With the official 2020 Census count starting in just four months, new population estimates for Pittsburgh and Allegheny County indicate that the official count may show the region truly has turned a corner.

Figures from the Census Bureau’s 2018 American Community Survey released Thursday show that for the first time in more than half a century, the city and county both could have relatively stable populations in the next official census in 2020.

The survey’s estimate – a weighted figure based on survey results over the five prior years – was that the city’s population in 2018 was 303,587, just slightly less than the 305,704 the city had in the official 2010 Census. And the county estimate for 2018 was 1,225,561, which would be slightly above the 1,223,066 in 2010.

Neither of the projected figures may sound dramatic. But after Allegheny County lost population in each of the past five official census going back to 1970 and the city lost people in each of the prior six going back to 1960, a stable count would be reason for a party.

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Shady Avenue in Pittsburgh will undergo nearly a year of scrutiny and planning to improve safety on the busy corridor. City officials partnered with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, a regional planning body, to analyze crash data, traffic and amenities along the road.

“It’s a very long corridor, there’s a lot of things that are going on,” said Katy Sawyer, a senior project manager with the city’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure.

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Through the Safe Streets, Smart Cities Academy, Smart Growth America worked with three cities around the country to implement temporary safety demonstration projects. The City of Pittsburgh historically relied on 311 requests to help decide which streets need safety improvements, but when a team from the city looked more closely at the data, they realized they were not reaching the whole community through this process. In particular, they were not addressing key locations with high crash rates in low-income communities of color because this traditional channel of collecting complaints. In partnership with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Commission, the Allegheny County Health Department, the Port Authority of Allegheny County, and PennDOT, they launched a demonstration project at one such site to implement safety projects and to establish new partnerships with the community. Working closely with a local school, they added crosswalks with protected refuges to help children reach school more safely, and they also redesigned the intersection of Lincoln and Frankstown Avenues to make it less stressful for all people—including drivers—in the process.

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