The Genius of the One-Lane Street

It Calms Traffic

2000 block of Spruce.

I'd like to take the adrenaline out of driving. Also the cortisol. Call me a dreamer. Imagine a low-stress commute. 

And I have a dandy tool ready to hand in Philadelphia - the one-lane street. As I've often said, "Put 'em in a cattle chute, and then they'll behave." And that's what a street with only one lane for moving motor vehicles does. I don't know anything else that works as well.

Pine and Spruce streets in Center City Philadelphia became one-lane streets when bike lanes were installed in one of the two lanes that had been devoted to moving motor vehicles. And yes, this change made these streets safer, less stressful, and more pleasant for everybody, and not just bicyclists.

To understand what Pine and Spruce streets were like before they sprouted bike lanes, all we need to do is walk over to neighboring Lombard street and have a look.

Lombard, the Last Two-Lane Street

Lombard runs westbound and is an access route for the South Street bridge and the Schuylkill Expressway; in operation it is basically a race track. Drivers are clearly shifting into interstate mode, performing the abrupt lane changes so dear to Nascar drivers, and occasionally, in their enthusiasm, jumping the curb. My block on Lombard street has lost, I believe, five trees in the last few years. Quite a few children live on the block, but no casualties to report so far.

Pine at 20th.

I think it's worth pointing out that this street was designed to produce precisely the effects that we see. The engineers were focusing on something called Level of Service (LOS) - basically, how many cars can you cram down this street in a given amount of time, and that meant speed. Speed above all, above human life. 

The term Level of Service did not show up until 1965. But it simply gave a name to what the engineers had been doing for a long time. Starting in the late 1960s, with the arrival of things like the U.S. Department of Transportation, the approach actually softened, but the focus remained on Level of Service. 

People had been concerned about the safety of motor vehicle traffic from the very first days of the car, but they weren't in the driver's seat. (See Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, 2008.) It wasn't until the arrival of the Vision Zero movement in recent years that a curious idea gained traction: Perhaps speed is not as important as safety. Shocking.

So at least the thinking has started to change. On the street in front of my house on Lombard street, not so much. Frankly, aside from the addition of a bunch of steel bollards to protect the sidewalk (this has been done by various residents and certainly not by the City) very little has changed in the configuration of the street here since I moved onto the block in 1984.

Meanwhile, on South Street

Meanwhile, South street, Lombard's eastbound partner, is a one-lane street for almost all its length, usually with cars parked at both curbs and one traffic lane down the middle. However, down by the South street bridge, one of the curbside lanes, which elsewhere would be a parking lane, is in fact a bike lane. 

So Pine and Spruce both have one parking lane and one bike lane and one motor-vehicle lane. And South has one motor-vehicle lane in the center of the street, and the curbside lanes are devoted to other uses. 

So why does Lombard have two motor-vehicle lanes for most of its length? Of the four blocks - Spruce, Pine, Lombard, and South - it is the only one that retains two motor-vehicle lanes.

Lombard at 22nd.

My question is further complicated by the fact that near the South street bridge, where you would expect the heaviest traffic on Lombard because the bridge is a magnet for cars, there is in fact only one lane for moving motor vehicles. The other two lanes are for parking, on the left curb, and a bike lane on the right curb. So if you can do that there, and if your three neighbor streets all have only one lane for moving motor vehicles, why aren't you eliminating the second motor vehicle lane east of 22nd?

Why Is One Lane Safer? 

Why is one traffic lane so much better than two? Because it reduces speeds and basically eliminates erratic lane changes. 

Let's take a look at a vivid recent example of how this plays out. Dr. Barbara Friedes, a pediatric oncologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, was killed on Spruce street last July 17. 

The driver who killed her, Michael Vahey, swung out of the traffic lane, which was apparently congested, and into the bike lane, which was protected only by plastic flex posts. He put his pedal to the metal, drove over the flex posts, and was apparently going more than 50 mph when he hit Dr. Friedes from behind. It's highly possible that she was unaware she was about to die until he hit her. 

Vahey was performing his special version of a traffic maneuver that drivers perform all the time on multilane streets and highways: jump to the left or the right, depending on where you're starting, and then stomp on the accelerator. It's called passing. Such a maneuver can be performed safely, but safety requires caution and a high level of situational awareness, two things that are not always present in a motorist.

Tree pit, Lombard street.

Denying the motorist a second, or passing, lane will largely eliminate this behavior. It also will reduce average speeds of motor vehicles on the street, because, on a one-lane street, the fastest speed is set by the slowest driver. There's no way around someone who's driving the speed limit. On a multilane street, the fastest speed is set by the fastest driver - the Barney Oldfield of the crew.

I do understand the attraction of driving fast. I was a boy in America in the fifties and the sixties. I read Road & Track and Car & Driver. Among my childhood heroes were Dan Gurney, Stirling Moss, and Juan Fangio. My father, on the other hand, was partial to - yes - Barney Oldfield, and also Wilbur Shaw.

I have said goodbye to all that. Others still cling to the romance of the open road. I think they need to be guided gently onto the paths of righteousness by appropriate design of our streets. 

South at 15th.

See also Defense Doesn't Win Wars; Running of the Bulls on Lombard Street; Willoughby Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn; Is It a Curve or Is It a Turn?

We Will Not Let Them Down

Independence Hall, Philadelphia.

On a Wednesday in late January, Lois and I didn't have anything to do at the same time. We thought there might be an anti-ICE demonstration in front of the Custom House at 2nd and Chestnut, so we hopped on a bus and rode across town.

The trip down Chestnut reminded me of the old days of Tuesdays with Toomey, when a small but intrepid crew would gather in front of the Custom House - a fortress guarded by heavily armed federales - and called on Senator Toomey to repent and do penance for his many sins. This went on weekly for years, and at some point we became a popular venue for politicians and activists to come and speak. John Fetterman came, as I recall, several times. I liked him. Back then.

At any rate, nothing was going on at the Custom House, so we found ourselves walking over to the Visitor Center on Independence Mall. Initially the idea was simply to get warm, but then we thought maybe we'd try for the Liberty Bell. The lady behind the desk was very happy to see us. It was a slow day, and both the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall were available right then. This is not what it's like in the summer.

So we walked across the street to the Liberty Bell pavilion, and as we walked past the explanatory panels that led to the bell, we wondered what kind of rewrite the fascists would come up with. Surely Martin Luther King would have to go.

When we came to the bell I reminded Lois about Bob Llewellyn, a photographer I worked with on several picture books. When Bob and I had showed up at the bell, Bob did what he usually did - look for something new to say. Eventually he stepped over the rope line and lay down under the bell. This was okay because I had secured a photo permit, and we even had a minder who ran interference with the guards. 

Bob lying under the bell didn't work, but then he had another idea, and I wound up under the bell holding a light that sprayed photons out through the bell's crack. Not actually a great picture, but the symbolism was fabulous.

Lois and I loitered for a few moments, just spending some time with the bell, and then we moved on, crossing Chestnut street. And going into a tent next to Independence Hall, which naturally contained metal detectors. We passed security with flying colors for the second time that day (the Liberty Bell pavilion also has metal detectors) and then sidled out through another set of tent flaps into the park behind Independence Hall. Here there were benches, where we waited for a few minutes along with about a dozen other tourists. It was quite windy, and a number of tarpaulins were making snapping sounds in the wind.

The sound put me in mind of going sailing on a windy day. I mentioned to one of the park rangers that it was the kind of day that a sailor had to be careful not to lose a spinnaker. She asked me what a spinnaker was. I told her it was a big and rather unwieldy sail that you most effectively deployed when the wind was directly behind you, and that a sudden gust from an unusual angle on a windy day could rip the spinnaker right off the sailboat and send it flying over the water. Then you needed to go chase it and bring it home and get it ready for the next time.

The ranger liked the story and also turned out to be our guide. The tour group before us was just exiting through the rear door of Independence Hall, and so it was time for us to form up and go inside.

Neither Lois nor I had been inside the hall for a long time, but we were quite familiar with the history, and I, for one, was prepared to be mildly bored. The guide surprised me, though, and sprinkled her story with a number of anecdotes that were new to me. And when she came to Benjamin Franklin's comment about "a republic, if you can keep it," I found the old anecdote unexpectedly moving, and I understood why we had come to this place on this day.

Afterwards Lois asked the guide if all the guides gave the same presentation, and she said all the guides prepared their own presentations, and we could come back tomorrow, have a different guide, and have a very different experience.

Lois then asked the guide if she and her colleagues were concerned that the new administration might provide them with a required script. She smiled and said, "We're taking it one day at a time."

See also Second and Chestnut, Citizens of the Planet, Syria and Queen Anne's War, W. Only Second Worst.

A World Without Newspapers

What Would that Look Like?

I've spent my whole life reading newspapers, but recently I've found myself moving away from that daily habit. I definitely miss them, but perhaps it would be better to say I didn't leave them. They left me, or are in the process of doing so.

There are different kinds of newspapers, of course. The ones I'm talking about dealt in facts and opinion, and the facts were worth knowing. But I think that newspapers like this - bureaucratic newspapers, if you will, with staffs that included copy editors, fact-checkers, and proofreaders - will soon be a thing of the past. 

(True story. A fact-checker for a magazine - not me - asks a writer, "Is this what he actually said?" Writer responds, "Well, it's what he would have said if I'd asked him.")

What will our world look like without the bureaucratic newspapers? Well, it turns out that newspapers haven't been around that long, so I thought it might be interesting to have a look at what things were like before newspapers. Maybe that old world can tell us something about the world after newspapers.

France Before the Revolution

Years ago I read Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre (1984). I think it's my favorite book about France in the years before the Revolution, which are sometimes called the Old Regime. The title essay of this book is about a printing shop in Paris, so I should not have been surprised to learn that Professor Darnton had also written a whole book about the publishing industry in France before 1789: The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982). 

And here was a world without newspapers. What did it look like? It is a world that is less foreign than I care to admit.

France at that time was a large, powerful bureaucratic state ruled by a very powerful king who did, from time to time, have to take into account the concerns and wishes of the church and the nobility, and occasionally even the common folk.

As for newspapers, Darnton tells us: "... 'news' as we know it did not exist in the Old Regime. At that time the French had no 'news' papers, only journals that circulated by virtue of royal privileges, which were restricted by censors to nonpolitical subjects, and which therefore could not afford to mention anything that would give offense in Versailles." (Darnton, Literary Underground, p. 143.) 

This situation contrasts dramatically with what happened as the French Revolution got into gear in 1789: "At least 250 genuine newspapers were founded in the last six months of 1789, and at least 350 circulated in 1790." (Darnton, p. 221, footnote 89.) 

How did that happen? The newly legal newspapers built on a vibrant history of illegal underground publishing. Darnton explains how this worked: "The French got their uncensored news or nouvelles from rumor. Specialists called nouvellistes gathered in certain parts of Paris - under the 'tree of Cracow' in the gardens of the Palais Royal, for example - to communicate nouvelles. When they consigned their gossip to writing, they produced nouvelles a la main. And when these manuscript gazettes were printed, they became chroniques scandaleuses - a genre that stands halfway in the process by which archaic rumor-mongering developed into popular journalism." Nouvellistes who continued to spread their news the old-fashioned way - by word of mouth - were called nouvellistes de bouche. Think Rush Limbaugh. (Darnton, pp. 143, 203.) 

And then there were the libels, or libelles. "These were violent attacks on individuals who commanded positions of prestige and power as ministers, courtiers, or members of the royal family. They resembled chroniques scandaleuses in their emphasis on scandal, but they also had political 'bite.' They probed the sensitive area where private decadence became a public issue, and by slandering eminent individuals, they desecrated the whole regime." (Darnton, p. 145.) 

In the France of the Old Regime, the people in the street (including, perhaps, a younger Madame Defarge) did not participate in politics, an activity that was reserved for the royal court and the king. So they got to watch the politics of the court as a kind of spectator sport. And court politics were themselves primarily about personalities and not policy, so there was a steady stream of slander emanating from the court, which made good copy for the scandal sheets. (Darnton, pp. 144, 202-204.) 

And then came the Revolution, and the scandal sheets became legal.

Are We Heading Backward?

After reading a whole book about slime, I come away grateful that, at least during most of my lifetime, I had access to newspapers that cared about facts and dealt with policy as well as personality.

It strikes me that we are in the process of sliding back to a world that, with a few major differences, looks a lot like France before the Revolution. The slime today is legal, but it serves the same purpose, and it is effective.

Of course, what is under attack is not a fading monarchy, but the very idea of democracy. There is an irony here - tools used to help bring democracy to France are now being used to destroy democracy in the United States, and really wherever democracy still exists.

One of the bulwarks of democracy has been a free press, but it is clear that the press is rapidly becoming unfree. Without a free press, where do we go to talk about ways not to slide back into the primordial slime? 

The nice thing about oligarchies is that they are unstable - the egos of the oligarchs prevent them from agreeing with one another on things like "Who is the fairest one of all?" I think that chink in their armor may give us just enough space to use the internet as our Tree of Cracow. (And, yes, nobody seems to know why it was called the Tree of Cracow, although speculation abounds. I find this somehow appropriate.) 

The internet - like the printing press - is a neutral medium, or tool. It can be used for good as well as for evil. Substack and Bluesky give me hope that I may be right. 

But it's not enough just to chat online. To paraphrase Joe Hill: "Don't mourn, organize!" 

If you want to know a lot more about the developing pre-revolutionary situation in France in the eighteenth century, have a look at Robert Darnton, The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 (2024). 

See also I Found a Picture on a Wall, Unleashing the Oligarchs, A World in Ruins, Campaign Poster Number Four, The Face of Fascism, Hans Fallada and the White-Collar Proletariat, As the Tide Goes Out, Submerged Narratives, Where Have All the Grownups Gone?

Can Open Streets Go Year-Round?

Pretty Nearly.

Open Streets: West Walnut did so well in September that it came back for encore performances on December 8 and 15. 

And yes, Virginia, there was even a Santa Claus planted directly in the middle of Walnut Street.

And there was chalk.

Here are some children not playing chess but playing with chess pieces and having a lively time.

As was a smaller child who happily found her own way to play beanbag.  

As is normal at Christmas time, the engine behind the celebration was commerce. Will the people come out? Definitely. Will they go into the stores and buy stuff? It seems so, but we need to wait for the numbers.

Meanwhile, on 18th street, we have people watching TV. They had been watching Frosty the Snowman, but now they appear to be enjoying a break with some wallpaper. Later, I'm told, there was a broadcast of the Eagles-Steelers game. The Steelers lost 27-13. 

And here we have one of the area's major attractions, the beer garden that stands on the remains of three nineteenth century buildings that were looted and burned during the George Floyd disturbances in 2020. The beer garden appears to be quite successful all the time, but the Open Streets were definitely special.

Violence was not far away this year. On the afternoon of Friday, December 13, a gunfight broke out at Philadelphia's Christmas Village, near the ice skating rink in Dilworth Park, next to City Hall, leaving three people wounded, one shot in the face.

Another, more distant reminder of the fragility of civilization came on December 20, when a man drove a BMW SUV into the crowds at the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing five people, including a nine-year-old child, and injuring at least 235 others.

The police presence at the December Open Streets: West Walnut was decidedly more muted than it had been in September. Large police vehicles had blocked vehicular access to the open streets in September; in December they were replaced by smaller vehicles belonging to the Center City District, which actually managed to look friendly. As I've often said, security should be effective and unobtrusive. But too often what we get is obtrusive and ineffective. I think the Center City District is headed in a good direction.

Nevertheless, there were still quite a few cops standing around. They generally looked bored but alert, a good frame of mind for sentry duty. One of the things they were watching with some care was a group of remarkably non-intimidating people walking a circular, or perhaps oval, picket line in front of Starbucks.

As a paid-up member of the Democratic Socialists of America, I was well aware of the ongoing strikes against Starbucks and Amazon, and after I finished taking the strikers' picture, I joined the picket line and walked the circle for a bit.

See also Open Streets: West Walnut, The Lady on Stilts.

I Found a Picture on a Wall

Not Far from my Home

January 1, 2025.

There is a large garage in Center City Philadelphia, just a few blocks south of City Hall on Broad street, the main north-south street in William Penn's 1682 plan. The garage has closed and is awaiting redevelopment. It is less than a block from the Kimmel Center, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and several other theatrical venues are nearby, but this is hardly the only garage in the immediate vicinity, and all of Center City has been shedding underutilized garage space at an impressive rate, usually replacing parking stalls with condos.

Aside from the empty garage, this is a very nice neighborhood. 

However, Philadelphia has difficulty sustaining its performance from beginning to end. There is a strange affection for the squalid, and it's never hard, even in the best neighborhoods, to walk a few feet and revisit our recent history as a dying town. The French call this syndrome nostalgie de la boue.

November 14, 2024.

The side wall of the garage, on Pine street, has adopted a relatively clean, but still louche, persona as a place for posters of all kinds. As with the Lennon Wall in Prague, there is jockeying for limited space. Posters get overlain, and there is a certain amount of ripping and tearing that seems to come with the territory. 

The poster above, like many others, was pasted up in multiple copies. Several copies of this one were torn carefully from the wall. This is unusual. I can't tell you if this was done by people unhappy with the poster, or people who were so happy with it that they wanted to take a copy home. In Philadelphia, both motives are possible. 

I suspect there is a deeper meaning to all this, but I'm afraid my sonar is unable fathom these particular Lower Depths. 

December 31, 2024.

See also Unleashing the Oligarchs.

The Lady on Stilts

Third Street Had a Good Idea

I was slightly off my game on December 7, possibly because it was Pearl Harbor day, which is an emotional day for me. Anyway, what you see here is slightly off my usual polish, which nods to chaos but in the end finds a certain equilibrium. Or at least tries.

On the other hand, maybe I was right for the day. Old City closed a block of Third north of Market on that Saturday, and had an Open Street. The star was the lady on stilts.

But there wasn't a whole lot to back her up. I was only there for an hour, roughly from three to four, but there simply wasn't a lot of programming beyond the lady on stilts.

There was a brass band, but for the time I was there the players just stood around. A little music would have been nice. 

And there could have been some additions to the dramatis personae. A juggler or two would have been okay. There were quite a few kids to be amused, not to mention adults in a wide variety of ages.

Really, putting on a street fair can draw on well over a half millennium of practice. Just pick what you want (three-card monte may be a bad idea); then mix and match.

I'll be interested to see whether local merchants saw the desired boost in foot traffic. The windows I looked through showed spaces well populated with people who appeared to be in a good mood. But, as New York mayor Bloomberg used to say, "In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data."

Below: All this painting on the street has nothing to do with the holidays. The City is starting a major rebuild of this stretch of Market, with the intention of making it more pedestrian friendly. Before we dig, we must draw. Third and Market. 

Betsy Ross House (below) was just around the corner on Arch, and definitely on its game.

See also Open Streets: West Walnut.

Sweeping the Bike Lane

This Is Not a Fake Picture

1700 block of Pine.

I seem to recall, in community meetings nearly a decade ago, people questioned the existence of street sweeping machines that were small enough to fit in a bike lane. And frankly, I'd never seen one before January 2, when I took this picture.

So bike lane sweeping machines are real. The picture is not a fake. I am not a bot.

Still, I have always been impressed with the inventiveness of the anti-bicycle crew. Back in 2016, Randy LoBasso wrote a story for the Metro detailing some of the fact-free gossip swirling around bike lanes in Philly. His focus was on a community meeting in Wash West to discuss proposed upgrades for the Pine-Spruce bike lanes. I think the meeting left us all with a sense of stalemate.

The next year, 2017, Emily Fredricks was killed in Wash West, at 11th and Spruce, and in 2019 the Pine-Spruce bike lanes were upgraded to their current state.

Memorial gathering for Emily Fredricks.
"For now we see through a glass, darkly ..."
I Corinthians 13:12

We have definitely made progress since 2016, but the underlying opposition among various parts of the community remains a constant. The basic tactics are the same: throw a lot of chaff in the air, and do your best to distract people from the fundamental issue: parking in the bike lane cripples the bike lane.

Nowadays, opponents of bike lanes frequently start their argument by stating that they are in favor of bicycling. Often they say they are bicyclists themselves. They just don't want to have a properly functioning network of bicycle lanes in Philadelphia, because that would interfere with their ability to drive their cars and park those cars wherever they damn well please. 

Of course, they don't say that last bit out loud. Instead they spray the room from a grab-bag of bandaids - how about speed bumps? A decent tool, doesn't address the underlying issue. I could go on - but enough.

The opponents of bike lanes are persistent, and they need to be watched. But we have made progress - just look at that sweeping machine at the top of this story - and I think we will make more progress this year.

"But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." I Cor. 13:10 

See also The Traffic at J'aime; Flex Posts on Pine and Spruce; Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends; The State of Play on Pine-Spruce; Mayor Parker Signs No Stopping Bill.