Patients must endure a bumpy ride to reach the Veterans Affairs hospital in Lincoln-Lemington.
A pothole-laden three-quarter-mile stretch of Highland Drive is the only way about 100,000 outpatient veterans and their relatives can travel to the hospital and nearby senior care facility each year, said Pittsburgh Councilman Patrick Dowd, who is having trouble persuading city officials to repave the road this summer.
"These are people who served us, and we need to make sure we're serving them," Dowd said.
Dowd said Public Works Director Guy Costa told him that finding the roughly $250,000 needed to pave the road is not a priority because it is used mainly by people who don't live in Pittsburgh.
"With the current funding, we are unable to pave Highland Drive unless we don't pave 1 mile of other streets," Costa wrote in a letter to Dowd.
Costa declined to comment when reached by phone.
Pittsburgh began its seven-month paving program April 11 with a $10 million capital budget allotment for street paving. Crews plan to resurface 51 miles of the city's 861 miles of streets, up from 39 miles repaved last year, according to Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's office.
"I've been here since 1980, and it's been the same. The concrete is separated, there are potholes -- it's deteriorated," Bill Leuthold, program coordinator at the VA hospital, said about the road. The hospital employs 870 people.
"I guess they think they can get a lot more political bang for their buck if they go to more high-profile areas," Leuthold said. "It's just really bad. The road causes a kind of pounding effect. It's like driving on a railroad track."
Leuthold said Highland Drive is particularly dangerous for drivers in the winter when ice accumulates because of poor drainage and the many cracks and potholes.
Ravenstahl renewed a promise Wednesday to computerize the city's street-paving system next year so streets will be selected based only on need.
Some council members -- including Ravenstahl's political rival, Councilman Bill Peduto -- have complained that the current method of street paving favors the politically connected.
"Next year, we will take subjectivity out of the process, using even more data-driven knowledge to optimize each maintenance dollar spent on paving," Ravenstahl said.
The mayor announced he has awarded a $35,000 contract to CarteGraph Systems Inc. of Dubuque, Iowa, to create a computer database of city streets and their conditions.
Paving will be done based on a score each street receives on a 1-to-100 scale once the computer system is ready, the mayor said.
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