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?

Narcissism and Dictatorship

Benito Mussolini near the end of his career.

 "Count Carlo Senni has just been talking about his years with Mussolini, to whom he is whole-heartedly, but not wholly uncritically, loyal. He emphasizes one trait which strikes everyone who has ever worked with Mussolini: his unbounded, almost undisguised, utterly cynical contempt for his own human instruments. Except for his brother Arnaldo (now dead) and perhaps, to a lesser extent, his daughter, there is no human being in the world whom he loves and trusts. He believes in the ability of his son-in-law; he does not trust him. A sentimentalist about 'the people' en masse, he is completely cynical about all individuals, and measures them only by the use he can put them to... Yet so great is his personal ascendancy that his underlings - knowing that they themselves will be kicked away as soon as they cease to be useful - still retain their personal devotion to him."

- Iris Origo, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940 (2017) p. 66.

See also Fascism,  An Inflection Point, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?

Blame the Victim and Privatize the Grief

If You're Wrong, Go with the Big Lie

June 3, 2018. I got my t-shirt at 22nd and Spruce.

There's a well-worn playbook that's been used by the tobacco and asbestos industries and now seems to be an integral part of virtually any reactionary movement that deals with ideas. The basic principle is quite simple: Deny the premise. If scientists are saying that tobacco causes cancer, find some scientists who are willing to disagree. If argument doesn't work, go buy some scientific research that backs your side. If the war goes on long enough, found think tanks and give your best propagandists fancy, academic-sounding titles. (For background on this topic, see Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin, 2010, chapters 2 and 3. See also Jill Lepore, "The Lie Factory," The New Yorker, September 24, 2012.)

There's another template that came to my mind recently, after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Back in the 1920s, a new-fangled contraption called the automobile was busy slaughtering children in the streets of our nation's cities. And many people were unhappy about that, and they protested - there were marches, all kinds of things. (See Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011.)

The auto industry and its allies were taken aback by this uproar, and so they organized on a number of fronts. In particular they got state legislatures to change the traffic laws to make it illegal for pedestrians to cross in the middle of the street. This was a novel idea, and so "motordom," as it was called, didn't just sell it to the lawmakers. It also mounted a huge public relations campaign, even inventing the term "jaywalking."

With the law on their side, the auto lobby could then blame the victim. Little Johnny shouldn't have chased that ball out into the street. Or, what was he doing wearing dark clothes at dusk? On it goes, and it still goes on today. When a Duck boat driver killed a pedestrian down by the Reading Terminal Market, here in Philly, there was much tsk-tsking about how the pedestrian lacked sufficient situational awareness.

I wish I could say that the media have not been complicit in all this, but they are. Let's face it: Car ads are a huge category for print, television, and online media. Last year, for instance, a local television station did its best to blame a 14-year-old girl who was hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk in suburban Abington. (For a story on this, click here.)

In the end that driver was charged. In the Philadelphia Duck case, it was the insurance companies that finally shut the company down.

Okay, so blaming the victim is the setup punch. And here's the money punch. Motordom can say, with a straight face, that death on our roads is a private matter, not a concern of public policy. Mothers just need to do a better job keeping their children inside, playing violent video games and getting fat. The government doesn't need to do anything. Shouldn't do anything.

And by the way, speed limits are an un-American infringement of citizens' God-given rights. So our political class needs to balance freedom and death.

And the same thing happens with guns. Here the NRA has the advantage of the Second Amendment, which the Supreme Court has obligingly interpreted in a profoundly screwy way. So they've got the law.

But I don't think they're doing very well on blaming the victim, and we need to make sure that that continues to be the case. Because if they ever do get traction on that, then I think they'll have a good shot at privatizing the grief and removing the issue from the public agenda.

Fortunately, I think the NRA is playing a weak hand. Wayne LaPierre's famous statement that "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun" is problematic on a number of levels. First, we now have many instances where a good guy with a gun was present and failed to prevent mayhem. Second, there are alternatives, like seeing that the bad guy doesn't have a gun. In a school setting, LaPierre's dictum also conjures the image of giving guns to kindergartners. Even the idea of arming teachers takes many people to a place they don't want to go.

At its core, the NRA's vision is profoundly dystopian, and their argument for irresponsible freedom only appeals to certain people.

That leaves them with raw power. But power in America almost always comes cloaked with virtue. Naked, it's a tough sell.

I think that leaves a very large gap for the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas to rush through, and I think the rest of us should follow. Call us the Utopians, or maybe the Shining City on a Hill Mob.

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Guns Without Responsibility