Unblocking the Bus Lane on Chestnut

1500 block of Ionic. I would not want to make a delivery on this block.

Once upon a time there was a bus lane, but it wasn't really a bus lane. At least nobody treated it like one. Cars drove in it. Delivery trucks stopped in it. The only thing that the buses didn't have to contend with very much were the bicyclists. That's because most of them were too terrified to ride on the street, even though the lane was explicitly for buses and bikes.

This stub of Ionic is perhaps 100 feet from the Union League.

The delivery trucks in particular created some truly gnarly snarls, and the buses were slowed in the completion of their daily rounds. The little old people, possibly headed to a political demonstration at Senator Toomey's office, didn't care as long as they had a seat. They would just sit and chat with themselves and other passengers, and occasionally even divert the time-bound from consultation with their wristwatches.

It was Chestnut Street in old Philadelphia, in the time of Trump, and the problems may now seem quaint, but at the time there were people who actually cared about traffic jams, and tried to do something about them.

And these people made a wonderful discovery. There were almost always solutions. You just needed to look carefully. And then getting the solutions adopted was a whole other story.

One researcher decided to take a close look at a particularly problematic stretch of Chestnut Street, running from Broad Street west to 19th. And he found something very interesting. The vast majority of buildings had rear access, and didn't need to have delivery trucks stop in the bus lane on Chestnut and make deliveries through their front doors. 

The rear access was through little alleys named Ranstead, and Ionic, and Stock Exchange Place. This last name was for a business that had once been located in the area, but had long since moved. Philadelphians, however, are noted for their attachment to the past.

On some blocks the little Ionic Street or Stock Exchange Place did not exist, but on these blocks the buildings tended to be very large and extend south all the way from Chestnut to Sansom, where they would have rear access.

And on the north side of Chestnut, Ranstead would also disappear from time to time, most notably for the Liberty Place complex in the 1600 block. But Liberty Place also came with its own huge underground loading zone off of 16th Street. Neither the shops nor the offices of Liberty Place had any need to stop and unload on Chestnut.

The researcher did note a number of buildings that appeared not to have rear access. He wondered a bit about what the fire department would say if there was actually no second means of egress, but he also knew that the number of these buildings was so small that, if they lacked rear access, they could get their deliveries on Chestnut Street without blocking the bus lane. All the City needed to do was take the existing truck loading zones on Chestnut and expand their hours past 10 a.m.

As the researcher put it in his report, "It would be nice, of course, if all the deliveries could take place before 10 a.m., but clearly that is not happening. We need to see people as they are, not as we would have them be. And then we need to design accordingly, remembering that the two top priorities for this street are deliveries and keeping the bus lane free of obstructions."

Since this is a fairy tale, the needed changes were quickly made, and all was well on Chestnut Street. The merchants got their goods, the bus riders rolled merrily across town without obstruction, and most of the shoppers arriving by car parked in a garage.

Morning on Chestnut, a few minutes after ten.

See also Alleys, Focus on the Short Trips, This Isn't Just Any Alley, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?