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.