It occurred to me recently that I’ve been penning this monthly column for over a year. In fact, this is the 14th Transit Talk! I’m no less fired up about big dreams like a Railroad St. T than I was in March 2024, but there are so many less bombastic aspects of local transportation deserving a closer look (or an unhinged rant, as the case may be).
Big-budget projects, when they’re not a huge waste of money, can make a massive difference in how people move around a city, but sometimes little things can make a significant impact, too. Strong Towns recently singled out Pittsburgh for praise in this area, calling the city’s low-cost traffic-calming projects “a model for every city.” Hear, hear!
There’s one lower-cost transit innovation in particular I’d love to see Pittsburgh and other cities install more often: the incredible red curb bumps installed around Allegheny Circle. These gentle reminders of how to properly turn would be welcome in an age of huge cars and poor driving. As it turns out, these bumps have a name.
“Those are technically truck aprons, which we’re using largely for their turn calming benefits!” says Jacob Williams (no relation), City of Pittsburgh press officer for the Department of Mobility and Infrastructure and other transit- and accessibility-related projects.
I hadn’t heard of truck aprons before and, suffice to say, I think they rule.
The Wikipedia article on truck aprons says they have often been deployed in roundabouts, allowing bigger trucks to slowly roll through without needing to back up for turns while “keep[ing] light vehicles on the main road surface.” They’re also frequently used in slip lanes, or lanes that curve away from a perpendicular intersection, for the same purpose. Around Allegheny Center, per the city’s spec sheet, the bump-outs at intersections such as the junction with Federal Street are framed mostly as a pedestrian benefit used “to shorten non-vehicular crossing distances and to give these users more visibility.”
The pedestrian benefits are non-negligible, but the impact on drivers is what I really like about the way the city rebuilt Allegheny and Penn circles. Both projects have drastically improved the environment for cyclists, walkers, and rollers by discarding ill-advised remnants of a bygone era’s car obsession.
Maybe you haven’t noticed, or maybe you do this yourself, but people have gotten really bad at turning their vehicles. I regularly see people in trucks and even regular sedans cutting their left turns so short as to cross lanes, or, conversely, making wide right turns like they’re a semi truck. Often, it’s because people are screeching through an intersection without braking. Here’s a fun fact: most vehicles have a decent turning radius in 2025, so — provided you slow down a little — you can make a 90-degree turn quite easily without leaving your lane, cutting off cars and the people outside them, or hopping the curb.
I’m not a complete fool, and I understand that writing about this isn’t going to make any difference. This is where truck aprons come in.
Like a speed bump, they won’t destroy your car if you go over them, but they do make the road feel different. It’s a reminder that the road is directly next to pedestrian areas. In an area reconfigured to be more multimodal-friendly, truck aprons are also a hedge against reckless turns while among bus, bike, and foot traffic.
All of my Transit Talk columns have, in one way or another, been about rebalancing transit so cars aren’t given highest priority when the city makes changes to our streets and sidewalks. Truck aprons serve as a gentle reminder to people in cars that they’re not the only ones around. There are lots of ways to do this, but the most effective are hard pieces of infrastructure that (unlike, say, flexposts) won’t yield to a car. Unlike bollards, however, these curb bumps aren’t a “STOP!” but a polite “hey, now.”
So, my ask: put truck aprons everywhere! Anywhere there’s a bulb-out, bike lane, tight turn, or bioswale would be a great place to add a permanent gentle slope of concrete that tells drivers to turn more carefully and/or pump the brakes. The message they send is clear: drivers, you’re not the only ones out here. Share the road and pay attention — and for goodness’ sake slow down and turn your steering wheel a little farther in the direction you’re trying to go.
I think about these at intersections such as 51st Street and Butler Street in Lawrenceville, where pedestrians blocked by the Allegheny Cemetery wall face drivers screaming up Stanton Avenue, or along Boulevard of the Allies downtown, where parked cars and a wide expanse of pavement sometimes send walkers and rollers scampering. Elsewhere — in Oakland in particular, where multiple pedestrians have been badly injured and killed in crashes — I would love to see truck aprons paired with raised crosswalks, bulb-outs, and more chicanes similar to what’s been added to Bigelow Boulevard near the Cathedral of Learning.
With Gen Z driving less and Pittsburgh reprioritizing foot traffic in civic assets such as Market Square, truck aprons are an awesome addition to the local traffic-calming toolbox. I, for one, would love to see more of these as Pittsburgh continues to make headlines for fixing the mistakes of the past.
This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.
