Latest news with #EdGainey
CBS News
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Fireworks will light up the Pittsburgh sky on Friday. What to know about timing, parking and viewing spots.
Pittsburgh is known for going all out to celebrate the Fourth of July, including a fireworks spectacular that lights up the night sky. The city's holiday celebration has been moved this year due to ongoing construction at Point State Park, but Pittsburghers can still enjoy the festivities on Friday from land or by boat. "Independence Day in Pittsburgh is more than just fireworks. It's a powerful celebration of community, freedom, and resilience," Mayor Ed Gainey said in June. Everything you need to know about the 2025 Independence Day Celebration in Pittsburgh can be found below. When are the fireworks in Pittsburgh? Friday's celebration kicks off at 4 p.m., and the 25-minute fireworks display is scheduled for 9:35 p.m. Where is Pittsburgh's 4th of July celebration? The city's Independence Day Celebration has moved to the North Shore this year. Most of the holiday's events are set for the North Shore Great Lawn because of the Point State Park construction. Events are also scheduled for Emerald View Park's Grandview Band Stand. "This year, we're bringing the energy to new locations across the city, with incredible entertainment, family fun, and heartfelt tributes to our veterans," Gainey said in June. Where are the best places to watch Pittsburgh's fireworks? There is no such thing as a bad view, but some of the most popular viewing spots include on Mount Washington and the Carnegie Science Center, which is hosting a Fourth of July event that includes a reserved viewing area for the fireworks show. However, don't miss getting a front seat to the fireworks on the Three Rivers if you or someone you know has a boat. The Gateway Clipper will also have a Fourth of July cruise. Activities at Pittsburgh's 4th of July celebration Officials said people coming to the city on Friday can expect plenty of music, food and entertainment. There are two music stages on the North Shore Great Lawn, food trucks highlighting local businesses, a family fun center and an 80-foot-tall hot air balloon. Live music, activities for kids, local food and a great view of the fireworks display can also be found at the Grandview Park Band Stand. Pittsburgh 4th of July parking There are plenty of parking garages across the North Shore for people interested in driving to the event. People can take Pittsburgh Regional Transit's light-rail system to Allegheny Station and walk to the festivities. Also, PRT buses 14 and 54 drop off riders at Allegheny Avenue past Reedsdale Street, within walking distance of the celebration. Reminder, PRT has park-and-ride stations for bus and light rail riders. Pittsburgh fireworks bag policy The city said anyone coming to the celebration is subject to a bag check. Prohibited items include alcohol, firearms, pop-up tents, grills, laser pointers, selfie sticks and structures, among others.
Technical.ly
29-06-2025
- General
- Technical.ly
Pittsburgh's stuck garbage truck and the new American politics of abundance
Government is often 'more focused on process than outcomes,' but, as in entrepreneurship, results matter — and should guide public action. Compounding effects of small, gradual changes show that outcome-focused fixes can boost safety, slash expenses and visibly improve residents' lives. Progress happens when leaders 'set goals, create safety for continual improvement and listen deeply to frontline workers,' shifting from command-and-control mode to servant leadership. → Read on for details and join Chris Wink's weekly newsletter for more One February morning three years ago just before 7 a.m., Pittsburgh sanitation workers were shaking a 3,000-pound dumpster stuck in mid-air. A truck's winch cable had seized. Time crunched, these workers were trying to address a problem for which they had no training. Yet this particular problem happened a few times each month. Each fix cost the city a few thousand dollars, plus lost staff time and the risk to city workers — not to mention potentially millions in worker's compensation. This time, a foreman intervened with a front loader to safely return the dumpster to the ground, and newly elected Mayor Ed Gainey had staff looking for just this sort of problem to solve. They enlisted Pittsburgh Futures Collaborative, a nonprofit of regional civic consulting do-goodery. 'Without a leader focused on creating an excellent organization onsite, everyone would have just gone about their business, putting themselves in harm's way,' said Geoff Webster, Pittsburgh Futures chair. Together Gainey's team and Pittsburgh Futures identified a city sanitation worker who never had the problem, and determined it was because of how he prepared the equipment before his shift. 'In less than 24 hours, they created a check process for all the winch cables before they go out on every shift, and they trained everybody how to do this,' Webster said. That required breaking existing policy and listening to an experienced frontline worker. Three years later, the once-common, costly and risky problem hasn't happened again. Winches and dumpsters in Western Pennsylvania might seem far from innovation. But that would overlook innovation's best working definition: new solutions for old problems. A rule of the early weekend hackathons that evolved into today's civic technology and shaped my early career is relevant here: Develop software only once all analog solutions are exhausted. This represents the ideal of technology and entrepreneurship to solve actual problems for real people, in whatever way gets the job done. Unfortunately, one current stinging criticism of government, especially the regulation-friendly progressive kind, is that it's more focused on process than outcomes. Journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have popularized this idea with their recent book ' Abundance,' but the challenge surrounds us. Entrepreneurs and engineers know this well: No points are awarded for following a prescribed playbook if the company closes or the code malfunctions. Results matter. They should in public life too. For example, adding housing faster, especially in economically dynamic cities with flourishing research and entrepreneurship climates, would add an extra 1.7 million jobs over the next decade, according to a 2024 McKinsey analysis. Entrepreneurs don't pick places to start companies, they pick places to live and then start companies there. So, sensibly, any economic development strategy should solve for housing. And yet, expensive US cities often address sky-high housing costs with complicated schemes for mandating rents, rather than making it easier to build. Likewise, American transit projects get bogged down by overlapping if well-intentioned groups championing issues like environmental concerns or historical preservation. The average cost of building a mile of public transit in the United States is far more than in most other big countries, according to a recent report, including Canada, Germany, Japan, India and Iran. This is especially true in Democratic-run cities and states, places where residents are most likely to prioritize increasing housing affordability and public transit. This month, established Democrats lamented New York City's freshly elected party nominee for mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic-socialist. But most fail to match his plainspoken policy ideas that residents feel address their problems. The promise of local governance is, as New York's last socialist mayor Fiorella LaGuardia is credited with saying, there's no Republican or Democratic way to collect garbage. That includes addressing a frequently tangled winch. 'Too often those problems are solved in a vacuum,' said Jake Pawlak, Pittsburgh's deputy mayor and director of the Office of Management and Budget. 'Without rapid engagement from the entire leadership structure, innovations would have been lost.' This could be a happy outcome of engagement between experience-minded designers, entrepreneurial builders and civil servants. 'Leaders need to set goals, create safety for continual improvement and listen deeply to frontline workers,' Pittsburgh Futures Chair Webster said. The compounding effects of small, gradual changes can't be overstated. In Pittsburgh's case, the pragmatic, results-focused approach not only enhanced worker safety, it dramatically cut costs – just the kind of 'government efficiency' that so many cheer. According to Webster and team, their dumpster training intervention avoided a projected 200 injuries and saved the city nearly $10 million in worker's compensation costs over three years. 'Abundance' coauthor Thompson argues the ideological battle between big government and small government, regulation and deregulation, is misguided. Instead we should question what solutions produce the most effective outcomes, and pursue them. That might mean a regulation, or the removal of one. It could have once meant an intervention that now is unnecessary. Other times, as the Pittsburgh case study teaches, we just need to train a staff on how to disentangle a winch. Political success comes when leaders consistently solve problems for residents, and ensure they know it. Or as Webster put it, move from 'command and control leadership' to a 'servant leadership' approach, committed to constant improvement and real-world outcomes.
CBS News
18-06-2025
- Health
- CBS News
Pittsburgh students can still get free daily meals this summer
As the summer begins for students around the city of Pittsburgh, local leaders are working together to make sure every student has the opportunity to stay active and eat healthy outside of school. Anti-hunger advocates gathered in Allegheny Commons Park-East on Tuesday morning to kick off the Free Summer Meals program, an initiative backed by Mayor Ed Gainey's office and a number of local organizations, including Pittsburgh Public Schools, Citiparks, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank and the American Dairy Association. All summer long, children 18 and under can receive daily meals free of charge with no restrictions at one of hundreds of sites across Allegheny County. The list of free summer meal sites can be found on the Pittsburgh Community Food Bank website. "Helping to eliminate food insecurity and feeding our children is very necessary because no child — no child — should go hungry," said Gainey. "Getting good food, nutritious food, should always be an objective that we want to acquire. That means that regardless of where you come from, everybody has a right to be able to eat morning, noon and night, which is why I think this program is a great one, especially since it picks up where the after-school program has left off." In Pennsylvania, 1.2 million people and one in eight children struggle with food insecurity, according to Feeding America. "Kids shouldn't have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, and last summer our partners served more than 400,000 meals to kids," said Val Morgan, child nutrition partnership specialist for the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank. "We hope to beat that this summer." That may be a modest goal, considering of the 20 million students eligible nationwide for free and reduced-price lunches during the school year, less than 5 million participated in last summer's program, leaving more than 75 percent of potential eligible students unserved. "There's one emergency that we have: that's a child not being fed," said Malik Hamilton, director of food services for Pittsburgh Public Schools, who serves more than 5 million meals to students per school year. "As soon as we hear that there might be somebody not getting fed, all work stops until we know that every child that is hungry has a meal in their hand to put in their belly." "During the summer months, access to healthy meals can make all the difference," said Dr. Wayne Walters, Pittsburgh Public Schools superintendent. "It helps keep children strong, focused and ready to learn when they return to the classroom in the fall." Among those present to lend their support was Pittsburgh Steelers' long snapper Christian Kuntz, a Chartiers Valley High School and Duquesne University alum. Kuntz helped pass out free lunches to the students at the park. "As a professional football player, nutrition has played a huge part in my life and career to this point, whether that was in high school, college and into the pros," said Kuntz. "I've had countless amounts of nutritionists, strength coaches, health teachers, advisors, parents that have guided me in the right direction to make the right choices in what I'm fueling my body with, and our kids are fueling their body with the same." Marburger Farm Dairy, based in Evans City, will provide cartons of milk for the free summer lunches, and they brought a calf, Miss Peanut, to meet the children. "As a first grade teacher and a mother of four, I know how important it is for students to have access to healthy school meals, packed with dairy so that we can be at our best throughout the day," said Nicole Ansell, a dairy farmer with Marburger. "Because of this, I also know how important access to meals in the summertime is for many students." Walters called the program "a vital initiative that ensures our students remain healthy, nourished and cared for, even when school is out." "For many of our students, school meals are more than just nourishment; they are a lifeline."
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
Pittsburgh reports decline in traffic crashes, deaths, serious injuries for fourth year in a row
The City of Pittsburgh reports a decline in traffic crashes, deaths and serious injuries on city streets for the fourth year in a row. Latest data from the Pennsylvania Crash Information Tool shows that total crashes on city and state-owned roadways in Pittsburgh decreased 17 percent in 2024, compared to 2023. City-owned streets alone have had over 700 fewer crashes compared to 2021, a spokesperson says. Meanwhile, crashes statewide have increased by .35 percent. Deaths and serious injuries from crashes on city streets have steadily declined over the past three years, the spokesperson says. While crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists fell by 20 percent from 2024, these crashes are disproportionately fatal, the spokesperson says. The fourth year of declining incidents is being considered a major milestone in the city's Vision Zero initiative to end traffic fatalities and serious injuries. 'In Pittsburgh, we believe every life matters — no one should die just trying to get where they need to go," said Mayor Ed Gainey. 'For the fourth year in a row, crashes, injuries, and fatalities are down. That's no accident — it's because we've made safety a priority, especially for our most vulnerable neighbors. But we're not done. High-severity crashes are still hitting the same streets and the same communities. That's why we're doubling down — to make sure every Pittsburgher, in every neighborhood, can walk, bike, or drive without fear. This is about equity, justice, and saving lives.' In 2024, the Gainey administration increased the city's traffic calming budget by 136 percent to about $1.08 million, the spokesperson says. Additionally, over 50 safety and accessibility projects are planned in the city this year, with many targeting high-injury, low-income and high-pedestrian areas. Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW
Yahoo
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Pittsburgh Fourth of July location moved amid Point State Park construction
The City of Pittsburgh has moved the location of its Fourth of July celebrations, amid ongoing construction at Point State Park. A spokesperson says the city's Independence Day events will take place at the North Shore Riverwalk this year, with additional festivities at Emerald View Park's Grandview Bandstand. Events will begin at 4 p.m. on the North Shore, including a children's fun zone, hot-air balloon, the Trulieve Veterans Wellness Row and continuous musical performances on the main stage, officials say. Fireworks will begin at 9:35 p.m. You can watch the celebration live on WPXI-TV. Additionally, the Steel City Blast at Grandview will take place at Emerald View Park's Grandview Bandstand from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. 'Independence Day in Pittsburgh is more than just fireworks — it's a powerful celebration of community, freedom and resilience,' said Mayor Ed Gainey. 'This year, we're bringing the energy to new locations across the city, with incredible entertainment, family fun and heartfelt tributes to our veterans. I invite everyone to come out, enjoy the festivities, and celebrate what makes Pittsburgh such a strong, vibrant city.' The Trulieve Veterans Wellness Row will provide various veteran-focused programs and resources. 'We're honored to continue our partnership with the City of Pittsburgh for this year's Independence Day celebration,' said Nick Rassler, Trulieve's Pennsylvania director of state operations. 'We are proud to support local veterans through the Trulieve Veterans Row initiative by connecting them with wellness resources, community support and a space to reset.' For more information, you can visit Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW
