The past, present and murky future of the Allegheny County road belt system

Mostly two-lane roadways, the belts were formed by threading a route through existing roads.

By ADAM BABETSKI
TribLive

Jeff Mrvos might be the Allegheny County Belt System’s biggest fan — and one of its last.

Mrvos, 44, grew up in McKeesport across from the Yellow Belt. That’s one of the five color-coded ring roads which have connected the communities surrounding Pittsburgh since the 1950s. A series of signs keep drivers on the right colored path.

Before Google Maps and Waze could tell motorists where to turn, those colored signs on the county roads attempted do the job. Now Global Positioning Systems (GPS) have largely rendered the belts unnecessary, while some claimed they never really worked all that well. The Allegheny County Department of Public Works has even started to remove the weathered signs as they fade away, a slow-motion vanishing of local history.

But people like Mrvos recognize their value. Following the Yellow Belt road provided him with a direct eastward route to Turtle Creek and Oakmont. Going westward, Carnegie and Franklin Park beckoned.

The Orange Belt and Green Belt — both of which pass through McKeesport’s outskirts — guided Mrvos to places like Pittsburgh International Airport and Highland Park.

Mrvos considered himself lucky to live in such a connected hub.

“It’s actually the only place that a belt touches one city three times,” he said.

Mrvos carried his youthful fascination with the belts into adulthood, acquiring old signs from flea markets and even creating T-shirts with the belts’ distinctive color-coded markers.

But while Mrvos’ memorabilia collection grows, he’s heard fewer and fewer people around him referencing the belts.

Undaunted, Mrvos is on a oneman crusade to preserve a piece of the region’s identity.

“If I ever hear somebody talking about it, I try to chime in,” he said. “It just took hold of me. … It’s a Pittsburgh oddity to me.”

History of the belts

The belt system’s roads are indeed an oddity.

Mostly two-lane roadways, the belts were formed by threading a route through existing roads. They have little in common with larger, purpose-built contemporaries such as Washington, D.C.’s Capital Beltway and Cincinnati’s Interstate 275.

That’s because Joseph White, an engineer with the Allegheny County Department of Public Works, developed them in the years following World War II, said Aleksandar Stevanovic, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. With the wartime demand for steel in sharp decline, the Pittsburgh region’s population began to crater, too.

The city reached a record high of 677,000 residents in the 1950 census before dropping to 604,000 a decade later. Following national trends, city dwellers were diffusing to the suburbs. Nevertheless, Allegheny County’s population was steadily shrinking, from 1.6 million in 1960 to 1.2 million today.

Adding an expensive, high-capacity road system through the hills and valleys of Allegheny County would have been impractical, Stevanovic said.

“The economic strength of the area was simply not high enough to support that,” Stevanovic said.

White helped the county keep pace and save money by transforming existing roads into a navigational tool using traffic signs.

He created five color-coded belts in progressively wider loops around Pittsburgh: Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. A tiny, 2-mile Purple belt in Pittsburgh proper followed in 1995.

Researcher Jeff Kitsko owns Pennsylvania Highways, a website dedicated to the state’s roads. He determined that each of the main belts ranged between 38.1 miles and 91.7 miles in length. The Green, Orange and Red belts are not complete circles.

Before the belts, many commuters cut through Downtown to reach their destinations, since most of Allegheny County’s largest roads led to the central business district, Stevanovic said.

He said White’s system reduced traffic Downtown by allowing drivers traveling between suburbs to stay on Pittsburgh’s outskirts.

“If people know what neighborhoods each circle connects, then you would know that if you are on that route, and you go left or right from your location, you are going to end up in a desired destination,” he said.

The belt system also helped drivers negotiate Pittsburgh’s tangled roadways, which were nothing like American cities’ typical grid patterns of streets.

In the era before GPS, commuters referenced belt system signs to determine whether a single-lane road at an intersection led to a neighboring community — or a dead end.

“So many cities in the United States are so predictable when it comes to navigation. Pittsburgh is not,” Stevanovic said. “Having that information 30 or 40 or 60 years ago was really precious.”

Who still uses the belts?

The belt system, already facing hardships from depopulation, largely did not survive its transition to the internet age and GPS.

Major companies like Apple and Google chose not to incorporate the belts into their mapping systems. Neither responded to a request for comment regarding their decision- making.

Lyft, the ridesharing app, is one of the few modern companies that incorporates the belt system in its maps.

But one Lyft driver, Mitch Waxman of Dormont, said it can be a major inconvenience for drivers rather than a guide.

Lyft frequently routes Waxman onto the Blue Belt in Pittsburgh’s eastern suburbs like Swissvale and Wilkinsburg, prompting him to follow signs that have either decayed or no longer exist to figure out where he needs to go. Drivers follow their assigned routes as closely as possible because passengers’ ride fares are based on miles driven, he said.

Waxman, 59, comes from New York City, which has a more predictable grid system. He finds that the remnants of the belt system on top of Pittsburgh’s hilly terrain just makes his job harder.

“Pittsburgh is so darn complicated as it is,” he said.

Lyft spokesman Cristian Delgado said drivers can choose alternate routes in the app and report road hazards like missing signs.

Some Pittsburghers who once used the belt signs extensively have since replaced them with other options.

Madelyn Dinnerstein, 65, of Ross moved to the Pittsburgh region in 1999. She said the belt system’s wayfinding signage helped her acclimate to the suburbs.

Dinnerstein recalled using paper maps of the belts to determine which one was closest to her destination. For example, the Green Belt was located near her synagogue, Adat Shalom in Indiana Township.

“That way, I only had to write down the directions for the beginning and the end. I could rely on the belt signs for where to turn in the middle,” she said.

Dinnerstein relied less on the belt system as MapQuest — the first commercial web mapping service — rose in popularity and allowed her to print out directions from her computer.

She stopped referencing the belts completely when she bought a car with an OnStar GPS in the mid-2000s.

Ben Peoples, 46, of Squirrel Hill relied on the Blue Belt during his time at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s. He once traveled the entire belt for fun, stopping for a Dole Whip at Crafton Ice Cream Delite on the road’s opposite end to celebrate.

But Peoples far more often used a now-removed sign at the intersection of Beechwood Boulevard and Monitor Street as a waypoint. He keeps some of the other remaining belt signs in mind as a handy backup to the navigation systems should he need one.

“If I’m lost, I can kind of nerdle my way to somewhere that I actually know on the belts,” he said.

Younger drivers tend to regard the belt signs more as an interesting visual than as a useful navigational tool.

South Side resident Nick Weltz, 34, grew up in Philadelphia but had family from Pittsburgh. He grew fond of the belt signs through visits to the city.

While he’s never used the belt signs to navigate, he is still happy to call them out to his passengers whenever he passes one.

“When I’m driving through some wooded hollow in an area I haven’t been before, I love seeing the familiar sign that lets me know I’m on the Orange Belt,” he said.

“It’s quirky and doesn’t make a ton of sense. But a lot of things are like that here, so why change it?”

Pete Linko, 31, of Findlay also grew up when belts were becoming more of a curiosity than a necessity.

He would point out signs for the Orange and Yellow belts from the back seat as his family car passed them. He was particularly excited to see the Green and Red belt signs, since neither road reached his home in the West Hills.

“It became a game whenever we traveled,” he said.

Linko is considering turning off his GPS and taking his son on a road trip around Pittsburgh following the belts to experience what the region was like before smartphones.

“It would be a fun way to introduce him to something from a bygone era that I remember and hopefully will continue to live on as a marker to our past,” he said.

What’s next for the belts?

The belts appear to be fading not only from the Pittsburgh public’s collective memory, but also that of the government responsible for maintaining them.

Allegheny County Department of Public Works spokesman Brent Wasko said none of the county’s current engineers have “extensive knowledge of the system or its history.”

The county used to replace damaged belt signs. But two years ago, it simply began removing them without installing new ones. Wasko wasn’t sure how many remained.

“With the widespread use of mobile navigation apps and built‑in vehicle GPS systems, the belt system has become largely obsolete,” he said. “Replacing the signs no longer makes sense.”

Stevanovic, the Pitt professor, estimated the system has lost 90% of its significance as a navigational aid in the modern day due to GPS. It also has lost around half of its significance carrying traffic, he said, since the belts are now dwarfed by modern roads in the suburbs.

Pittsburgh is one of the many American cities moving away from cars to more sustainable transportation models like bikes and buses, Stevanovic said. The city is growing its network of bike lanes and installing Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s University Line, which links Downtown and Oakland.

He believes that if the public had to choose between adding to the belt system’s capacity or introducing a high-speed train, they’d take the latter. Of course, some of the existing belts could be reborn as bus-only routes for less money, he said.

On the other hand, autonomous cars could put public transit in a worse position by giving commuters additional car-based options, Stevanovic said. Waymo is testing its self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh, and Tesla’s robotaxis — which do not have steering wheels — have started to appear around the city in recent weeks.

In a constantly evolving transportation ecosystem, Stevanovic wondered whether there is any way the belts can truly make a comeback, be it in their current form or for a different use.

“That’s a big, several billion-dollar question.”