How Do We Put This Back Together?

Lilliana Mason Says It Doesn't Look Good

Migrant mother, California. Dorothea Lange/FSA, 1936.

I've been living with this picture for a very long time. A lot of people have. It is one of the most famous pictures to come out of the Farm Security Administration's photo project during the 1930's. Florence Thompson, the subject of this portrait, was born in the old Indian Territory of Oklahoma to Cherokee parents in 1903. She survived the Great Depression and died in 1983.

The image is famous because the face says it all: What comes next?

I can't believe it, but we're actually facing another one of those times. And, frankly, things don't look very good.

Recently my son suggested I read a book by one of his college chums, Lilliana Mason, who is now a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. And so I read the book, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and I almost wish I hadn't. (Earlier this year she also published an op-ed in the New York Times. To see it, click here.) The book analyzes the stovepipes that we Americans have frozen ourselves into, and answers some questions that I have had for some time. The answers are not encouraging.

But first some background.

What's Been Going On
For several decades now, many smart people have been wondering about the Republican base. Their leadership kept pulling the old bait-and-switch trick on them - offer one thing, then deliver another. And in the next election, the same people would go to the polls and vote again for the Republicans.

Under Trump, the ground has shifted somewhat, but the basic dynamic remains the same. A very small group of people at the top are trying to turn their base, and the whole country, into a herd of peons, ruled by a small and increasingly closed elite.

The idea of a middle-class society, the idea of social mobility, the idea of a career open to talent - all these are to be replaced by an economic, political, and social profile similar to that of medieval France or a modern banana republic.

So why  does the Republican base keep voting for this program? Why the visceral hatred for Obamacare, even as they sign up in droves? Why do they vote so enthusiastically against their own self-interest? Why do they vote for their own degradation?

The Answer
According to Mason, the basic answer is very simple. And I must say she has convinced me. Mason suggests that many, many people in America see life as a football game. The main goal, and really the only goal, is to win. People want their team to win.

Mason starts her story back in the time after World War II, when researchers performed a number of experiments that had disturbing results.

Robbers Cave
Flashback to the summer of 1954 and the Robbers Cave State Park in Latimer County, Oklahoma. Social psychologist Muzafer Sherif is holding a special summer camp for 22 fifth-graders. All are from Oklahoma City, but none of them know any of the others. All are white, protestant, middle-class boys, and beyond that they have been screened to be psychologically as close to identical as possible.

Sherif and his coworkers divide the boys into two teams of equal size, and, for the first week of the three-week camp session, they are kept apart. In fact, they don't even know of the other team's existence.

In the second week the two teams, called the Eagles and the Rattlers, are brought together for a baseball game, and the trash talk starts immediately. Things go downhill from there, with raids on the other team's cabin. Fist fights start to break out, and boys start to collect good throwing rocks.

As Mason puts it, "By the end of the second week, twenty-two highly similar boys who had met only two weeks before had formed two nearly warring tribes, with only the gentle nudge of isolation and competition to encourage them." (Mason, page 2.)

In the final days of camp, the researchers tried to reverse this process with a number of what we would now call team-building exercises - in this case, trying to get two teams to act as one. Among other things, the researchers shut off the water supply to the camp, and all the children had to work together to figure out what was wrong and restore the water supply. "After these exercises, the boys remained partial to their own teams, but they did agree to ride home in the same bus at the end of camp. Prior to the exercises, both teams had refused to share a bus with the others." (Mason, p. 134.)

Lord of the Flies
If you're thinking that the Robbers Cave experiment sounds a lot like a scientific version of Lord of the Flies, you are not alone. However, it seems unlikely that there was any cross-influence. Lord of the Flies was published in 1954, the same year the Robbers Cave experiment took place. They are contemporary, and both clearly living in the shadow of World War II, but I'm prepared to think they came to similar places by different paths.

Ingroups and Outgroups
"Humans are hardwired to cling to social groups," as Mason puts it (p. 9). In the 1960s, social psychologist Henri Tajfel decided to test this concept. In one experiment, he made up two notional groups; the experimental subject was assigned to one of the groups. However, there was no conflict between groups, no difference in values. And there were no actual people in the groups. Except for the subject, who had been assigned to one of the nonexistent groups. How non-confrontational can you get?

The subject was then given a choice on how to allocate money between the two groups. Either both groups could receive the maximum amount, or the subject's group (the ingroup) could receive less than the maximum and the other group (the outgroup) would receive even less than the ingroup. Again and again, in many variations of this experiment, the subject chose the second alternative. Winning was more important than prosperity.

Civilization Is Not a Zero-Sum Game
One of the purposes of civilization is to tame some of these instincts. This of course involves the leaders of a society actually being interested in preserving civilization.

It's easy enough to point out flaws in the demagogue's world. For starters, life is not like a football game. Football is a zero-sum game, with one winner and one loser. +1 -1 = 0. Civilized life is largely composed of non-zero-sum games. +1 +1 = 2.

Here's an example. I have no idea how to change the oil in my car. I take it to my dealership, which employs a small army of mechanics. One of them changes the oil. I pay the cashier. So my car has fresh oil, and the dealership has a little more money than it did before I showed up. You don't exactly have the drama of a Superbowl, but I prefer it when oil changes are not exciting.

The Last 30 Years
Unfortunately, over the last 30 years or so, the idea of looking for win-wins, as they are sometimes called, has been displaced in our political life by the search for conflict. And we have found it.

Mason chronicles this process with about 100 pages of impressive original research. Her statistical analysis of data primarily from the American National Election Studies, which have been analyzing presidential elections since 1948, confirms our rising ire and progressive retreat into tribal groups.

Sorting
At the base of this process is a phenomenon that Mason calls sorting. She notes that we all have a variety of identities. Membership in a political party is only one of these identities. Race and ethnicity, sex, religion, favorite sports, smoker/non-smoker, pre-existing medical condition - it's a very long list.

What happens when all of the people in a group share most or all of their identities? It's not pretty.

As Mason puts it (p. 19), "Imagine how much more intense the Robbers Cave conflict would have been had the Rattlers all been Catholic, northern, and white, while the Eagles were Protestants, southern, and black."

This intensity, based on the sorting of identities between the two groups, reinforces the focus on winning. Fast-forward to American politics today: "All of the political arguments over taxes, welfare, abortion, compassion, responsibility, and the ACA are built on a base of automatic and primal feelings that compel partisans to believe that their group is right, regardless of the content of the discussion." (P. 50.)

Winning becomes everything; the issues themselves become relatively trivial.

Misleading Polls
Naturally, in such an environment, polling on particular issues can become quite misleading. Take the legislative fiasco that occurred in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings. It looked for a while like some meaningful gun control reforms would get through the Congress. One poll showed "83 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans personally supported a law expanding background checks." (P. 54.) And then - nothing happened.

Writes Mason (also p. 54), "when it came to the moment of public partisan competition, party victory trumped preferred policy for many Republicans. Party affiliation today means that a partisan cares a great deal about one party being the winner. Policy results come second."

What Comes Next?
As I noted at the outset, Mason is not sanguine about finding a way out of this mess. Neither am I.

Those who follow demographic trends - or just walk down a street in a city like Philadelphia - can easily see that it's not a white Christian country. Frankly it never was. Florence Thompson, pictured at the top of this story, was not Scotch-Irish. She was Cherokee.

But that doesn't mean that we will not be ruled by a closed oligarchy of white Christian men.

The idea that the country's wealthy business interests will desert the Republicans and possibly (aping Ross Perot) try to start a third party is, to my mind, unrealistic. The business interests in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy adapted pretty readily to Hitler and Mussolini (at least in the beginning), and the same already seems to be happening here.

I did come up with two glimmers of hope. I traded a number of very cordial emails with Professor Mason, and I asked her about these potential rays of light.

First, the Democrats ran hard on healthcare in the midterm elections, and it seems the issue contributed to their success. I asked Professor Mason whether she thought this might be a sign of returning civilization, or whether it was simply a matter of the Dems using healthcare (an extremely emotional issue) to mobilize their base.

Her response: "My most recent thoughts are actually pointing toward policy-based campaigning working better for Dems than Reps. Because the average policy attitudes of the American electorate are liberal (but a majority call themselves conservative), policy-based appeals should work well for Dems. The GOP, on the other hand, is incentivized to fall back onto identity-based appeals because their policies are less popular."

Here's my other possible point of light. I think the great move to the suburbs after World War II was a disaster on many levels, not least because it tended to isolate people from others who weren't just like them. (Mason talks a bit about the suburbs on pages 41-42.) Now, however, many people are moving back to the city and even rubbing elbows with people (gasp) who aren't just like them. And, as the recent election showed, even the suburbs around Philadelphia are changing.

Professor Mason threw some cold water on this one: "Re-urbanization might be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does generate more community-oriented influences. On the other hand, it further centralizes Democratic voters in smaller and more dense geographical areas. This makes the 'natural' GOP advantage in the Senate and electoral college even bigger."

Is there anything out there that can be big enough, and come soon enough, to head off our move to a two-class society, with a very small elite at the top, a large group of powerless poor people at the bottom, and no middle class in the middle? I don't know.

Just before the recent election, Mason gave a very interesting interview to WNYC. To listen to it, click here.

See also Fascism, Life on the Farm, Mr. Piketty's Book, Rugged Individualism From Daniel Boone to Barack Obama, Unsustainable Income Inequality.

Christ Church Park Redesign

Here's What I Think

X marks the spot.

Great meeting November 27 at Christ Church's Neighborhood House, on the redesign of Christ Church Park. The design team has been busy - a previous neighborhood meeting in July, also at the Neighborhood House; an open-air design workshop on Church Street, directly next to the park, in August; an online survey; research on other parks both in Philadelphia and elsewhere; and of course observation of the park itself.

At the most recent meeting the team went over all this activity and then presented a series of four design options, each taking a different approach but aiming at the same goals of increasing the park's usage and its usefulness to the community.

The Parking Lot
There was a bit of tip-toeing around what should be done with the elephant in the room - a parking lot that sits discreetly behind a red brick wall at the west side of the park. One of the presenters noted that turning the parking lot into part of the park would increase the size of the park by 50 percent. However, the National Park Service has stated from the beginning - very nicely - that the parking lot is out of scope for this project.

The presenters did discuss expanding the park in a tentative way that I hope didn't offend anyone, and they offered drawings of lesser takings from the parking lot that would improve the sightlines into the center of the block.

I say what I'm about to say with a twinge of regret, because I do think this is a model parking lot - it essentially disappears, in a nice way, behind a red brick wall. I wish every parking lot in Philadelphia looked this good. Very few of them do.

However, having given the matter some thought, I strongly support turning the parking lot into park land, for several reasons. First, this is a small lot in a crucial location that should be devoted to active people and not sleeping cars. Second, these drivers have alternatives in very large garages at the mall and on Second south of Chestnut. Third, turning the lot into parkland would provide a lot more room for people to enjoy themselves outdoors right in the center of Old City. Fourth, it would open up the block in a dramatic way that would let people see, before they stepped into the park from Market or Second, the potential for further walking adventures beyond the park, to the north and the west. Currently the rather complex web of streets within this block is not particularly visible until you get through the park and hit Church Street - the main drag, but hardly the only option for an interesting walk.

I hope the National Park Service will reconsider its position.

Diagonal Walkways
The presenters showed us drawings for four main options. I liked pieces of each of them, and pulled them together into what I suppose we could call option five - the rather clumsy drawing at the top of this story.

First, I think the park needs two strong diagonal paths, from the southwest to the northeast, and from the southeast to the northwest. These will be good for the park itself, and for the whole neighborhood. The survey came up with a figure of 20 percent of respondents who never go to the park. This is a terrible number, and the way to fix it is to allow people walking - residents, workers, tourists - to use the park as a shortcut to their destination.

There seems to be a lingering idea that a park should be solely an oasis for quiet contemplation, and that foot traffic shuffling through would be a distraction for those who have come to meditate. If you look at Washington or Rittenhouse Square, you'll see that they both have strong diagonal paths. And if you stand at the northeast gate of Rittenhouse Square, at 18th and Walnut, around 8:30 on a Tuesday morning, you'll just about get run over by the people walking through the park on their way to the office. This is not a conflict with other uses, it is a complement.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, pp. 96-97), Jane Jacobs analyzed Rittenhouse Square in detail and came to the conclusion that the square's secret to its success was the variety of users who appear in the park over the course of the day.

Jeff Speck, in his book Walkable City (2012), likes to talk about the importance of bringing back the useful walk - walking to the office, or walking to pick up groceries, possibly at several different stores (say, in Rittenhouse, coffee at La Colombe, bananas, clementines, and arugula at Sue's, and cheese and maybe soppressata at Di Bruno's).  Walking should not be simply a leisure activity. It can also be a useful way to get around.

I think people - particularly our leaders - have trouble with this idea, just as they seem to have trouble seeing a bicycle as anything other than a leisure-time toy. The pattern of bicycle commuting and utility bicycling throughout the day is firmly established in certain parts of Philadelphia. And certainly it's not a secret at this point. I just think a lot of people have trouble processing the information, let alone acting on it.

And I think I know why. Jarrett Walker, who is consulting on the redesign of Philadelphia's bus network, has an interesting blog post on elite projection. This is simply the idea that the well-to-do and influential people in our society imagine that everyone else is just like them, or wants to be just like them. As he points out, many, many problems flow from this lack of vision.

Anyway, the strong diagonals should be very good at getting people into the park, and they should also encourage people to see how permeable this block is. And this block is only part of a larger, currently unintegrated, circulation pattern that, if it ever gets hooked together, would allow people to get around entirely on byways and, with the exception of crosswalks, avoid the highways. This system of walkways and alleys is prepared to run from the mall on Fifth Street down to Front Street, and from the Arch Street Meeting House to Old St. Joseph's Church, below Walnut.

Opening Up to Market Street
Coming back to the park itself, let's have a look at proposals for the perimeter of the park, starting with the south side, by Market Street. The actual park is at present set well back from Market, with much of the additional space taken up by a planting bed. I personally think the original designers of the park saw this as a mashalling yard for tourists. You can stand at the fence and gaze at Christ Church on the other side of the park's large lawn, maybe take a picture. Then you can walk through one of the park's two gates, which stands inconspicuously at the west edge of the park, next to the brick wall for the parking lot. You can then walk up a brick path to the gate at the north side of the park and, if you want, cross the Belgian block of Church Street and enter the church.

So the whole park, on its most heavily trafficked side, is essentially hiding. Time to open things up a bit. There are a number of interesting proposals about how to do this, but I do think one thing is quite clear. This park needs a gate at the corner of Second and Market. Which by the way is only a few steps from the Second Street stop of the Market-Frankford line, and less than half a block from stops for six different bus routes (5, 17, 21, 33, 42, 48).

Unless you're moving a piano, you really don't need to drive to Old City. But however you get there, the corner of Second and Market is the natural front door for Christ Church park. At present there is no gate on this corner.

Sidewalk Bumpout on Second Street
The design team also suggested bumping out the sidewalk on Second Street, roughly from Church Street down to Market. Engineers have been consulted, and we are assured that this can be done without materially affecting the flow of motor vehicles down Second Street.

Steps for Sitting on the North Side of Church Street
The design team also recommends adding steps to the north side of Church Street. You could use these steps to walk up to the church's grade level, which is a bit higher than the surrounding area, or you could use them to sit on; this happens quite a lot on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. I think the steps the design team proposes would work well.

The team is also proposing a lower wall on the north side of the actual park. These two changes would serve to meld the Church and its yard, Church Street, and the park itself into a more organic whole.

Back to the Parking Lot
Okay, back to the west side of the park. Another advantage of removing the parking lot is that it allows you to move the current north-south walkway further to the west, so it's on line with American Street to the north. There was a lovely rendering of this new walkway, paved now in cobblestones instead of brick, and looking for all the world like an eighteenth century Philadelphia street, shaded by the mature trees that are already present in the parking lot.

This new alignment for the walkway allows people to see from Market Street that the block has an interior north-south street, and from the park they will also be able to see Church Street running east to west, and intersecting at the northwest corner of the park.  That's not the whole internal grid on this block, but I think it's enough to create an invitation to explore. 

About Those Pink Stickers
At the end of the meeting, printouts of the four design options were put on tables, and the members of the audience, who had each previously been provided with several small stickers, some green and some pink, were asked to show their approval of particular design elements by placing a green sticker on things they liked, and a pink sticker on things they didn't like. I placed my stickers, chatted with a number of people, and at the end of the session I walked around and had a look at where the various stickers had descended.

On the plans that still had the parking lot at least partially intact, the lot looked like a leopard with pink spots.

Parking lot gate. Unlock the value.

See also The Invitation, The Future of Christ Church Park, Permeable Blocks.

Getting From Here to There

Transit First in Philadelphia

Bus station, Marion, Ohio. Ben Shahn/FSA, 1938. 

I finally got around to reading SEPTA's recent report on redesigning Philadelphia's bus network, and I'm very glad I did. The Philadelphia Bus Network Choices Report was introduced to the world in June of this year. If you'd like to read the report, click here.

When it came out, Network Choices received insightful coverage from Jason Laughlin of the Inquirer (click here) and Jim Saksa of PlanPhilly (click here).

The report was prepared by consultants Jarrett Walker + Associates. This well-known firm also consulted on the redesign of Houston's bus network, which was rolled out in 2015.

What struck me most about the Walker report was that, at its base, it was a short course in geometry, as applied to transportation in cities.

The Geometry of Cars
Since the arrival of cars a little over a century ago (the Ford Model T was introduced in 1908), there has been a strong tendency to concentrate on cars for all of our transportation needs. This approach has had support from the car industry and its allies. Unfortunately, when it comes to cities, the push for an essentially monomodal transportation system based on the private automobile runs up against the laws of geometry. (See Network Choices, page 9.)

Cars are big. It takes a lot of space for cars to transport people. This is a problem, because the purpose of cities is to bring people together, and the effect of cars is to push them apart.

We can see this effect at work in Center City Philadelphia, where the Vine Street Expressway is essentially a moat dividing William Penn's original city from points north. Market Street and JFK Boulevard are too wide for pedestrians to be comfortable, and so the interesting stores tend to show up on the side streets and Walnut and Chestnut to the south, which are human scale.

Cars are also very convenient. They can get you anywhere there's a road, something that trains on tracks and buses on fixed routes do not do. There are valid reasons why people have loved cars since they were invented, and it is a simple fact that cars are not going away.

However, it seems fair to suggest that we are currently over-reliant on cars. Unlike some other parts of the country, Philadelphia has a functioning multimodal transportation system, with a variety of rail transit and a large bus network; many parts of the city are very walkable, and certain sections are heavily bicycled, despite the utter inadequacy of the city's network of bike lanes. Still, you only need to look at a street like Chestnut in Center City to see that there are too many cars, both moving and parked, and they are taking up too much space.

How do we cut down on the number of cars being used every day in this city? People tend to focus on commuters, many of whom either come from or are going to places that are inaccessible by anything but a car. Fortunately, there is a silver lining. Many of the car trips in Philadelphia are actually quite short - under two miles. And in many cases these trips could be done easily, and possibly more pleasantly, by walking, biking, or taking the bus.

Unfortunately, all of these modes have been neglected, and if you want them to fulfill their potential, they all need to be upgraded. When it comes to buses, this means we need to rethink the network.

The Geometry of a Bus Network
The older parts of Philadelphia were laid out on a grid, and the bus network in those areas generally follows the grid. In the newer parts of town, where street layouts often feel very suburban, the bus network is more radial.

The Walker firm really likes the grid, because the grid dovetails with the firm's basic design approach of short, straight routes, high frequency, and good connections. Free transfers are crucial to the success of this approach, which involves a lot of hopping on and off buses, but because of the high frequency it does not involve a lot of waiting time.

Let's have a look at South Philly. This is basically grid heaven, but that does not mean there are no improvement opportunities. It turns out that the east-west routes have comparatively wide spacing (they're generally about half a mile apart), while the north-south routes are spaced about a quarter mile apart (Network Choices, p. 73).

The north-south routes are too close together and basically try to steal passengers from one another. Who wins? The most frequent routes. Poor little Route 2, for instance, is stuck between the much more frequent Broad Street Line (aka the subway) to the east, and, to the west, Route 17. As the report puts it, "The pattern of boarding activity and route productivity is clearly showing that many people prefer to walk to higher frequency service." (P. 73.)

Route 47M
South Philly's overcrowding of north-south streets reaches its apogee with route 47M on 9th Street. To quote the report, "This is a highly specialized route that primarily serves the Italian Market on 9th Street. Until 1993, SEPTA operated all Route 47 buses via 9th Street, but the busy Italian Market meant that many buses were stuck in traffic during their trip through South Philadelphia. In May 1993, northbound Route 47 was shifted to 7th Street to improve speed and reliability. But the 47M was also added to maintain service on 9th Street.

"Route 47M operates northbound only and is effectively using one bus from the northbound 47 every 20 minutes to run through the Italian Market on 9th Street. This is done so that people going to the market  do not have to walk two blocks from 7th Street to 9th Street.

"This kind of response to specialized demands takes frequency from the most productive north-south route to reduce walking distance for a few people." And guess what. Hardly anybody gets off the 47M at the Italian Market. "Most people riding Route 47M get off at Market Street." (P. 84.)

I can hear the howls of protest already, as the keepers of South Philly's many "peculiar institutions" (such as parking in the crosswalk) rise up in agitated opposition. But if you're robbing Route 47 of significant frequency so that people don't need to walk two blocks to the Italian Market, and then virtually nobody is getting off at the Italian Market, perhaps sweet reason will win out in the end. Who knows. One insight the Walker report offers, which I happen to agree with, is that "the point of transit is to provide an alternative to driving, not an alternative to walking." (P. 93.)

Chestnut Street
In addition to looking at the big-picture geometry of routes, the Walker people also spent time going through their tool-box of hyperlocal solutions to specific problems. They clearly took a close look at Chestnut Street in Center City, a transit nightmare that I've been writing about for a while, and they've come up with a bunch of deft, often very minor, adjustments that I think could have very positive effects. (See page 46.)

Mayor Kenney has already started the ball rolling on Chestnut Street. In September he introduced a package of steps to increase enforcement of existing traffic regulations on the most heavily congested parts of Chestnut, which lie just east and west of Broad. And this program has had some effect.

However, the increased enforcement is temporary, and even now it's not solving the whole problem. Random people parking in the bus lane has declined substantially, but Fed Ex, UPS, and the post office still stop when and where they choose. And of course Uber and Lyft stop wherever their next passenger is standing.

I've suggested before that a big part of the solution lies in the third lane on Chestnut Street - the parking lane. Much of this lane is given over to to loading zones in the early morning, but at 10 a.m. those spots generally revert to being regular two-hour parking spots. Not coincidentally, the phenomenon of delivery trucks unloading in the bus lane explodes right after 10 a.m. It seems only logical to extend the time of the loading zones further into the day. I do think this simple and incremental move would help a lot.

That still leaves the problem of drivers filling the bus lane, which is on the right side of the street, while they try to turn right and go south on a numbered street. The right turn from the bus lane was never an ideal design, and I actually recall that when this first went in, the right turn from Chestnut onto 17th was prohibited. There was a big sign indicating No Right Turn. Basically, everybody ignored it, and after a while the sign quietly went away.

Drivers do queue regularly to make the turn on 15th and 17th, which I have observed personally. A lot. I'm told this also happens elsewhere. The issue is twofold. First, pedestrians walking along on the south side of Chestnut are often crossing 15th and 17th in great numbers, blocking the drivers who want to turn right. Second, cars headed south on 15th and 17th frequently back up into the intersection and even beyond, to the north. What can I say? It's a busy area.

The basic problem for a bus driver is that the bus stop is at the corner, just before the intersection. If turning cars back up at all, the bus can't get to the stop. The Walker folks suggest a number of changes that would likely make things, not perfect, but I think much better.

First, what would happen if we just moved the stop to the far side of the intersection? Then the bus driver could swing out into the left lane, drive around the queue, and stop at the stop.

Alternatively, we could simply eliminate the bus stop at intersections where cars turn right - in other words, space the bus stops every other block, placing them at intersections where there is only a left-hand turn.

But, but, you splutter. Take a deep breath. Stops in Philly are much closer together than they are in other comparable cities. The typical Philadelphia block is about 450 feet long, so stopping every other block would give you 900 feet between stops, putting Philly on a par with Boston (p. 93).

And often a bus rider would not have to walk any further than at present. Take the William Penn House on the 1900 block of Chestnut. It's located in the midblock, so a resident currently has a choice of two stops half a block from the apartment building's front entrance on Chestnut Street. Removing one of those stops would still leave you with the same half-block walk to a bus stop.

Implementation: All at Once or Bit by Bit?
So, should we redesign the network over a couple of years, and then implement the changes all at once? Or should we put the improvements in gradually, as they become available?

I'd do both. My thought on the 47M is that eliminating it is pretty much a no-brainer, but I've seen this community in action. I'd wait on the 47M and roll it up into a much bigger ball with things like Route 2, just west of Broad. This would encourage people to take a broader view.

On the other hand I'd do Chestnut Street now, especially since it's already started and may fail if we don't keep going. I'd even do it in several slices - expand the hours of the loading zones in the parking lane, and then later deal with the bus stops and the right-turning traffic.

The problems on Chestnut Street are widely recognized in the community, which doesn't mean that the changes will lack opposition. However, Chestnut Street is low-hanging fruit, and it might be possible to convince a City Council member or two that the results are almost certain to be very positive and the blowback transitory.

Also, it wouldn't hurt to get some successful pilot projects out there fairly early. They could show people that these changes actually do work, right here in Philadelphia, and possibly increase public confidence in the overall project.

Bus station, Marion, Ohio. Ben Shahn/FSA, 1938. 

See also Unblocking the Bus Lane on Chestnut, Taming Chestnut Street, Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, About that Parking Lot in South Philly.

About the photographer. Ben Shahn is best known as a painter, but he made a number of trips for the Farm Security Administration's photo unit, and to my mind produced work that is among the best in the whole collection, where he is up against some astounding talent, including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Russell Lee.

A New World Being Born

Despite a Breech Presentation, I'm Hopeful of Success

Philly Free Streets 2016, Broad and South.

As I sat in a very comfortable chair in the mayor's reception room in City Hall on Friday, October 19, I found myself filled with conflicting emotions and thoughts. It has taken a while for all of this to settle.

And there's still some sloshing going on, but I do have two salient thoughts: First, I think we are going to get our streets to a better place; second, I'm very concerned about timelines that look like hockey sticks - flat for the first couple of years, then almost vertical in the final year. I saw a lot of those hockey sticks in my corporate life, and I often watched the vice presidents in charge of those programs change jobs - more money at another firm - just before the hockey stick was supposed to go into liftoff.

The meeting in the mayor's reception room was about Vision Zero: the plan to reduce traffic deaths to zero in the relatively near future. And there was some very good news. The bill to allow speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard was in the process of being signed by the governor.

The other highlight for me was the introduction of a program of neighborhood slow zones. The two salient points here, again for me, are reaching into the community and asking the locals to grapple with the question of how they can make their streets safer and more enjoyable; and, second, looking at a whole neighborhood and assembling an array of improvements planned to work together to improve the life of the community, instead of the City looking at individual traffic lights and changing things for the worse, without consultation or notice. (I have personal experience of the top-down approach: see Running of the Bulls on Lombard Street.)

I see here the beginnings of a broader approach to reimagining our public spaces. I think the term public space generally causes people to think of parks, but I would definitely add streets, where much of the acreage is. And I would add our rivers and our rail lines. I think some of the most depressing views of Philadelphia are through a train window.

The list doesn't stop there. In New York there's a sewage plant that gives public tours and explains, among other things, the concept of a watershed.

When it comes to our streets, there's an increasingly large and articulate constituency for new thinking (see, for instance, this collection of ideas).  I think one of the big gaps lies in the City's ability to respond.

The City needs to get much more nimble, by which I mean flexible and quick. And it will only get there if the various departments that deal with our public spaces are brought together in ways that facilitate genuine collaboration.

It would be really, really nice if we saw more progress on the ground, more or less right now. A lot of us have been waiting too long. But I think getting the City reorganized around the larger issues is critical to our long-term success.

See also It's the Road Design, Stupid, and Reimagining Our Streets.

Barbarians Inside the Gate

The Immigration Debate Need Not Be a Fact-Free Zone

Newsboy, St. Louis, Missouri. Lewis Hine, May 1910.

"Most Americans believe that illegal immigrants should 'get in line' and immigrate legally, just like their own ancestors did. There are several fallacies, however, that underpin this viewpoint. First, for most of American history, there was no immigration 'line.' Every immigrant who wanted to come to the United States could do so without any wait at all. The immigration of Asians was eventually limited quite severely, but otherwise, even after Americans began imposing various medical and financial restrictions, 98 to 99 percent of Europeans and North Americans who wanted to come to the United States could do so without standing in any line. Waiting in a line began only in 1921, and even then, close relatives of those already in the United States were allowed to skip the line altogether. Consequently, very few Americans have ancestors who waited in an immigration line.

"The second fallacy is the belief that a line exists in which most of today's illegal immigrants could have waited. This is simply not true. The vast majority of visas given to immigrants today are reserved for family members of those already legally in the United States, and almost all of the remainder are awarded to those with highly sought-after job skills (nurses, software engineers, even university professors). If you do not have such a skill or a close relative already lawfully in the United States who can sponsor you, there is no way to immigrate legally - no line to get in at all. A poor Mexican or Ecuadorean without American relatives thus does not have the same opportunity to immigrate that a poor Irishman or German or Italian or eastern European Jew once had. Americans are certainly within their rights to decide that they no longer want to give other people the same opportunities that their own ancestors had. But Americans ought to acknowledge as much rather than perpetuate the myth that their forebears followed the same rules that today's illegal immigrants flout."

- Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams, The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016), pp. 567-568. Footnotes omitted.

See also Citizens of the Planet.

Permeable Blocks

Going Off the Grid in Old City

Old City Philadelphia, 1811.

When I got to the top of the stairs and saw the dead squirrel lying in the dirt, barely three blocks from the Liberty Bell, I mused once again on Philadelphia's apparent inability to sustain a performance. Maestro, cue the tone-deaf trombones.

My friend Joe Schiavo tells me it used to be a lot worse. The area at the top of the stairs, now a parking lot, used to be a hot spot for short dumping. Still, the center of this block should be a Grand Central Station for distributing pedestrians - both tourists and locals - among the various destinations that lie a stone's throw from my dead squirrel. And it's not.

The pedestrian walkways through this block already exist. The east-west route actually extends from the mall, between Fifth and Sixth Streets, past Christ Church at Second Street, and all the way through to Front Street. The north-south route joins the Arch Street Meeting House to the north with Franklin Court just south of Market, and continues through the National Park to Old St. Joseph's Church, just south of Walnut.

However, there is a hitch in the north-south route - a gate at the southern edge of the Arch Street Meeting's property. This gate seems to be locked all the time.

Here's what the area around the gate looks like. The dead squirrel is just to the right, out of the picture.

Perhaps not a jungle, but definitely a jumble.

The gate is actually separating two parking lots - the lot for the Arch Street Meeting House to the north, and the parking lot to the south, which lies behind buildings that front on Third and also Market.

The gate issue is easily fixed with a key. But there's a reason the gate is locked. The parking lot at the center of the block - where all the walkways converge - is a very uninviting space. To put it charitably, this lot does not meet the City's current design standards for parking lots. (See Putting Some Park into Old Parking Lots.)

Here's what the bad-boy lot looks like. The stairs that lead to the walkways running south and west are just out of sight to the right.

There's also room for garbage. (Think sheds, at the very least. See What Should We Do With the Humble Dumpster?)

And here's my favorite wall. Something assembled by people who simply do not give a damn.

The one good thing about the mess in the middle of the block is that it's hard to see unless you're standing right on top of it. There's a significant grade change right in the center of the block, which is why there are stairs.

Don't forget to set the hand brake.

From Fifth to Third
Let's back up and talk about some of the parts that are pretty. The walkway, as I mentioned, begins in the west at Fifth Street, across from the mall. It would be nice if there were a mid-block crossing here, so people visiting the mall might actually feel invited to go see where the walkway takes them.

Between Fifth and Fourth things are quite lovely. I was puzzled by this oddity. My brother thinks it may be a work of art - bench frames standing in for benches, part for the whole. Sort of like the ghost structures at Franklin Court.

Ghost benches.

The pretty part continues across Fourth Street, which could also use a mid-block crossing. This area is formally known as the Commerce Street Walkway, after a street that used to run just north of Market and now lives mainly in memory and old maps. Commerce Square, in the 2000 block of Market, takes its name from Commerce Street.

Commerce Street Walkway, from Fourth Street.

If you look carefully, you can see the wall and the parking lot in the distance, but they're hardly detracting from the bucolic ambience.

When you hit the wall, you need to turn left to go up the steps or right to go to Market Street. The walk down to Market is rather barren, but there is a nice outdoor eating area attached to a restaurant.

This may be Orianna Street. Or maybe not.

If you go left up the steps you come to the ugly part, but you can push through to Third Street on Wistar Alley.

Wistar Alley.

Some nice pavers in the foreground. I'd love to see what's underneath all the asphalt. The alley itself is rather dark and unadorned. Calling Isaiah Zagar. Let's do mosaics with lots mirror shards, like the 800 block of Pemberton. (See My New Favorite Alley.)

Building across the street not my problem today.

It's important to remember the purpose of the exercise here. The basic purpose of fixing the walkways in the 300 block is to allow people to move easily through the block to get to adjacent destinations, like Franklin Court south of Market and Christ Church east of Third. We need to raise our game on this block so that people will feel comfortable rambling east from the Liberty Bell and discovering Philadelphia as a nineteenth-century city.

For that we need to learn how to sustain our performance. No flat trombones. No dead squirrels.

Here's what's available just across Third Street, on Church Street, not far from Christ Church. We need to live up to this.

Church Street.

So Who Cares About Going Off the Grid?
I do, and I think I have very good reasons. But first let's back up and glance at a little history.

Philadelphia's basic street grid dates to William Penn's 1682 plan, which was "aspirational" - the city didn't exist yet. When settlers who had purchased land showed up, they rapidly started adding little streets between Penn's big ones. (They also built out the city north and south along the Delaware, rather than expanding west toward the Schuylkill, but that's another story.)

Most of these little streets run generally north-south or east-west, like the ones in Penn's grid, but they often don't line up from block to block. You need to scoot a little bit right or left to pick up your little street again - and it may have a different name. Sometimes a little street will just go away - sometimes they come back a block or two later; sometimes they don't. And sometimes a little street is just a stub, ending in the middle of the block.

So it's not a grid the way William's 1682 plan is.

This pattern recurs widely throughout the older parts of the city, but it is particularly notable in Old City. And it is in Old City where these little streets are best placed to be a major tourist attraction.

I think there has been a tendency to view these streets as a mildly embarrassing remnant of our pre-modern past - after all, some of them are so narrow you can barely fit a car down them, let alone a beer truck. (And some are really tiny, like Grindstone Alley near Christ Church. It's just about six feet wide, wall to wall. I measured it.)

Grindstone Alley.

The Role of Permeable Blocks
What purpose do such streets serve in a modern city? As you may have guessed, I have an answer to that question: I think that the little streets, or alleys, offer a significant and sustainable competitive advantage built around human scale.

Old City is really two cities laid on top of one another - the modern, car-dominated city, and an older, almost accidental city that is profoundly human in its scale and appeal.

The alleys of Old City can be charming, quirky, occasionally mysterious, sometimes surprising. Oh, did I mention historical? Elfreth's Alley, commonly known as the nation's oldest residential street, is a National Historic Landmark. Only a short walk from the Betsy Ross House, it is located between Front and Second Street, north of Arch and south of Quarry.

But my new favorite alley is Cuthbert Street between Front and Second, a bit south of Arch and a stone's throw from Christ Church. It's just loaded with charm.

Cuthbert Street.

Recently I was sitting in my new favorite cafe, Old City Coffee on Church Street, when a happy and energetic group of middle-aged Italian tourists bustled in. As they were settling in to a collection of tables, one of the cafe's more senior people came out and explained to them in Italian how to order. And I think they liked the place, and liked the narrow Belgian block street out the window, the virtual absence of cars, and even though it clearly wasn't home, I think they felt at home.

When it comes to tourists, I think the big issue is to lure them away from the Liberty Bell and into Old City. Once they get there, I think they'll like it. Foreigners may find it comfortable. Americans may find it unfamiliar - even odd - but perhaps also charming.

I think there are big benefits for locals as well. Whether they live in Old City or work there, or are in from another neighborhood, perhaps to go to an art gallery or the Arden Theater, or to buy a bar stool at Mr. Bar Stool (that's an actual store, not far from Elfreth's Alley), you have more than one way to walk to your destination. You can get off the big grid and have a quiet ramble, maybe even let yourself get a little bit lost, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Sustaining the Performance
All of these possibilities already exist in Old City. There are just a few spots that could use some tidying up, and the block we've been talking about is, to my mind, at the top of that list.

I mentioned my friend Joe Schiavo at the top of this story. He and Janet Kalter and their non-profit organization, Old City Green, led the successful 2016 makeover of Girard Fountain Park, across the street from the Arch Street Meeting House, and are now leading a project, including a Community Design Collaborative planning grant, to bring the 300 block of the Commerce Street Walkway up to its full potential as a community amenity. I spoke with them, and also with David Rubin, the landscape architect, Job Itzkowitz, executive director of the Old City District, and Jonas Maciunas, who consults with the Old City District and was a principal author of the Old City Vision 2026 planning document. I'm grateful for their insights. However, the opinions I express here are my own.

My understanding is that soon we will be seeing some proposed designs. I look forward to commenting on them, but first I wanted to do this story, to lay out the context and to encourage people to think not just about what these improvements will do for the block, but also what they can do for the whole of Old City.

One Last Thing
I've concentrated in this story on the potential to make it easier and more pleasant for people to move around Old City. But Commerce Street Walkway should also be a place for people to hang out. In fact, it already is. The benches in the 300 block regularly sport a variety of people taking the air, wielding cigarettes, cell phones, and laptops, or just sitting.

Here's my idea. At the top of the steps, place a few tables and some chairs. (I am stealing this idea, of course, from Dilworth Park and Love Park.) Oh, and throw in a gelato stand. Call it the Dead Squirrel Cafe. Or maybe not.

Cobblestones, Cuthbert Street.

See also Alleys, This Isn't Just Any Alley, A Tale of Three Alleys, City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street,  Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, Second and Chestnut, The Invitation, The Future of Christ Church Park.

Bike Parking 9/29 Asbury Park

Helping Make Civilization Happen

Here are some shots of the bike parking for the Sea Hear Now music festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on September 29, 2018. The festival continues tomorrow. People noted that the car parking seemed less crazy than usual. Maybe the large number of people who rode bikes had something to do with that.

The main bike parking lot, 5th Ave. and Ocean.

A wide view of the main lot.

Parking next to Convention Hall. 

More parking and some happy listeners, 7th Ave. at Webb.

Taming Chestnut Street

The Limits of Enforcement

Chestnut Street, shortly after 10 a.m. Parking lane to the right.

Here's an email I sent to Mayor Kenney yesterday.

September 27, 2018

Dear Mayor Kenney,

Thank you for your initiative to improve traffic flow on Chestnut Street in Center City and also on Market Street east of City Hall.

I am convinced that enforcement alone will not do the job. In fact, as the various enforcement agencies see that their efforts are ineffective, and they quietly lose interest in the project, I think we could easily wind up in a worse situation than the one we started from. However, I do think the problem can be solved.

A few years back, the City took a lot of the parking spaces on Chestnut and turned them into loading zones - but only until 10 a.m., when they become regular 2-hour parking spaces. If you want to move delivery vehicles out of the bus lane, you need to give them places to go. And I think one very feasible solution would be to extend the hours of the loading zones that are already there.

Here's a story on Chestnut Street that I wrote a while ago.

Sincerely,

Bill West

All the Whining Will Be the Sound of Change

The Revolution in Parking Has Started. Just Listen.

Occasionally, Donald Shoup goes literary on me. Here he is quoting Machiavelli:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old order of things, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."

And, as Shoup notes on page 281 of his new book, Parking and the City (2018), if the entrenched forces of the status quo ever do give ground, they will whine a lot as they move. Nobody ever said this process would be easy, or pleasant, or neat. (The Machiavelli quote is also on page 281.)

Shoup's topic, of course, is parking. He's been at it for decades, and in the last decade there have clearly been some tectonic shifts. You wouldn't necessarily know this by looking at the streets of Philadelphia, but then we've rarely been seen as pioneers or even fast followers, and the new book gathers examples of progress from around the country and the globe.

Shoup edited the book, which contains articles by him and several dozen other writers.

The book also performs another important service. Since the publication of The High Cost of Free Parking in 2005, says Donald Shoup, "many people have asked for a shorter version of the book to appeal to general readers who are concerned about the future of cities but don’t want to buy or read an 800-page book about parking. ... The Introduction to Parking and the City is this shorter, updated version of The High Cost of Free Parking." (P. xviii.) The introduction is about 50 pages long, and it does what Shoup says it does. And it's available online for free. Just click here.

Sound Bites and Pithy Quotes 
This is actually a well-written book. When it comes to economists, city planners, and traffic engineers, I'm generally willing to grade their writing on a curve, but I didn't have to do that here. (Well, maybe once or twice.)

Below are a bunch of quotations from the book - some of them brief, some of them very brief. I'm not convinced that the public's attention span is any shorter than it always has been - after all, the Greeks gave us aphorisms and the Romans gave us epigrams. However, some people persist in thinking that you can convince the man or woman in the street with dense prose and highly convoluted argument. And those people are as wrong today as they were in the Greek agora, back in the day.

These are snippets that can help you get your ideas across. Borrow them, or make your own. It will help you keep your audience awake.

The Wild West
Houston, Texas: "It's Saturday night. The streets are teeming with people streaming out of nightclubs and bars at the end of a raucous night. Partiers ramble down residential streets, searching for their cars, yelling and sometimes fighting in the yards along the way. Meanwhile, valets are running back and forth setting off car alarms to quickly identify customers' vehicles.

"Residents watch the mayhem from their bedroom windows and wonder if they will ever be able to sleep through the night on a weekend. They dream of waking up in the morning without finding empty cans, bottles, and pizza boxes in their front yards.

"Sound familiar? A burgeoning entertainment district can deliver great economic gains to a formerly sleepy area, but those gains come with a lot of pain." (P. 445.)

Austin, Texas: "Why lease a parking space if you can park on the street for free? Students stored their cars on the streets, sometimes without moving them for months at a time. On-street parking was completely unmanaged and overcrowded. People parked too close to intersections, cars blocked driveways and fire hydrants, and parking spaces were hard to find." (P. 455.)

Management: The X Factor
"For years, parking policy has been based on the fallacy that there is not enough space to park, while what is really lacking is effective parking management." (P. 190.)

Dreaming Is Not Planning
"The physical transformation of cities and the loss of valuable, active urban land are probably the most visible consequences of urban parking growth. The transformation was planned decades earlier in the futuristic forms popularized by Le Corbusier, Norman Bel Geddes, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others. In these designers' collective vision, high-rise towers were surrounded by parks and plazas and connected by giant, free-flowing highways. Missing from most of these early images, however, were the many cars required to move people around in these increasingly disconnected places and the space to store those cars while not in use. Only now can we see and measure those outcomes." (Pp. 126-127.)

Why Price Is Important
"Demand is a function of price, and this does not cease to be true merely because transportation engineers and urban planners ignore it." (P. 73.)

"Misinterpreting the peak demand for free parking as the demand for parking and then requiring that amount of parking everywhere has led to a planning disaster of epic proportions." (P. 72.)

"Parking spaces outnumber cars, and each space can cost much more than a car parked in it, but planners continue to set parking requirements without considering this cost." (P. 83.)

"To use a familiar analogy, if pizza were free, would there ever be enough pizza?" (P. 94.)

Off-Street Parking Requirements Deform the Fabric of the City
"A successful Central Business District (CBD) combines large amounts of labor and capital on a small amount of land. CBDs thrive on high density because the prime advantage they offer over other parts of a metropolitan area is proximity - the immediate availability of a wide variety of activities." (Pp. 75-76.)

"The high cost of structured parking gives developers a strong incentive to build in low-density areas where cheaper land allows surface parking, thus encouraging sprawl. Surface lots cost developers less money, but they cost the city more land that could have better uses." (P. 85.)

"Because parking requirements reduce the supply of apartments, they increase the price of housing. On some days, planners think about housing affordability, but on most days they think about parking requirements and forget about housing affordability." (P. 92.)

"Cities thrive when they offer more rather than fewer choices; cities that remove parking requirements will create more diverse and inclusive housing markets, and become more diverse and inclusive places." (P. 212.)

"Would the public interest be better served if parking and housing were unbundled, creating separate markets for each? Vehicles could be parked off the street in parking garages independent of dwelling units." (P. 146.)

Trade-Offs
"Cities seem willing to pay any price and bear any burden to assure the survival of free parking. But do people really want free parking more than affordable housing, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, good urban design, and many other public goals?" (P. 200.)

Hard Work Ahead
"There is a largely unspoken assumption that city governments have an obligation to ensure parking is cheap, plentiful, and convenient at most destinations. In order to realize effective parking reforms and the associated benefits, cities must dispense with this assumption." (P. 111.)

"While there is no silver bullet, repealing minimum parking requirements is a foundational step toward sustainable, affordable, and equitable cities." (P. 124.)

"Fair market prices can end the Hundred Years' War over free curb parking, and the revenue will provide a peace dividend to rebuild our neglected public infrastructure." (P. 282.)

"Like the automobile itself, parking is a good servant but a bad master. Parking should be friendly - easy to find, easy to use, and easy to pay for - but cities should not require or subsidize parking." (P. 203.)

"Trying to reform your own city's parking policies may feel like paddling a canoe to tow an aircraft carrier but if enough people paddle, the ship will move." (P. 500.)

See also Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Parking in San Francisco, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, The Supreme Court and Parking.

Jane Jacobs Was a Bicyclist

She Commuted by Bike in Manhattan in the 1950s

Boardwalk, Asbury Park. Not Jane's bike.

Jane Jacobs didn't drive, but her husband, Bob, did. They had a car, which largely sat in a garage on Greenwich Street, near their home at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, and got used mainly for vacation trips. For a number of years, the family car was a Fiat Multipla, an odd-looking little van that was famous in the Jacobs family for a highly temperamental fuel pump. Later, as they were moving to Canada, they purchased from friends a VW bus that was on its third engine.

Jane Jacobs didn't dislike cars. She just thought there were too many of them. And she hated what cars were doing to cities: "Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot. Downtowns and other neighborhoods that are marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support are casually disemboweled." (Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961, p. 338.)

Jane the Cyclist
Jane got started cycling as a child in Scranton, Pa., where she competed for saddle time on two tricycles in a family that eventually included four children. She was one of the few in her era who continued bicycling into adulthood - the nadir of American bicycling may be considered the 1930s to the 1960s, and she cycled right through them.

(This article relies heavily on Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, 2016. For the paragraphs above, see pp. 25, 114, 207, 261, 262, 277.)

Fortunately husband Bob was also an avid cyclist. When he was nineteen years old, in 1936, he toured through Europe by bicycle, even spending some time in what was then Nazi Germany. (Kanigel, p. 95.)

In addition to practicing architecture (he specialized in hospitals), Bob taught and wrote. Here's something from one of his articles: "We run the risk," he wrote, "of letting verbalized symbols overwhelm, smother and even negate the direct data actually supplied by our senses." (Kanigel, pp. 97, 123, 281.)

I think I like Bob.

Jane was also no stranger to bicycle touring. In 1940, she had taken a week-long bicycling trip in Quebec with her older sister, Betty. So it should come as no surprise to us that, after their wedding in 1944, the couple found themselves on a cycling honeymoon, riding through northern Pennsylvania and southern New York State. (Kanigel, pp. 25, 81, 96.)

In the early days of their marriage, they would go "hitch-hiking with the fish," as she put it. Here's what her biographer, Robert Kanigel, has to say: "they'd load their bikes on the train, get off somewhere within cycling distance of a fishing port, and, with their beat-up bags, hitch rides on fishing boats plying East Coast waterways. No reference to what Jane called this 'intricate network of unofficial transport' appeared in any atlas or tourist map. They made no hotel reservations, yet always found someone to take them in. In a little town on Pamlico Sound in North Carolina, it was the owner of a local shrimp-packing plant. In Maine, it was the island butter maker and her lobsterman husband." (P. 135.)

When at home in New York they would go for Sunday bike rides in the city, and after they had children, the little ones would come along too. (P. 135.)

But it is Jane's bike commuting that is, for me, the most arresting part of this picture. After all, Americans have historically viewed the bicycle primarily as a recreational vehicle. There was an awareness of the concept, even though very few adults were riding by this time. On the other hand, riding a bike to work between Greenwich Village and midtown Manhattan, in the starchy, gray-flannel suit days of the 1950s - that has a decidedly transgressive feel, at least to me. I love it.

Jane kept her bike parked just off the kitchen in their home on Hudson Street. It was accoutered with a wicker basket attached to the handlebars. In the morning, wearing conventional office attire, "sometimes even pearls," she would get the bike out and pedal through highly congested streets to her office at Architectural Forum, in Rockefeller Center - all this without bike lanes or even a helmet. Standard comments were "Get a horse!" and "Watch out, girlie, you'll get hurt." (Pp. 134-135, 200.)

Jane the Street-Fighter
Jane Jacobs is of course mainly known for her epochal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is also remembered as an early and important community activist. She fought a whole series of battles in defense of her West Village neighborhood, and in two of them she faced off directly with uber-highwayman Robert Moses.

They were oddly matched antagonists. Moses was the quintessential insider, amassing vast power without ever getting elected to anything. And there was Jane, the quintessential outsider, organizing her neighbors to crack open the doors of power and give residents at least a little bit of say about what happened to the place where they lived. It was a long time ago, and it's difficult to imagine today how radical this whole concept of community involvement was.

There's something called asymmetric warfare -  it's one of the reasons we lost in Vietnam - and I think the asymmetry between Moses and his world and Jacobs and her emerging world was one of the keys to her success. In the two battles she had directly with Moses, over Washington Square Park and over the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, she won. I think Robert Moses just didn't see it coming. (See Kanigel, chapters 15 and 17.)

I've searched around for something, anything, that Moses and Jacobs had in common. And I did find one thing. Neither one of them drove. Bob Jacobs drove Jane, and Bob Moses had a chauffeur. He never learned to drive.

I think there's something ironic about the fact that, in these two crucial battles over making space for more cars, neither side was led by a motorist.

(In 1958 Jane Jacobs wrote a story for Fortune magazine that provides an early summary of her ideas. I found it online; it's quite a lot of fun, and substantially shorter than the book. To see it, click here.)

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?