Trial by Combat

There's Something Sophomoric About Rudy

Trial by combat, Germany, 14th century.

On January 6, Rudy Giuliani stepped to the mike and told a few thousand friends that it was time for "trial by combat." This was at a gathering in the Ellipse, just south of the White House, and he was warming the crowd up for the headliner, Donald Trump. 

I have the impression that Rudy doesn't know very much about trial by combat. Maybe he should read some Shakespeare - Henry VI, Part 2, to be specific. 

The three parts of Henry VI are mainly about the Wars of the Roses, although Joan of Arc manages to put in an appearance in Part 1 (Will doesn't like her - she's French). My favorite character is Margaret of Anjou (another Frenchwoman). Her undisguised contempt for her husband, King Henry VI, is a marvel.

The lower classes also get some time on stage. Although the Wars of the Roses are basically about one large family slaughtering itself (all the principals were descended from John of Gaunt), there was also considerable social unrest from below during this time. In Part 2 we have Jack Cade's rebellion, best known for the line "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." 2H6 4.2.74.

Also in Part 2, overshadowed by Jack Cade, we have a trial by combat between a small-time employer and his apprentice. The employer is Thomas Horner, an armorer (his shop makes suits of armor). The apprentice is Peter Thump, who claims he has heard his boss say unkind things about the king.

The two show up in act 1, scene 3, in what I suppose we can call an arraignment. Peter says that his boss told him that Henry VI was not the rightful king, and that the man who should be king was another descendant of John of Gaunt: Richard, duke of York.

(Richard never becomes king. He is captured in battle in Part 3, 1.4. Queen Margaret taunts him by putting a paper crown on his head. He responds by saying, among other things, "beggars mounted run their horse to death." 1.4.127. Lord Clifford and Queen Margaret then stab him to death, and Margaret orders Richard's head cut off and mounted on the gates of the city of York "So York may overlook the town of York." 1.4.180. )

Anyway, back to Part 2 and Thomas and Peter. Thomas Horner, the armorer, is in a pickle, because, as the duke who is acting as prosecutor notes, such words, if actually spoken, would be high treason. So Horner says that Peter, his apprentice, is lying out of malice. And the king decides on a trial by combat, which occurs a little later, in act 2, scene 3. Both litigants show up with supporters. Both sides have been drinking, and continue to do so onstage. 

Apparently the older man has had quite a lot to drink. He's confident of winning. His young apprentice, on the other hand, thinks he's going to die, and he gives away his possessions - an apron, a hammer, and some money - to his friends.

The actual combat is brief and decisive. Peter the apprentice kills his employer, who gives us a parting gift - "I confess, I confess treason." 2.3.95.

I'm glad Shakespeare threw that bit in. Trial by combat was often seen as showing the will of God, possibly mediated by might makes right. Or maybe, by the time of the Wars of the Roses, simply might makes right. Shakespeare's audience was sufficiently modern that they might have seen death without confession as inconclusive on the subject of actual guilt or innocence.

There's a reason why trial by combat was, over the centuries, gradually being replaced with trial by jury. For all its flaws, trial by jury attempts to get to the actual facts.

Of course, trial by combat is simple and quick and reaches a definitive conclusion, with the added attraction that it's not much work for the authorities. It helps if you're willing to see both of the two combatants as expendable.

I can see why Rudy Giuliani would find it attractive.

But do we really want to live that way? If we settle our differences by violence, we live by violence.

People love to complain about jury duty and make jokes about lawyers. And our modern legal system is indeed cumbersome. But at least it seeks to divert conflict away from violence in the direction of peaceful resolution. And the ideal of justice based on fact and law appeals to me more than the picture of people settling their arguments with baseball bats.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a wise old professor who taught medieval history. One of his tasks was to explain the early development of western legal systems. How did brutish knights gradually get convinced to give up bopping their neighbors on the head when they were annoyed? It was a long, slow process that was only partially successful. But it established a principle: "The purpose of the law is to stop a fight."

There's a good, brief overview of the history of trial by combat in JSTOR Daily. To see it click here.

To be clear, what happened at the Capitol on 6 January 2021 was not a trial by combat. It is part of an argument over whether we keep the Constitution we have, or whether we get a new one, which will look much like the Republican platform in the 2020 election.

Picture credit: per Wikimedia Commons.

See also A Home Invasion.

After the Riot

What Was Trump Planning to Do?

Portuguese spinner, Fall River, Mass., 1916.

Let's look back for a moment to January 6 and say that Trump actually won the big battle on Capitol Hill. What would that look like? The ballots are not counted, possibly they go into a bonfire. Pence and Pelosi and Grassley are killed or captured. Many other members of the House and Senate are dead or in captivity. 

What does Trump do then? Declare martial law and announce that he will rule by emergency powers?

If he does that, what do the remaining power structures do? I'm talking about the armed forces, the FBI. The states, which have their own armies. The corporations. The list goes on.

I'm just wondering if, at that point - it would have been late in the day on January 6 - there was any plan at all for what to do next.  Or was there no plan? That's what happened in the conquest of Iraq - no plan for the occupation.

I think we need to publicly speculate about Trump's endgame. I think a lot of people assume he was just going to keep on being president, and everything else would look a lot like it looked last year. That in itself is not pretty, but there is a dynamic to these situations, and nobody is talking about it.

Maybe we'll even get lucky and find some evidence. We won't know if we don't start looking.

Photo credit: Lewis Hine, National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

See also A Home Invasion.

Paris: 6 February 1934

"Throw the Deputies in the Seine" 

Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly.

European fascism is a complicated subject, and I think many people make the mistake of focusing on Germany, and particularly Germany after the Nazis rose to power. As I've argued before, the Weimar experience seems to provide more useful lessons for those of us concerned about the direction of American politics. 

I also think that useful, and less inflammatory, parallels to the American experience can be found in other European countries, most notably Italy (see my article Jim Crow Was a Failed State, which goes through the Italian experience in some detail), and also France. 

One striking parallel from the French experience was an assault on the Palais Bourbon, seat of the French National Assembly, in Paris on 6 February 1934. It was in a number of ways different from what happened at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., on 6 January 2021, but there are useful parallels that help us build a richer context for what happened to the People's House. One big lesson: Don't make martyrs.

Here's a description of what happened way back in 1934. At that time, the National Assembly was called the Chamber of Deputies. The Palais Bourbon is on the left bank of the Seine directly across from the Place de la Concorde. There's a bridge, called the Pont de la Concorde. 

"Nationalist and veterans groups took matters into their own hands with the street demonstrations of 6 February 1934, the wildest night Paris had seen since 1871. It no longer seems as certain as it did at the time that the organizers of this mass demonstration sought to overthrow the republic. But they coordinated their plans for a mass move on "la maison sans fenetres," the Chamber of Deputies, with slogans like 'throw the deputies in the Seine.' Action Francaise, the largest veterans' organization, the Union Nationale des Combattants, the Croix de Feu, and other middle-class nationalist direct-action groups massed some 40,000 demonstrators in a march on the Chamber. Although the Croix de Feu on the Left Bank didn't try very hard, the Action Francaise and UNC groups crossing the bridge from the Place de la Concorde pressed for hours against police barricades until finally the police fired into the crowd (it is still not clear what orders had been given by Eugene Frot, the minister of the interior), killing 16 and wounding 655. The Chamber was kept inviolate, but Edouard Daladier's government resigned the next day without being voted into a minority."

This is from pages 244-245 of Robert Paxton's 1972 book Vichy France. I've been a Paxton fan for a very long time. 

The dead and the wounded provided the right with an incandescent organizing principle, one they used to good effect for years.

Fascist rage and increasing power elicited a strong response from the left, resulting in a virtual civil war in France between 1934 and 1937.  The splintered parties of the left united in the Popular Front, which came to power in 1936. This period, which I think is instructive for Americans in our current situation, has been overshadowed by the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, and of course World War II, which began in 1939.

There wasn't a lot of shooting, but there were many strikes by workers, and a right-wing group called the Cagoule perpetrated quite a bit of violence, including the courtesy assassinations of two opponents of Mussolini, the brothers Carlo and Nello Roselli, in 1937. The divisions between left and right remained deep and bitter, and undoubtedly contributed to the ease with which Germany conquered France in 1940.

A few days after the sack of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Professor Paxton came back to the Palais Bourbon and, in the process, gave me a present. He had for years been declining to label Donald Trump a fascist, for valid reasons. In Newsweek on January 11, 2021, he wrote, "Trump's incitement of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, [2021] removes my objection to the fascist label. His open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line. The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary." 

I've been calling Trump a fascist for a while, but I must say I feel more comfortable doing so now that Professor Paxton has changed his position.

Photo Credit: Per Wikimedia Commons, 2011.

See also Fascism, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?

Josh Hawley's Romance with Religion

A Grand Inquisitor Wannabe?

Wooden church, St. Mary's, Ga. Walker Evans/FSA, 1936.

I named my last car Pelagia. It was an inside joke. Pelagius was a fellow who lived a long time ago and didn't believe in original sin. This got him into some trouble with the thought police. 

I don't think about Pelagius every day, but it seems that Senator Josh Hawley may. I gather he doesn't like him (see this story in the Times). Apparently Hawley thinks that Americans derive their well-known tendency to think for themselves from Pelagius. It's true that, in addition to his ideas about original sin, Pelagius believed that free will involved making up your own mind. Hawley doesn't like that at all. 

Theologically, it strikes me that Hawley would have been quite at home in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts. There the leaders told you what to think, and if you didn't like it you could go and found Rhode Island. 

(This is actually a more gentle treatment of heretics than was traditional. In 1600, the Italian heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome.) 

I had thought, or at least hoped, that we had gotten away from some of the more extreme manifestations of religious fanaticism. Over the years I've made a sort of hobby out of poking around in the underside of church history, with an emphasis on the Crusades and the Inquisition. I've even written about it a bit. 

I won't hide my basic conclusion from you. Religious fanaticism is not, in my opinion, a good thing.

I could talk about the taking of Ma'arra on December 11, 1098, during the First Crusade. The Crusaders, who became pretty good at committing atrocities during the course of the Crusade, actually cooked and ate some of their defeated enemy. This is called cannibalism in polite society, or perhaps not mentioned at all. (See Abortion and the Bible.)

So many stories. One more. There was a village called Montaillou in the south of France, up in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was crawling with heretics. The Inquisition had been trying to get them into the straight and narrow for many years. It didn't work. The villagers liked their heresy. (They believed in the independent existence of evil. This is known as the Manichean heresy.)

One day in 1308 the Inquisition, obviously fed up, had the adult and adolescent villagers rounded up and marched off to an infamous church prison in Carcassonne. 

Left behind were the children. They were alone, except for the animals.

I have a picture in my mind. A few small children, standing on a hill, a light breeze fluttering their hair on a cool, sunny day. They're watching their parents, far below them, walking away to jail.

If you can do this to children, you can do anything. (For more, see Where Have All the Grownups Gone?)

If I were Senator Hawley, I would rethink my commitment to religious fanaticism. It seems awfully hard to square with his oath to the Constitution. In the end, I think it's an either-or proposition. 

You're playing with dynamite, Josh. Stop.

Pelagius.

I found this picture of Pelagius through Wikimedia Commons. It's from a book called the Nuremberg Chronicle. This is a pretty special book. It was printed in 1493, which makes it an incunabulum - a book printed before 1500. There aren't a whole lot of them. Since Pelagius died more than 1,000 years before the book was published, I doubt that he actually looked much like this picture; in particular I think his clothes probably look a lot like what people in Nuremberg were wearing in 1493. 

See also Submerged Narratives, The Problem with Dystopia, Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil.

A Home Invasion

Civilization Is Fragile 

House interior, Morgantown, W.Va. Walker Evans/FSA, 1935.

It's a Friday evening. You're sitting at the kitchen table, writing a list of things that need doing over the weekend. Your spouse and children are at the movies. It's a quiet time.

And then it's not. There's a loud bang at the door. You're startled, but decide you should investigate. As you're standing up, a large man in dark clothes appears in the kitchen door. Things are happening very quickly. 

The large man punches you in the face, breaking your glasses. Then he hits you again and knocks you to the ground.

You're on your back. Your head hurts and you can't see very well. Your heart is thumping and you're having trouble breathing. You think you may throw up.

The large man is pointing a large pistol at your face, directly between your eyes. He speaks.

"Where's the money!" It's not a question. It's a demand.

Several days later, you're standing in your living room, holding a cup of coffee. There's no place to sit. The invaders used knives to rip open the sofa and the two easy chairs. They also cut up several paintings that had been done by an older relative who is not in a position to paint replacements. There is graffiti spray-painted on the walls.

The phone rings. It's the police. They have captured the three home invaders.

"So," the officer asks, "do you want us to prosecute them, or do you want us to let them go?"

Domination

Home invasions are about money, but they are also about domination. In this country, they are almost always a private affair, but, in Italy, Benito Mussolini used them as a tool of politics. I wrote about this in 2019:

"Not that we should underestimate the seductive, iconoclastic power of the fascists. Mussolini had at his disposal hit squads, or squadri, composed largely of petty criminals and wannabe thugs. The squadristi would use the manganello, a kind of billy club, to beat people they didn't like. They would also make them drink castor oil. Another favorite tactic was the home invasion, where the homeowner's furniture and other belongings would be thrown into the street. The squadri also ransacked newspaper offices. (See Caroline Moorehead, A Bold and Dangerous Family, 2017, pp. 77- 78, 129-130, 140-141, 147. For a recent article in Slate, click here.)

"Numerous judges and police officers simply loved the squadristi, and would go to great lengths to keep them out of jail, even before the March on Rome. (Moorehead, pp. 78, 82.)"

(To see the full story, click here.)

Justice

The sack of the Capitol - the People's House - was a home invasion. And now various people are saying that it wasn't that big a deal, and we should move on - no, that was a Bush-era phrase. Now it's "unify."

I say we need justice to be done first - and not just to the people who were on the ground at the Capitol, but to all those who abetted and incited, including the president.

Then we can talk about moving on and unifying. But we will never forget.

See also A Moment in Time, Reform in Head and Members.

Barnacles at the Curb

Don't Follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters

Careening an old whaler near New Bedford, 1882.

 

Back in the days when ships were made of wood and men were made of iron, the ships had a problem. The problem was barnacles. These pesky little creatures just loved to latch onto the nice wet wood on the bottom of a ship's hull, where they would soon cover the entire area below the waterline with their extended family. With a good crop of barnacles, a sailing ship would become noticeably slower, and its response to the helm more sluggish. The solution was called careening - typically, grounding a ship at high tide and tipping it so the bottom of the hull could be cleaned at low tide. Pirates used to do this on the sands of secluded beaches in the Caribbean, with sunny weather and appropriate palm trees, but you can do it anywhere you can safely tip a boat over on its side. We still use the word careening. When you go a bit too quickly around a corner, and your car goes tippy, you're careening.

The barnacles came to my mind while I was reading the performance audit report that the Philadelphia Controller's Office released at the end of last year on the Philadelphia Parking Authority. I think the report is good as far as it goes, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.

Managing Money, Managing People

There's something called LODO - Lights On, Doors Open. LODO seeks to answer a question: Does an organization have the basic infrastructure in place that will allow it do its job - whether that job is selling groceries or managing parking. In my opinion, the auditor's report does a pretty good job looking at these basic issues.

Not surprisingly, the auditors suggested after their review that the PPA has too many workers and pays its senior managers too much money. To arrive at these conclusions, the auditors compared the PPA to a group of peer organizations in other cities, and so the criticisms we have all heard for years now have a basis in data.

The PPA was not happy, claiming essentially that it was a unique organization in an extremely unusual environment. You hear that a lot in Philadelphia, along with the excuse that the city is too poor to do the right thing.

Benchmarking is a standard practice, and frankly the PPA should be doing this itself, rather relying upon outsiders to provide the service.

Next on the list of the usual suspects is the thought that the PPA is a patronage mill. Again, the auditors came up with some interesting, and I think suggestive, data. They selected a random sample of 107 employees working in the on-street parking and support units, and they "compared employee residency data with publicly available records for ward leaders and city committee persons." They found that 25 of the 107 (23%) either held one of those offices or lived with someone who did. This number, of course, only provides a lower bound to the discussion. All that the auditors may have identified is nepotism, which is the hard core of patronage. The more subtle tentacles of patronage can be long and twisty, and cover a much wider area. (Page 14 of the auditors' report. To see the report, click here. For the back-and-forth on salaries and staffing, see pp. 7-12 of the auditors' report and  pp. 4-5 and 8-12 of the PPA's response to the auditors' report, which are also pp. 30-31 and 34-38 of the full report. Then go to pp. 48-50 of the full report for the auditors' response to the PPA response.) 

On the patronage issue, the PPA spluttered a bit, and then blurted out this: "On its face the Audit Report finds that the vast majority (77%) of the PPA's employees have no political connections. This finding undermines the 'patronage' stereotype often errantly restated about the PPA." (Page 5 of the PPA's response to the auditors' report; page 31 of the full report.) 

I think this response is hilarious.

The auditors were careful to note that the employees studied came from both of the major political parties. I suspect that such a bipartisan theme might be found elsewhere in the PPA.  It might be interesting, for instance, to look into where the PPA purchases its vehicles, and what replacement cycles the various types of vehicles are on.

There's a lot more, but I think I'll end this section by looking at something I've taken to calling the school funding corkscrew. Does anyone want to argue that the funding structure by which the PPA gives money to the Philadelphia School District is not screwy? There are much more straightforward ways to fund our schools. And I know we face obstacles in Harrisburg, but shouldn't we at least state that tying the school subsidy to the number of parking tickets is ridiculous? Reform has to start somewhere. The PPA has enough other distractions to keep it from focusing on what should be its job, which is managing parking. It doesn't need the school funding corkscrew.

Managing Parking

So how is the PPA doing with its basic job of managing parking? My answer is, Not very well. 

As the PPA notes in its response to the auditors' report, its mission statement includes the following language: "A focus on improved access, greater mobility, and increased vehicular and pedestrian safety are the guiding principles of our program." (Pp. 1-2 of the PPA's response; pp. 27-28 of the full report.) Remember that word "access." A big part of access is being able to park your car when you get to your destination.

The auditors don't seem very interested in these issues, as the PPA duly notes, but the audit report does give us a gift. If you have trouble reading this table, click on it. It should get larger.

Back in 2015, I came up with the idea that we should have a set of vital signs to measure the health of our parking system. This would be similar to the vital signs that get taken every time you go to your doctor's office - you know, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, that sort of thing. 

I think the most important vital sign for a parking system is its occupancy rate, which should ideally be about 85 percent. I stumbled onto my second-most important vital sign while I was doing some research on the (then) new parking system in San Francisco, and it turned out that its ratio of meter revenue to ticket revenue was four to one - four dollars of meter revenue for every dollar of ticket revenue.

I wondered what the ratio was in Philadelphia. Finding out involved filing a Right-to-Know request, and when the data for the answer came back it turned out that we had a reverse ratio - we had twice as much ticket revenue as meter revenue. (For the article I wrote, click here.) 

The table above, from page 8 of the auditor's report, displays the necessary numbers for six cities. Only two have reverse ratios - Philadelphia and Detroit. Portland, Oregon, has five dollars of meter revenue for every dollar of ticket revenue. (Meter revenue figures are not available for Boston.) 

Why does Philadelphia have so much more ticket revenue than meter revenue? The answer is simple. Parking on the street is very inexpensive in Philadelphia, and so the legal spots at the curb are almost always taken. 

So when a plumber shows up to fix a clogged sewer line, and he looks for a spot to park, he is almost always looking at a block that has an occupancy rate of 100 percent. If the occupancy rate was 85 percent, he would find an open space and park in it. At 100 percent he parks in the crosswalk at the corner.

And that's when a young parent and a child in a stroller step out into the street and get hit by a car careening around the corner. So the plumber doesn't get access, and the pedestrians don't get safety. Feel free to refer to the extract from PPA's mission statement, above.

Oh - I almost forgot. Why is there so much more money in parking fines than in meter revenue? Because the meter rates are artificially low, and the clogging at the curb forces people to park illegally, which drives up the revenue from fines. The PPA profits greatly by dangerously overloading our curbs.

The PPA could provide 85 percent occupancy in metered areas by adopting dynamic pricing, the system that was pioneered in San Francisco back in 2008. Dynamic, or variable, pricing is at its heart very simple: At places and times where demand is high, prices go up. At places and times where demand is low, prices go down. (For more on dynamic pricing and the San Francisco demonstration project, click here.) 

This system works. And it's not even new any more. 

There's an interesting twist in residential areas where the PPA offers residential parking permits to the people who live in the area. At $35 a year, the parking permit is essentially free. Once again, the curbs are jammed. (For more on parking permits, click here and here.)

There is a solution. Its name is uniform price auction. Explaining it is a bit complicated, although I think it would actually be fairly straightforward in operation. For a discussion of uniform price auctions, click here. 

When it comes to adopting new technology, I think it's fair to say that the PPA is a slow, fumbling adopter. 

The auditors were quite interested in license-plate recognition technology. There's an interesting tit-for-tat between the auditors and the PPA on pages 12-14, 38-39 (pp. 12-13 of the PPA reply), and 51-52 (in the auditors' response to the PPA response). 

The basic question has to do with the fact that the PPA has issued hand-held license-plate readers to its staff of ambulatory enforcement officers. The auditors suggest that it would be more efficient (and more in keeping with best practice) to mount license-plate readers on vehicles, which could cover large amounts of territory in not a lot of time, thereby allowing the PPA to lay off a substantial number of enforcement officers, an indeterminate number of whom are members of a political machine. 

The PPA responded that LPRs can only be programmed to recognize one type of regulation, which meant that LPRs could not be used on complicated blocks where, in addition to parking spaces, there were such things as loading zones, handicapped zones, fire hydrants, and crosswalks.

The auditors demurred: "Additionally, our parking management consultant has indicated that LPR systems can be programmed to recognize different regulations within a city block. Crosswalks, loading zones, fire hydrants, and drivers who decide to double park are not unique to Philadelphia. The PPA should consider researching how other cities manage these constraints while using mobile LPR systems." 

This is a very polite suggestion that the PPA should do some benchmarking of its own.

If the reader is thinking that the decision to use hand-held license-plate readers rather than vehicle-mounted readers may have been influenced by the prospect of laying off a large number of employees who have connections, you would not be alone. Remember: Distractions can damage the mission.

There are two glancing mentions of the PPA's mobile parking app, meterUP, on pages 13 and 39 (p. 13 of the PPA response). I won't go into the history here, but the PPA did not exactly cover itself with glory when it set this program up. (Click here for more.) 

For several years I have been serving on the municipal parking committee for Asbury Park, a small city at the Jersey shore. In July 2017, 8 percent of parking revenue was coming through Asbury's mobile app. In 2019 a second app was added to the first, and, in December 2020, 67 percent of all metered parking revenue was coming through the two apps. 

That's a pretty steep adoption curve, but, in the world of electronics, adoption curves can be nearly vertical. I wonder what the PPA's experience with meterUP has been.

Managing Streets 

So let's back up now and ask a bigger question: What are our streets for? Or, perhaps better, what should our streets be for? For the last century there has been an unexamined assumption that our streets are for motor vehicles - moving, and also parked. In recent years, people have started to push back against this dominant belief. 

And in the last year, with the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a shift. People no longer automatically accept the hegemony of the car. In Philadelphia the best example of this shift is the proliferation of restaurants located in the open air - on the street and not just on the sidewalk. (For more, click here and here.) 

In Paris, there has been great progress in the last year to establish a complete, safe, network of bicycle lanes. No such rapid progress on bike lanes has occurred in Philadelphia, although we do continue to inch along at our usual snail's pace. 

My own thinking about the use of streets has evolved slowly. When I started writing about these issues on my blog in 2012, I was initially concerned about making recreational bicycling safer on Martin Luther King Drive, in Fairmount Park. And then I turned to the problem of the incredibly tight parking conditions in Center City and South Philly. 

Only in time did I come to see the rapidly developing use of bicycles for many purposes other than recreation, such as commuting to work or dropping the kids off at school or going to the grocery store. And only in time did I come to see parked cars as barnacles - in the way, and slowing down the progress we needed to make, first in reimagining our streets and then in redesigning them. 

I really enjoyed playing around with Professor Shoup's ideas about parking, and trying to see how they could be applied in Philadelphia. I still do. But now I see clearly that the basic problem is not that our parking system is badly designed and poorly executed, but that we simply have way too much parking on our streets.

I think it's clear that long-term on-street storage of cars on the street has to go away. These cars belong off the street. In my opinion, PPA should be leading this shift by building or encouraging the development of large regional garages in residential neighborhoods. 

One good location for such a garage would be the site of the old Moyamensing Prison in the heart of South Philly. (For more, click here and here.) 

Managing our streets is a complicated task that is, at present, poorly organized and lacks any unified, coherent vision. A great many public agencies and private organizations have a say in our streets, and just figuring out who owns or controls a particular patch of street can be a patience. Jim Saksa had a good story on this in PlanPhilly in 2015. (To see the story, click here.) 

So there are challenges. How surprising. I will leave you with one thought, a little piece of light that came to me only slowly, and in pieces, but is now whole.

We need to scrape off the barnacles. I think the barnacles are the key to liberating our streets.

Picture credit: F.S. Cozzens, in Harper's Weekly, December 1882. Per Wikimedia Commons.

See also Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, It's the Road Design, Stupid, The Supreme Court and Parking. 

Fitting the Solution to the Problem

Brooklyn's Fulton Street Shows Bureaucrats Being Flexible 

Say hello to Christopher Wallace, better known as the Notorious B.I.G. This mural portrait is at Fulton and St. James in Brooklyn. Notorious B.I.G.'s childhood home is on St. James, between Fulton and Gates, and in 2019 New York City added his name to the block, so now it's both St. James Place and Christopher "Notorious B.I.G." Wallace Way. (He was also called Biggie Smalls, but that sobriquet didn't make it onto the street sign.)

Notorious B.I.G. was a famous and, I'm told, very talented rapper. I don't know enough to talk intelligently about him or his music, so I'm going to move directly to the actual topic of this story, which is a little miracle that is taking place in his home neighborhood.

Bus Lanes

Let's have a look at Fulton Street. Fulton is a major east-west street that extends from downtown Brooklyn to the border with Queens. (The street continues in Queens, but it has a different name.) We're concerned here with the western part of Fulton, which has three distinct segments. Have a look at the drawing below.

This drawing comes from a 2017 Powerpoint by New York City's Department of Transportation (NYCDOT). If you'd like to see the full document, click here.

So here was the state of play in 2017. The Fulton Mall, west of Flatbush, has been around for decades. It prioritizes pedestrians - the area is a nexus for transit with, by my count, not less than 13 subway lines and seven bus routes passing through or near the mall. Buses are allowed in the mall, which is technically a transitway, and delivery trucks and emergency vehicles also have access. (For an article on the Fulton Mall, click here.)

There are two segments east of Flatbush. The first - the central one of the three - has curbside bus lanes. The easternmost (labeled "Study Area" in the drawing) has no special provision for buses, beyond bus stops. 

In 2017 NYCDOT, facing serious congestion issues in the Study Area, proposed extending the curbside bus lanes from the central zone through the Study Area, but limiting operation of the lanes to morning and evening hours, allowing the space to revert to parking and loading at other times.

There was precedent for this proposal. the central segment was actually two zones. The western zone, starting at Flatbush, had curbside bus lanes all the time. The eastern zone, however, limited the zones to  the hours between 7 am and 7 pm on weekdays.

So the proposal for the Study Area can be seen as simply a further step on a glide path from the Fulton Mall, which is mainly about pedestrians and buses, through the central segment, which starts off with 24/7 bus lanes for the western piece, and then glides down to provide overnight and weekend parking in the eastern piece, and then glides to a Study Area bus lane design focused on rush hour.

The community's reception of this modest proposal was not entirely positive. The Fulton Area Business Alliance (FAB FULTON) negotiated with the City and agreed to a new plan with westbound bus lane hours in the morning only and eastbound lane hours in the evening only.

Numerous local businesses then decided to go rogue, and even enlisted a City Council member to plead their case. This effort failed, and the FAB plan was implemented. 

I don't have a good sense of what has gone on during the pandemic, but before the arrival of the coronavirus I had the feeling that NYCDOT had gotten what it wanted.

Signage and Enforcement 

One of the problems with the new bus lanes is that they're complicated. Have a look at this pole full of signs.

The space here is variously given over to loading, parking - don't forget street sweeping - and, oh, yes, no standing, when it is a bus lane. This is called burying the lead, so the sign makers came up with yet another sign, which I suppose we can call a headline.

Having these signs means you can point to them while you're writing a ticket, if that's your line of work. Of course, enforcement officers can't be everywhere, so, in August 2020, NYCDOT and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) announced that camera enforcement was coming to Fulton Street; this was part of a broad expansion of an existing camera enforcement program, adding streets in three boroughs.

Cross Road Blues

(Robert Johnson originally recorded his Cross Road Blues in 1936. For more information about the song, click here.) 

Fulton Street has a mind of its own and basically pays no attention to the underlying street grid. This diagonal approach to life creates some interesting intersections.

And the quirkiness leads to problems - a flat turn means drivers can - and do - go faster. The geometry of the intersection can also lead to very long crosswalks.

NYCDOT, in its 2017 study, came up with several fixes. Bumpouts can shorten pedestrian crossing distances and increase visibility for all road users. These bumpouts can be made of concrete, or they can be made of paint. Paint is quicker and cheaper. It helps if you throw in some flex posts and a few planters. That way you won't have people parking their cars in the bumpouts.

I think we should give the streets engineers some credit here for their flexibility. Departments of Transportation have historically been rather ponderous organizations, doing large, expensive projects slowly (think bridges and Interstate highways). The idea of a small project executed quickly and cheaply is a big shift - a cultural shift. And here they're doing it. 

The work on Fulton also involves a fair amount of more standard construction, and my impression is it's well designed and well executed.

Here's another example of new thinking. There is the very human tendency to cut corners. NYCDOT has taken to placing sturdy flex posts in the street's median strip, near intersections. Here's an installation on Fulton near Classon. In the background you can see the Crispus Attucks playground. (The adjacent basketball courts are named after Biggie.) 

These posts get beat up quite a bit, but that means they're working. You just need to maintain them.

Putnam Triangle

Diagonals make triangles; the City and FAB, which is a Business Improvement District, have been working to upgrade the triangles along this stretch of Fulton. 

My favorite is the Putnam Triangle, which has benefited greatly from a dramatic renovation. 

Before this recent work was done, Putnam Avenue ran into Fulton right next to the spot where Cambridge Place ran into Fulton, creating a very gnarly three-way quasi-intersection. 

Eliminating this block of Putnam got rid of a substantial number of traffic conflicts. It also basically doubled the available pedestrian space and turned a traffic island into a handsome, easily accessible pedestrian plaza.

FAB has extensive coverage of the Putnam Triangle on its website.

One of the Things We Lost

Below is a shot of a little cafe at the same intersection as the Crispus Attucks playground. It's from the Before times, and I couldn't remember the cafe's name. My daughter reminded me: Always and Forever. A trifle ironic in view of subsequent events.

This is a rare quiet moment. Usually this place was bustling; the owners and staff just loved little kids, and families would pour over from Crispus Attucks to refuel with cookies and hot chocolate, and pastries and very good coffee for the grownups.

At this moment, I think my grandson and various grownups may have gone back to the playground for Round Two, to be followed by home, lunch, and a nap. I would occasionally stay behind, lingering over my coffee, and being very happy.

Always and Forever is now sadly gone from the neighborhood - lost to the virus.

(My daughter also, in an attempt to update my musical education, sent me this link to a music video by the Notorious B.I.G. I enjoyed it very much and recommend it to you.)

See also Getting From Here to There, Unblocking the Bus Lane on Chestnut.