It's always a good idea to connect the largest concentrations of student residences and student union to the core of the main campus where the main campus building, theatre, and chapel sit. It would be a significant campus enhancement.
It is a safety issue. People get struck crossing Bigelow nearly every year. People have been killed, including a former Chancellor's wife. I personally have seen a man in a wheelchair struck by a car trying to cross Bigelow when I was in school.
Nearly every minor and major urban college in America has been able to close similar stretches of streets that bisect their campus. One only has to look across the state at Penn, Drexel, and Temple where local government actually helped to facilitate similar campus upgrades for all of those schools.
Pitt has been trying to close it down since the 1950s. Every time it attempts to do so, it becomes a political issue with local politicians, for their own political expediency, painting Pitt as a neighborhood bully and predator; often using language like Pitt is trying to prevent ambulances carrying the neighborhood elderly from reaching the hospitals. Jim Ferlo, a disgusting individual in my personal observations of his conduct, employed this tactic. Thank goodness he is no longer around, but his protégés remain.
The political climate has little changed, unfortunately, and one can see this in the pages of the PG on a near weekly basis. More recently, the city rebuffed the closure of Schenley Drive between Schenley Plaza and Hillman/Posvar because of possibility of "students overrunning the public plaza." These are the types of ludicrous statements that continue to be tossed around and keep from happening what would be a no-brainer in any other city in the country. It also suggests to Pitt's administration that there are perhaps bigger local fish to fry.
That said, it has been 20 years since that last serious attempt at closing Bigelow (a closure that, btw, was approved by the city planning commission before the Ferlos of the area made it an issue at the 11th hour), and it might be time to test the waters again. The administration can also rely on the experience of the prior administrative players, who I think, as newly minted university leaders at the time, were caught off-guard by the political uproar that it caused.
