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civic beauty is far more acute than it generally is in America, this temporarily ragged condition is accepted as a small price to pay for the economical and certain accomplishment of a great permanent improvement.

Unified Procedure For City, County and Borough

It is obvious that the How of traffic moves regardless of the artificial boundaries of the city and the surrounding boroughs, and that if an efficient system of thoroughfares is to be evolved for the Pittsburgh Industrial District it will be necessary to disregard those boundaries in planning it. This has been done in the preliminary studies which have resulted in this report, and the necessity for it must control the form of any permanent organization for preparing final plans and executing them. If these duties are to be entrusted to officers of the City, and the city boundaries remain unchanged, those officers must have authority from the legislature to deal with territory beyond the boundaries of the city, as is the case in a limited way in Wisconsin cities.*

The simplest and most logical procedure, if the boundaries of the city and of the boroughs are to remain substantially unchanged, would be to establish a common agency for dealing with the general problems of city planning for all of the municipalities and the related parts of the country outside of them. The Constitution of Pennsylvania apparently prevents the formation of a special metropolitan board for the Pittsburgh Industrial District but general authority might be obtained under which the County could establish such a board. If the difficulty should be met simply by extending the boundaries of the city, it is important that the new boundaries should include not merely those areas which are now seen to have close physical relations with the city, but a great extent of territory within which the beginnings of urban or suburban growth have started, or are likely to start, during the next generation.

Whether the duty of planning and providing for the main transportation lines is made a city affair or a county affair, those who are charged with it should be free to go as far in any given direction as the demands of the traffic lead them. They should neither be limited by arbitrary boundaries in those directions where scattering but connected urban development may reach out

*Public Statutes, Sec. 2261 m.

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Last modified on 22-Dec 1999
Design format: copyright 1997-1999 Bruce S. Cridlebaugh
Original document: Frederick Law Olmsted, 1910