Nov 27, 2014 4 min read

The leftover turkey is cooling in the fridge, seasonal music from the likes of Bing and Burl has overtaken the airwaves and the hunt is officially on for the prime bargains. The holiday season is here.

Perhaps sometime between now and the dawn of 2015, you’ll be journeying to the Pittsburgh Cultural District to see “The Nutcracker,” “A Musical Christmas Carol” or a performance by the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Here’s some advice from us: Leave early.

Sure, you always have to worry about backups on the Parkway leading into the Fort Pitt Tunnel, particularly on those nights when the Pittsburgh Penguins are on the ice at Consol Energy Center. And navigating Pittsburgh traffic can often be grueling in the best of circumstances. But there’s now an additional fly floating in the ointment – bike lanes that have been added to Penn Avenue, reducing it to a one-way street in the Cultural District, rather than the two-way thoroughfare it had been before September.

That means that on those nights when there are events happening simultaneously at Heinz Hall, the Benedum Center, the Byham Theater, the O’Reilly Theater and any of the other venues in downtown Pittsburgh, you’ll wish you had access to a jetpack to rise above the gridlock.

In theory, the bike lanes on Penn Avenue, along with similar lanes on the Andy Warhol Bridge and in Oakland, should be solid additions to the city’s transportation plan – they’re meant to be eco-friendly, reduce traffic from motor vehicles, enhance health and well-being and, by their simple presence, encourage people to dust off their helmets, pump some air in the tires and use their bikes.

In practice, though, the bike lanes might be an innovation ahead of their time and place. And they’ve made life harder for the vast majority of people who still venture into the heart of the city in their cars.

They would perhaps be good for Miami, Atlanta, Dallas or Phoenix, places where the weather is more hospitable on a more frequent basis. But maybe not in this part of the world. Not yet.

Pittsburgh’s mayor Bill Peduto was a major proponent of the bike lanes, and recently told KDKA-TV that any backlash – or “bikelash,” as it’s been called – will subside “once people understand that the roads are there for everyone, not just the automobile. And if you make it safer for the cyclist, you’re also going to make it safer for the motorist.”

But we wonder just how often those bike lanes are being used. Weather in this region can be somewhat less than optimum for bike-riding between October and April. In that period, the lanes that had previously accommodated cars will be sitting empty and unused, while drivers pump more exhaust into the air as they creep ever-so-slowly along.

And while Pittsburgh should take tremendous pride in the vibrancy of its Cultural District – officials from many other cities of comparable size can only wish they had a downtown that was as alive with activity after the sun goes down – we’d be willing to bet the vast majority of visitors to it don’t live within easy biking distance. They come from places like Penn Hills, Ross Township, Carnegie and, yes, Washington. The last we checked, trying to maneuver a bike down the Parkway would be not just wildly difficult, but enormously foolhardy.

As your blood pressure rises when you sit in your car and the minutes tick by before curtain time, your reaction to the bike lane in the Cultural District is very likely to be an emphatic “Bah! Humbug!”