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?