strong, the office reported, with available spaces consistently selling out each month. “Feedback has been positive, and we view it as a successful tool in improving the parking experience on campus.”
At the Aug. 13 town hall webinar, Dwayne Pinkney, executive senior vice chancellor for administration and finance, addressed concerns about a new policy that requires a 48-hour notice for canceling parking reserved through the Pitt Park app.
“The rationale behind that move was that we had experienced a lot of late cancellations from individuals — members of our community — who reserve parking for a number of days,” Pinkney said. “In some cases, the entire month is reserved and the spaces are not used optimally.”
With the late cancellations, there is not enough time to make that space available for someone else to use. “So we have unused parking in an environment where … parking is just an extremely important commodity. It's expensive and it is hard to identify. And so the practice of reserving those spaces and then not utilizing those spaces was causing quite a bit of disruption, exacerbating the problem with respect to demand and also creating some challenges on the revenue side.”
This policy was put in place, he said, to “address those issues, both on the capacity side and predictability where revenue is concerned.”
Pinkney said he’s talking with members of his team to develop a mechanism for people who have true emergencies and cancelling at the last minute is unavoidable, but he said they have a lot of data about how the late cancellations have been “very disruptive, have completely made it a challenge for us to provide adequate parking and to provide predictability that individuals need.”
New parking spaces
The University is preparing to open a parking garage on the ground floor of the new building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Halket Street. More information about the garage — including opening date, capacity and permit options — will be shared in the coming months.
Parking officials said in December that the new Fifth & Halket building will have 98 spaces when it opens.
Some permitted parking spaces will be offered to students residing at the Hampton Inn and Pennsylvania Apartments.
EV charging stations
New EV charging stations will be available this fall at the Public Health building garage. In addition, the garage at Fifth and Halket will include EV charging capabilities once it opens. The University continues to prioritize sustainability and is actively exploring additional projects to expand EV charging across campus in the months ahead.
Non-Pitt use of ParkMobile
Individuals without a Pitt SSO can still reserve parking through ParkMobile, but availability is limited. ParkMobile remains active at select University-managed metered lots and a small number of other designated locations. While access for non-SSO users has been reduced to prioritize the Pitt community, limited public parking remains an option where space permits.
“Our top priority is making it safe and easy for everyone to get around campus, whether you’re walking, biking, driving or using transit,” says Jonathan Pearson, director of Mobility, which ensures, he says, “that travel to, from and across campus is not only more convenient but also safer for our entire community.”
Other parking concerns
Parking is limited along Fifth Avenue from Bellefield Avenue to Chesterfield Street as Pittsburgh Regional Transit contractors continue to relocate utilities, run electrical conduit for power to new transportation stations, and place new sidewalks and curbs. All this work is part of the PRTX University Line project that will create bus rapid transit lanes between Oakland to Downtown.
Eventually, the contra-flow (outbound) bus lane on Fifth Avenue will be removed as part of the project. But work on Forbes Avenue must be completed before PRT can move buses from the Fifth Avenue contra-flow lane to Forbes Avenue.
In addition, a new bike lane was recently completed on Forbes Avenue along Schenley Plaza.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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