Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy

Boardwalk, Ocean Grove.

I prepared this crib sheet for a meeting on parking in Philadelphia. I thought I would share it here. - wkw

PARKING PRIMER

2 Books

- Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (2011).

Shoup, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale, has a very simple idea. He wants to replace our current, largely administrative, parking system with a market. The price of a parking spot will go up or down depending on demand for the spot. This is called "dynamic pricing."

The goal will be to maintain a peak occupancy rate of 85%, so people will be able to find a parking spot when they want one. The buzz word here is "access."

- Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic (2008).

Professor Norton looks at the question of why we have so many cars in our cities. It turns out that key decisions were made in the 1920s to build a monomodal ground transportation system focused on the private car, rather than a multimodal system that employed different types of vehicles as appropriate. Basic shortcomings of over-concentration on cars - such as congestion and crashes - were well known at the time and continue to be intractable.


3 Kinds of Parking

- At the curb. Cars are big and parking them on the street quickly swamps the street. Large garages are more efficient and effective.

Example: All the cars parked between Broad Street and the Schuylkill River on Spruce (11 blocks, 186 spots) and Pine (13 blocks, 215 spots) would fit comfortably in the nearby garage at 17th and South (546 spots).

- Large garages. Many urbanists don't like large garages because their blank walls are "street killers." Maybe they shouldn't have blank walls.

- Small garages. The classic example is the garage placed in a rowhouse where the living room should be. If the required curb cut eliminates a parking space, there is no net gain in parking spaces.

Some argue that there is a decline in net parking space, because the in-house garage is likely empty much of the time as the car gets used. An empty space at the curb or in a large garage can be occupied by another car.

Parking minimums for residential construction, in addition to being spatially inefficient, also drive up the cost of construction and make it that much harder for regular people to afford city living.


Shoup's 3 Recommendations

- Set the right price for curb parking. Numerous communities, most notably San Francisco, have successfully adopted dynamic pricing.

- Return parking revenue to pay for local public services. Shoup points to Old Pasadena: "Spending more than $1 million a year of meter money on new public services helped convert what had been a commercial skid row into one of the most popular tourist destinations in Southern California." (Shoup, p. xxviii.)

- Remove minimum parking requirements. "Like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, minimum parking requirements do more harm than good and should be repealed." (P. xxxi.)

See also Measuring the Health of a Parking System and The Supreme Court and Parking.

Is It a Curve or Is It a Turn?

Making the turn, child in tow.

I've been looking at the intersection of 27th Street and Lombard Street in Philadelphia. It's a key part of the westbound access to the South Street bridge. The one thing I know for sure is that it is not an intersection. There is no westward extension of Lombard, past the intersection; and there is no 27th Street north of the intersection. 27th here is a one-block stub leading south to the bridge. There's another one-block stub of 27th just the other side of South, which feeds cars onto the bridge from Schuylkill Avenue.

Lombard and 27th are effectively one street that bends awkwardly at approximately 90 degrees, at the point where the nomenclature changes.

So this 90 degree thingy, is it a curve, or is it a turn? The people who designed and built this little stretch of road seem to have been genuinely conflicted by this question.

Lombard and 27th Street come together.

Here's another way of expressing the dilemma: Is it a city street, or is it an access ramp to the bridge and the Schuylkill Expressway, aka I-76?

Points in favor of ramp. There's no traffic light at Taney, the cross street just before 27th. (I think the ramp vibe starts at Taney.) There is also no traffic light at 27th, where there is, admittedly, no cross traffic. But the lack of a signal at these locations is a signal.

As you come to the turn, you'll notice the designers have gone to considerable effort to at least make it look like it's not a full 90 degree turn. The road widens substantially at the corner and the curbs don't form right angles, but instead present gentle, wide curves. On the inner side of the turn, this effect is enhanced by the judicious use of paint. All this encourages people to act as if they're swinging along on an interstate access ramp.

Finally, there are no crosswalks at Lombard and 27th. I personally think you'd have to be insane to try to walk across the street here, crosswalks or no crosswalks. But it's another little clue that this is not a city street.

(There are no crosswalks across Lombard at Taney either. People do walk across the street in this area with some regularity. Remember, there are lots and lots of people walking on the bridge, and they have to get there somehow.)

Points against ramp. If the turn at Lombard and 27th actually was an interstate access ramp, the curve would be banked.  A banked roadway makes it easier for cars to turn; it also means that all drainage goes to the low side of the bank, which in this case would be the left side of the road.

Instead, the street at this point has a crown in the middle and drains to both sides. This means that people on the right side of the road are turning on a surface that has reverse camber.  The problem with reverse camber in a turn is that it tends to throw you off the road. Which is why curves are generally banked.

Not surprisingly motorists tend to steer through this area slightly to the left of the crown, where the camber helps them turn. When they do this they need to avoid a large storm drain located in a depression in the pavement. They can do this by going to the right of the storm drain, or by straddling it. You don't want to put a wheel in that depression.

A storm drain for the motorists.

My friend Bill Marston thinks the drain probably started life next to the curb, but then the curb moved several feet closer to the building. If we accept this line of thinking, the streets engineers wasted their time moving the curb, because the bulk of the traffic is going to the right of the drain, and the motorists who are straddling could easily move to the right. So you have the appearance of a wider street, but not the reality. (The gap between the curb and the grate is 6' 6". I measured it.)

What's going on? I think the cartway's profile here is driven less by the needs of drivers and more by some thorny issues of drainage. The intersection of 27th and Lombard is at the bottom of two hills, one running down Lombard and the other coming down 27th from the bridge. When it rains, this intersection is definitely collecting storm water from a pretty wide area.

In addition to watching motorists, I've been watching bicyclists navigate through this area. They're hardly ever in the bike lane at the corner. They're to the left of it, I think for two main reasons: First, the higher route allows for a gentler curve. Second, there is a fearsome storm drain designed to catch the wheels of bicycles and eat them, and it's located at the curb in a particularly infelicitous spot. (I've also heard comments about gravel gathering in this spot. I wouldn't be surprised, since it's at the bottom of two hills. I just didn't see it.)

Storm drain in the bike lane.

I don't have solutions for any of these issues, but as we redo the bike lane in this section, I just wanted people to be aware of some of the design challenges.

Riding the curve.

See also Morning on Lombard Street, No Turn On Red, Put Traffic Lights on the Schuylkill Expressway.

My Life in Fairmount Park

Stas in the Vltava River. Prague, 2013.

I've run ten marathons. Paris twice, New York three times. I trained by running in Fairmount Park. I would run out Kelly Drive to the angels or the Kelly statue and back to my house on Lombard Street. Or I would run the loop out Kelly, across the Falls bridge and back on MLK Drive. That was the counter-clockwise route. Sometimes I would run clockwise. Sometimes I would do two loops. And sometimes I'd run out MLK Drive to the water pumping station on Montgomery Drive, and then over to the Belmont Plateau for some hill work. Nice view from the top, if you still had binocular vision.

A significant component of my training was on a bicycle. When I was too tired to run, I would bike. I have happy memories of MLK Drive, and the lights under the Strawberry Mansion bridge, before dawn on a February morning. There was nobody else there. I felt safe, and I was happy, even though parts of me were quite cold.

The only part I didn't like was the crossing of the bridge at the beginning of MLK Drive. It was acceptable when I was running, but when I was biking I always knew fear.

I started writing about biking in Philadelphia in 2012. I wrote about the MLK bridge. I approached various people. I spoke with my City Councilman's chief of staff. I have subsequently spoken with many powerful people.

The MLK bridge looks just as it did in 2012. Five years have passed, and many wonderful things have happened in my life, including the birth of my first grandchild. But nothing has happened on the MLK bridge.

That's not my fault. I've done my bit. The failure lies with our city fathers and mothers.

Vaclav Havel. Prague, 2013.

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." - Vaclav Havel

See also Uncorking the Bottleneck and The Bottleneck on MLK Is Still There.

Furness Buildings in Rittenhouse

Well Known and Lesser Known

Bates house, 1801 Delancey, 1867-1868.

I'd been walking by the building pictured above for decades, but it was only recently that I discovered Frank Furness had had a hand in its design. Which explains a lot about the Bates house at 1801 Delancey Place, on the northwest corner of 18th and Delancey.

As Michael Lewis puts it, "The house was an unconventional townhouse design for Philadelphia, where custom placed the rowhouse to the front of the lot, leaving a space for a private yard to the rear. The Bates design reversed this: a garden was created in the front, screened by a brick wall, a very eccentric feature." The result was "an unexpected suburban enclave on a street of stiff late Georgian townhouses." (Michael J. Lewis, Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind, 2001, p. 63.)

Not that Furness and his firm were averse to working on the gorgeous Georgians of Delancey Place. Records indicate the firm did alterations in 1820, 1821, 1823, and 1830 Delancey.

At the other end of the 1800 block of Delancey, just across 19th Street, is the famous Horace Jayne house, from much later in Furness's career.

Horace Jayne house, 1900 Delancey, 1895.

I'd been aware of the Jayne house and the Thomas A. Reilly house up on Rittenhouse Square. (The neighbors are having some work done.)

Thomas A. Reilly house, 1804 Rittenhouse Square, 1891-1892.

But mostly I'd been aware of Furness as a posthumously tragic figure whose unique style went out of style and whose buildings had an uncanny affinity for the wrecking ball, particularly in the years just before the rise of the historic preservation movement in the 1960's.

I'd never really looked into Furness. However, when I was working on my story about creating a large piazza to the west of Philadelphia's City Hall, I found myself checking books on Furness out of the library. I got what I needed out of them, finished the story, and then I kept reading.

A lot of Furness's best stuff did get hammered into dust and chunks, particularly the banks down on Chestnut near Independence Hall. It's a shame. We could be reusing those banks now for restaurants and museums. (Museum of the American Revolution, anyone? I guess we missed our Musee d'Orsay moment.)

I think there's a subtext, even today, to the conventional wisdom about Furness - that his buildings are so quirky they can't possibly work well. And that take is a mistake. Furness was, among other things, a master at moving people through space; his Broad Street Station, which used to stand just west of City Hall, was a prime example until it was knocked down.

A number of masterpieces remain - particularly the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on Broad Street, north of City Hall, and the Furness Library out at Penn. And, in the area around Rittenhouse Square, where I live, it turns out that we have a substantial number of surviving Furness buildings.

Some of these are institutional: His dad's old congregation, the First Unitarian Church, and his addition to the building that housed the Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, now Dorrance Hamilton Hall of the University of the Arts. Hamilton Hall, by the way, is across the street from Furness's childhood home at 1426 Pine Street.

But most of what we still have in the Rittenhouse area is residential (we lost two major train stations, the Pennsylvania Railroad's Broad Street Station near City Hall and the Philadelphia Depot of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 24th and Chestnut).

I'd heard the Thomas Hockley house was by Furness, but I didn't really know. It is. When you think about it, the corner entrance, the pigmy columns, and the chimney that leaps out of the wall are certainly hints.

Thomas Hockley house, 235 South 17th Street, 1875.

A bunch more, almost all of them buildings I have walked by many times, I simply had no idea were by Furness.

I'm not even going to try to list them all - it would be too long a list, and I know I'd miss something - but here are a few Furness houses that can round out a walking tour of Furness in Rittenhouse.

Let's start up on Walnut Street, with the John Rice rowhouses. 2106 on the left has fared better than 2108 over the years. 2108 is currently undergoing a vigorous gut rehab, but it appears that what is left of the historical facade will be preserved. And then there's that new construction to the right. We can hope for the best.

John Rice rowhouses, 2106-2108 Walnut Street, c. 1870.

Next we can hop down to the E.B. Warren rowhouses at 2102-2106 Spruce Street.

E.B. Warren rowhouses, 2102-2106 Spruce Street, c. 1871.

A little while later the firm supplied a similar facade for the Rudolf Ellis house at 2113 Spruce. Having some work done here as well.

Rudolf Ellis house, 2113 Spruce Street, 1873.

On 17th Street north of Walnut, we have a more commercial neighborhood and a nice row of buildings known as the Caroline Rogers houses (124-132 South 17th Street). Originally there were five, but the northern two were lopped off, and now there are three; 128 is no longer recognizable as a Furness building, so that leaves us with 130 and 132, and they could use some work. The iron beam over the doorway is echt Furness.

Caroline Rogers houses, 124-132 South 17th Street, 1887.

If you're interested in exploring further, allow me to send you to George E. Thomas et al., Frank Furness: The Complete Works, 1996. The catalog there supersedes the checklist in James F. O'Gorman, The Architecture of Frank Furness, 1973, which nonetheless remains a valuable resource.

I need to warn you that going through the catalog is a bit like reading the casualty lists from the Battle of the Somme in World War I. So much has been lost.

Let's go back for a minute to the little Thomas A. Reilly house at 1804 Rittenhouse Square. It had a big brother next door, the William West Frazier house at 250 South 18th Street, built in 1881-1882. It occupied the area from 1804 Rittenhouse down to the corner of 18th Street, and the front door was actually on 18th.

This site is now occupied by a large apartment building of which I am rather fond. But along with my fondness for the present, I must recognize that we lost one of Furness's signature works here. As Thomas et al. note (p. 230), "This was one of Furness's most important commissions located at the corner of Rittenhouse Square - one of the most visible sites in the city and Philadelphia's premier square."

I spend a fair amount of time in Asbury Park, a city which has also seen its share of devastation. A few years ago some intrepid techies put together an app that provided 3D images of structures along the boardwalk that aren't there any more, or that have changed greatly. As you walked along the boardwalk with a tour guide, you pointed your cell phone or tablet at a site, and up popped a ghost building. For good measure you could see the SS Morro Castle where it ran aground next to Convention Hall in 1934.

The app is called Augmented Asbury Park, and although there are no more walking tours it appears there is an online version.

My thought is that some group of intrepid techies in Philadelphia might like to do a similar app for missing Furness buildings. The south side of Rittenhouse Square would be a good place to start. Call it The Furness Ghosts.

This chimney at 132 South 17th has seen better days.