It's the Road Design, Stupid

Fiddling While Rome Burns

Emily Fredricks memorial, 11th and Spruce.

Death on our streets. Where does it come from? One school mutters about crazy bicyclists and obtuse pedestrians. Another school mutters about homicidal motorists.

And there's truth in all this muttering. People are human. They make mistakes, they act impulsively, and sometimes they act in anger.

But I fear the foibles of our common humanity are distracting us from the root cause of our problem: Our streets are not designed to kill, but they might as well be.

I've been studying the streets of Philadelphia for a number of years now. At some point it turned into a project - reimagining our streets. If I had my druthers, what would our public spaces look like? How would they function? It started as a personal project, but soon enough I found myself gravitating into the Vision Zero orbit.

Looking back, it seems stunningly obvious - to me, anyway - that safety should come first as a design principle. It turns out that this idea is actually controversial. Not that people come out in favor of death. Rather, they shift the conversation to other priorities - most notably, the need for speed.

This phenomenon of diversion and distraction is very common in our public discourse. There's always another shiny object for someone to toss into the air.

Council Plays Ping-Pong
Here's a recent example of politics as circus. Last year the Philadelphia Parking Authority was criticized for not doing enough to collect on old parking tickets. The PPA responded by dialing up the rate at which it was booting cars for unpaid tickets. The people expressed their unhappiness. City Council passed a parking amnesty, and a Council member got to take a star turn as a hero of the people.

A nice little game of ping-pong. Prod the PPA beast. When it stirs, shackle it. The people applaud. Take a bow. Makes you wonder if the whole thing wasn't a setup from the get-go.

The hot air of politics fills the sails of the ship of state. But if the ship doesn't also have adequate ballast in the form of thoughtful policy, it is likely to capsize in a strong wind.

An appropriate policy solution in this case might be to enact a statute of limitations on old parking tickets. Several people have suggested it, and it sounds like a good idea to me. Will it happen? I doubt it. Politicians are like movie moguls in that they love to recycle old ideas. Indiana Jones, Star Wars. How many sequels and prequels? Look for another parking amnesty in a few years.

Meanwhile, from an operational point of view, this whole kerfuffle never should have happened. The PPA is now even more distracted than usual from its basic mission of managing parking. Think about it: How does hounding people over 30-year-old parking tickets improve access at the curb today?

Zombies on the March
Love of the familiar, compounded by a very human resistance to new ideas, means that old ideas can remain powerful long after they have been thoroughly discredited. Some people call such ideas zombies - the walking dead.

Here's a zombie: parking minimums.

For many years, American zoning codes have commonly required a minimum number of parking spaces in or near new or heavily reworked buildings. Everything was official, and it certainly looked scientific, except that it wasn't.

In 2005, Professor Donald Shoup effectively blew the whistle on what he called "a precise, disciplined folly." The demolition had been going on for years, but with the 2005 publication of Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking, planners and elected officials no longer had an excuse to ignore the new thinking.

Shoup's demolition job is actually quite beautiful. I don't want to get into the weeds here, so I'll just skip a couple of hundred pages of data, statistical analysis, and closely reasoned argument laced with beautiful invective, and give you this: "Like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, minimum parking requirements do more harm than good and should be repealed." (Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, 2011 ed., p. xxxi. The "precise, disciplined folly" line is on p. 11.)

How It Played in Philly
So how did all of this play out in Philadelphia? Well, actually, we started off pretty well. In 2012, after a great deal of work, Philadelphia adopted a new zoning code that drastically reduced parking minimums. For multi-family dwellings the requirement, which had been one parking stall per dwelling unit (1/1) was reduced to three spots for every ten units (3/10).

In the Rittenhouse area of Philadelphia, where I live, the new law simply reflected the reality on the ground. Half of all households in the area don't own cars. In other parts of Center City the figure is higher - there is one area where 75 percent of households do not own a car.

You'd think this issue would be settled, but it's not. City Council is currently mulling not one but two bills that would push up the parking minimum for multi-family dwellings from three in ten (3/10) to six spaces for every ten dwelling units (6/10).

I honestly have no idea what we would do with all of those parking spaces. Storage closets, maybe.

It's my understanding that Council is reacting to complaints that curbside parking is very tight, which is certainly true in my Rittenhouse neighborhood. The Center City Residents' Association, which covers Rittenhouse, wrote a letter to Council opposing the proposed increase in parking minimums. CCRA noted that "it is not at all clear that mandating more parking space for multi-family housing will in any way reduce the shortage of on-street parking." It went on to suggest that as long as curbside parking is effectively free (a residential parking permit costs $35 per year), the curbs will be jammed. "Therefore," CCRA concluded, "if one purpose of the bill is to increase available street parking, a better way to achieve that goal might be to increase parking permit fees to market rates, thereby encouraging those using street parking to purchase vacant space in neighborhood lots."

To my mind, parking minimums are an intellectually bankrupt concept. I think it would be helpful if Council informed itself on the matter and possibly even came up with a comprehensive parking policy that looked at parking both on the street and off.

In fact, I would go even further. I've been looking at this subject for a number of years, and I'm not at all sure the parking problem is soluble in the context of a monomodal transportation system centered on the private automobile. I think we need to shift some basic assumptions, and start thinking seriously about what a balanced multimodal transportation system would look like, in broad outline and in fine detail.

Speed Kills
Life in the traffic lane suffers from the same dominance of bad old ideas that we have seen in the parking lane.

Since the very beginning of cars, there have been two problems that have defied solution - congestion and crashes. Starting in the 1920s, traffic engineers have used three main strategies to try to alleviate these problems. They have sorted incompatible types of traffic into separate spaces - most notably putting pedestrians on the sidewalk and giving the space between the curbs to motor vehicles. They have made more room for cars, shrinking sidewalks, fattening streets, and building new roads, most notably expressways and, later, interstate highways, that expressly prohibited any traffic other than motor vehicles. And they worked hard to increase the speed at which cars could travel on all these roads, both limited access highways and local streets. (For more on all this, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011.)

All three of these initiatives have had disastrous effects on the fabric of the city and on city life, and they have not resolved the issues of congestion and crashes.

So, once again, maybe it's time to accept the idea that the problem is insoluble as stated. Perhaps we should move away from the monomodal model, and get serious about a multimodal transportation system.

Something More
While we're at it, perhaps we can ask yet another question: What if a street can be not just a thoroughfare but also a public space?

Let's look at an individual block - 13th between Walnut and Chestnut. People complain about all the people sitting at tables on the sidewalk, eating and drinking and possibly even having a good time. And it's true they can get in the way of pedestrians, particularly those with strollers or in wheelchairs. The block could definitely be better organized, but the fixes are obvious and readily available.

To my mind, though, eliminating the outdoor restaurant seating should not be a part of the solution. The diners set a nice tone and vibe for the street, and it would be a poorer space without them.

And if you analyze the block as an outdoor room - a place to dwell for a time, rather than just a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else - perhaps you will come to the conclusion, as I have, that the diners are not interlopers. They belong there.

See also At Least It Makes People Laugh, Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Parking: Storage v. Access, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, Reimagining Our Streets, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?

A Certain Ramshackle Appearance

Who's in charge here?

Recently I've been having a look at the route of the old 23 trolley in Center City, mainly the southbound piece on 12th Street. And I've been having a number of thoughts. Including, who's in charge here? Have a look at these sign poles at 12th and Chestnut. Is there anyone who actually looks at this stuff and has the power to say, Wait a minute?

Don't get me wrong. In the modern world, I think we need more signs than they had years ago. For instance, the sign up on the building that says "Chestnut Street" is probably a bit subtle for today's world.

 It says Chestnut Street, if you can find it.

But do we, for instance, need two signs at Sansom Street telling us that we're at Sansom Street?

Trolley mast good. Second street sign bad.

I originally went to 12th Street, not to follow the trail of the trolley but to follow up on the news that, years ago, the Academy of Natural Sciences was located here - somewhere around 12th and Sansom. Good luck on finding any sign of that.

Once I was there I started looking around, and the archaeological remains of the 23 trolley are everywhere. I actually felt like getting a pith helmet so I'd look like some intrepid Englishman looking for dead Egyptians.

The most obvious remains are the tracks, of course. There's a long and tortured history. The tracks are a serious hazard for bicyclists. Motorists don't like them because a car tire on a rail acts like it's hit a patch of ice. Bicyclists have it worse; they can catch a wheel in the flange groove (or flangeway, if you want to be a stickler). At any rate, good things do not flow from that. After some unhappiness, the Philly Streets Department and Septa undertook to remove or pave over the rails at a bunch of intersections - these are the spots where bicyclists are most likely to "catch a crab," as rowers put it.

Disabled track, Sansom St. Filling the groove with asphalt helps.

That still leaves a bunch of track out there, and frankly a lot of it is not in very good shape. There are those who still are waiting for the 23 trolley service to be restored, and I like trolleys, so I don't want to get into an argument on that. But it seems clear that restoration of the line will involve replacement of a high percentage of the track (not to mention dealing with some gnarly ADA issues), so here's my compromise. Let's neutralize the track that's there - remove it or pave it over - and dramatically increase the usability of 12th Street - and 11th Street, which carried the northbound trolleys in Center City. Later on, if actual momentum arises for restoring the 23 trolley route, I'm prepared to be a very sympathetic listener.

The threat from the remaining track is very real. I was talking with an acquaintance who lives near Jefferson Hospital, and he described what it was like to go flying after his mountain bicycle's wheel dropped into the slot. Fortunately he wasn't seriously injured, but if Septa and the City think they've dealt successfully with the safety issues on 11th and 12th streets, they're mistaken.

One thing I didn't realize until I was looking for the old Academy of Natural Sciences site is that the tracks are not the only extant remains of route 23. There are masts. There are wires, up in the air, supported by the masts. My initial reaction was rip it out. It's just cluttering up the landscape. But I got some pushback from friends who like old things, and my view has evolved.

Frankly, I like the masts. Yes, they add to the clutter, but they are cool - I occasionally think of them as the big stone heads on Easter Island. A Philly version, of course. And I think they make the streets safer. They're sort of like bollards on steroids. I've seen a lot of light poles knocked over onto the ground. I've never seen a trolley mast knocked onto the ground.

Trolley mast at Locust and 12th. Needs more than paint.

It's true that many of the trolley masts could use some TLC, and in some cases perhaps they should be removed, but I now think that should be on a case-by-case basis. And maybe we could look at some colors other than pea-soup green.

Trolley wires, 12th and Sansom.

That brings us to the wires, which do tend to walk into a picture and take over. I was initially annoyed by this - there's some very nice architecture on 12th Street. But again my thinking has evolved. I'm okay with the wires. Let's keep them. Maybe string lights - LEDs of course. That could be quite festive, and help 12th Street compete with 13th as a restaurant venue.

But let's get rid of the tracks. And let's hire someone to sort out all the stuff we're sticking onto our streets. If you think of a block as an outdoor room, the idea of a designer who can curate the street seems a natural evolution.  At any rate, someone needs to extract some order and perhaps even elicit some quality from the cacophony we see so often on our streets.

Is anybody asking, Does this work for people?

See also Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor.

Striping Webb Street

Webb at Deal Lake Drive. The yellow boxes mark the setback required by state law.

Webb Street is a five-block street in the northern part of Asbury Park. It is in a mixed-income neighborhood and runs north-south, two blocks from the beach. On the south end it is anchored by The Asbury, a new hotel, and on the north end it stops at Deal Lake.

The northern four blocks of Webb were recently repaved, and more recently the paint crew showed up and worked its magic, trying to help cars and people find their proper places.

Webb does have an issue. Lots of people live here, and many of them have cars (this is New Jersey, after all). Then in the summer the "New Yorkers" show up to go to the beach, and they're very fond of Webb because it's close to the sand, and there are no meters (for now). So the striping didn't just include individual parking stalls and zebra stripes for the pedestrians - there are oceans of yellow stripes, carefully arrayed within yellow box borders, designed to protect the sight lines at intersections, and also to protect driveways.

Try telling the judge you didn't know it was a driveway.

It's well known that New Yorkers are not great respecters of clear space, whether at the corner or in front of driveways. (The locals tend to refer to all visitors as "New Yorkers," regardless of what the license plate says. I took ten minutes the other day and noted Auslander license plates from Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee.  Oh, and New York.)

The stripes get curvy so motorists can turn without agita.

Curiously, there have been complaints that all this paint is marring the beauty of a historic neighborhood, and detracting from the attention that should be paid to the lovely old buildings in the area. I have two thoughts. One is, nobody ever seems to complain about parked cars doing the same thing. Second, as regular readers of this blog probably know, I find asphalt to be extremely boring. I think the white and yellow stripes add visual interest to a road surface that looks essentially like a black hole is space. And I think the white and yellow also go very well with the green of the many lawns in the area.

Victorious by the Sea. That's the building's name.

Here's an 1883 Victorian, surrounded by white and yellow stripes. I think it's doing just fine. For Asbury Park, this is a really old house. The town wasn't founded until 1871. (This house recently moved from the east side of Webb to the west side, but that's another story.)

See also The Pavements of Asbury Park, What Streets Can Learn From Boardwalks, Pop-Up Railings for Crosswalks, A Poor Man's Bumpout, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor.