On a Slow Boat to China

Dolce far niente

20th & Manning on a quiet summer day.

"On a Slow Boat to China" is the title of an old Bing Crosby song, where two lovers are dreaming about a protracted getaway. Nowadays the phrase has a more quotidian meaning, and people normally use the briefer phrase slow-walk, as in "Let's slow-walk this project."

"Slow-walk" strikes me as a rather dry, bureaucratic locution, perhaps with a slight odor of death and decay. The Bing Crosby phrase is, to my mind, richer and full of life. I hadn't been aware of the romantic overtones, but I think you can feel them. I'm comforted by my thought that the new bike lanes for Spruce and Pine are standing shoulder to shoulder at the rail of a ship in the South Seas, enjoying the peace and moonlight together.

And going nowhere fast.

Why Does the Slow-Walk Matter?
Currently Philadelphia finds itself in the midst of an effort to reimagine its public spaces - including, notably, its streets. There are two key issues here: bicycling and car parking. There are other important issues, but if these two issues are not adequately addressed, the whole effort is doomed to failure.

Vision Zero
Recently I attended the annual Vision Zero conference, held this year on the campus of Temple University. The conference celebrated several important victories, including state authorization for automated speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard. This was a significant and hard-won achievement, and I don't mean to take anything away from it when I mention that we still have some unfinished business in Harrisburg.

There is, for instance, the issue of letting local police officers use radar guns to catch speeders. Currently in Pennsylvania, only state troopers are allowed to do this. For 50 years, municipalities have been asking for the law to be changed, to no effect. Pennsylvania is the only one of the 50 states that does not allow local police forces to use radar guns.

Mayor Kenney delivered the closing remarks of the conference, mentioning, among other things, the recent, dramatic increase in the city's budget for repaving streets. He also said, "We want you to continue to give us a hard time." Well, mayor, here you go.

An adequate repaving budget is of course absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient to take this city where it needs to go. In terms of  business strategy, you're at the LODO stage - lights on, doors open. You have streets, but you haven't yet figured out what to do with them. For instance, do you want to devote one-third or two-thirds of a street to long-term storage of cars? Or are there other, more valuable uses for that land?

Parking
In general, when it comes to parking, Philadelphia is woefully behind the curve. I serve on the parking committee of a little city at the Jersey shore, Asbury Park, which is light years ahead of Philly. As one example, in February of this year, Asbury shifted its metered parking from pay by numbered spot to pay by license plate. It has also moved its residential parking permits from hang tags on the car mirror to license plate recognition. And you can buy your residential permit online. The Philadelphia Parking Authority has some low-hanging fruit available here.

Let's take a look for a moment at Center City Philadelphia. The congestion is legendary, both in the traffic lanes and in the parking lanes. (The two are related.) What many people don't understand is there are plenty of parking spots in Center City. They're just off the street. In the most recent survey of Center City garages, in 2015, the peak occupancy rate was 73.9 percent. A much better number for peak occupancy would be 85 percent.

Why is it a better number? Because it would free up space on the street. As I mentioned in 2014, "You could take all the cars parked at meters in Center City and sweep them into the garages, and you'd only get the garages to 85 occupancy."

How do we move parked cars to garages and reduce the pressure on our streets? There are three prongs to this trident.

Dynamic meter pricing.
The idea of charging a market price for parking in a city's downtown, and varying that price as demand varies during the course of the day, on different days of the week, and in different seasons of the year, is simply no longer a new idea. It's not mysterious, and the methods used to implement it are no longer to be considered rocket science.

Dynamic pricing had its Broadway debut in San Francisco a decade ago, with the help of a federal grant. (For more, see Parking in San Francisco.) Since then it has spread across the country; Asbury Park has been doing dynamic pricing for years. Philly really needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Turn parking spots into loading zones.
However, I think I've actually given up waiting for City Council to start charging market rates for curb parking in Center City. So here's an option. Convert regular parking spaces into loading zones, which are in fact desperately needed. Again, our approach to what is now the parking lane (or lanes) should be: What is the highest and best use of this space?

Yes, such a move would mean that motorists might well have to park in a garage when they would prefer to park on the street, and they will undoubtedly mention that thought to their elected representatives. On the other side is the fact that delivery vehicles are regularly blocking traffic lanes and frequently making Center City almost impassable. Not because the delivery drivers are bad people, but because there's no place else for them to stop.

I'd do Chestnut Street first. Much of the parking lane on Chestnut Street in Center City is already given over to loading zones - but only until 10 a.m., when they generally revert to being regular two-hour parking spots. As I mentioned last year, "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."

Vacancy tax for garages.
Commercial garage prices also need to come down. You'd think that operators would be dissatisfied with a 74 percent peak occupancy, but it's possible that they're making more money at that price point than they would if they lowered prices and increased their occupancy. There are times when public policy and private profit don't both optimize at the same point. (Who knew? For more on this, see Professor Shoup's Parking Book.)

So how do we encourage garage operators to fill their garages, and meet an obvious public policy goal? As I put it in 2014, "Price controls have a habit of backfiring. But you could tax empty parking spots in garages. For the first 15 percent, the tax could be zero. Below 85 percent peak occupancy, the tax would be greater than zero. Just a thought."

As far as I can tell, nobody has ever put a vacancy tax on commercial garages. Vacancy taxes on residential properties, however, seem to be becoming something of an item. Paris has had one since 2015, and New York City may soon be getting a "pied-a-terre" tax. 

Bikes
People who should know better continue to denigrate bicycling. Peter Walker of The Guardian recently wrote a book titled How Cycling Can Save the World, and he wasn't kidding. If you really care about getting people around in cities, and not killing people in traffic crashes, and saving the planet, and generally improving the happiness and well-being of the people, then you should care about bicycling.

To succeed in Philly, bicycling needs a network of protected bike lanes. This would likely quintuple the number of people riding bikes, and basically change the whole story of what goes on on our streets.

Not too many years ago it looked like things were headed in that direction, but after a good start the bike network got mired down, and progress in recent years has been excruciatingly slow.

The poster child for slow-walking is the proposed upgrade to the Pine-Spruce pair of bike lanes, which are the backbone of the city's network of bicycle lanes. They were originally installed in 2009, and were due (overdue) for restriping when a proposal surfaced to upgrade the lanes by adding flex posts. I won't rehearse the years of wrangling that have ensued. And I'm not going to tell you how I feel about this process.

Instead, I'm going to look on the bright side. It is actually possible that the lanes will be redone this year. What could possibly go wrong? Well, I'm mindful of what happened down by the South Street bridge, on 27th Street and South Street. The lanes there were restriped; they were also supposed to get flex posts, but somehow that didn't happen.

I've heard a number of stories about how all that came to be. I've decided not to repeat any of them. I just hope we don't get a replay up on Pine and Spruce.

Leadership
I won't deny that parking and bicycling are difficult political issues in Philadelphia - inflammatory, even. Still, I think it's worth pointing out that these issues simply are not hard on the level of policy or on the level of urban design and traffic engineering. And the solutions are not expensive.

What I think we lack is leadership. This shortcoming manifests itself in several ways.

In parking we generally get distraction - proposals that are popular and often amusing, but which consume way too much oxygen and prevent us from solving the underlying problems.

There was the parking amnesty, a bandaid if ever there was one. And the proposal to increase the minimum requirements for off-street parking in new construction, at a time when virtually the whole rest of the nation is moving toward zero parking minimums. I'll stop there.

As for bikes, it's the slow-walk that's the derailleur. People who oppose bikes don't seem to have any cogent, or even coherent, arguments left. So now it's the slow-walk.

But guess what? There are elections this year - the primary in May and the general in November, and perhaps some of the actors in our little drama will Shuffle Off to Buffalo. (Also the title of a romantic song, this time about a honeymoon in Niagara Falls.)

16th and Market. Is the light really green?

See also At Least It Makes People Laugh, Intermittently Terrifying,  It's the Road Design, Stupid, The Supreme Court and Parking, Taming Chestnut Street, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?