Cutting Corners

Mark Twain and the Venetian Gondolier

South Street bridge. So what is the acceptable casualty rate here?

In 1867, Mark Twain took a trip to, among other places, Venice. Here's what he has to say about gondoliers cutting corners:

"I am afraid I study the gondolier's marvelous skill more than I do the sculptured palaces we glide among. He cuts a corner so closely, now and then, or misses another gondola by such an imperceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself 'scrooching,' as the children say, just as one does when a buggy wheel grazes his elbow." (This is in chapter 23 of Innocents Abroad.)

My original thought had been that the phrase originated at the dawn of the motor age, but upon further reflection I wouldn't be surprised if the term went back at least to Roman times. It's easy enough to imagine a man in a toga scolding a careless charioteer by yelling, "Don't cut corners!"

Of course the man in the toga would have said it in Latin. I wondered what that would sound like, so I asked Emily Marston and Ashley Opalka, my mentors in all things classical, and they guided me to this: "Noli angulos praecidere!"

Cars Cutting Corners
At any rate, cars didn't invent corner cutting, but they clearly made matters worse, and, not surprisingly, official efforts to control corner cutting date back to the beginning of the motor age.

I took this picture, and then I jumped to the left.

In 1903, a wealthy New Yorker named William Phelps Eno published "Rules for Driving," a four-page document. New York City adopted the "Rules," making it the country's first official traffic code. As a counter to corner-cutting, Eno adopted something called the outside left turn. Drivers were instructed to move straight into the intersection until they reached the center and then make a virtually 90 degree turn, with the center point of the intersection always to their left. So pretty much the opposite of cutting a corner.

Not too shabby. Maybe even four feet of clearance.

Eno also suggested that New York install a post at the center of the intersection, to mark the spot. The city did this in 1904 at numerous intersections.

The center post came to be called the "silent policeman," and it spread rapidly across the country, as did Eno's "Rules."

Note fragging on the little red bathmat at the crosswalk.

Neither the posts nor the "Rules" were received with unmixed enthusiasm, and it appears that something of a guerrilla war developed against the posts, with large numbers being destroyed. Traffic regulators moved on to traffic lights; the first practical traffic lights appeared in Cleveland in 1914. (For more on all this, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011, chapter 2.)

I think of the silent policeman as a taciturn and rather stiff fellow standing at the center of a roundabout - the basic idea was to get cars moving in a circular direction around a main point. But this small piece of infrastructure could hardly do the job on its own, and the typical intersection remained a classic crossroads, with two streets intersecting at more or less right angles, and everyone seeking the shortest way through, as they had done before cars. Traffic lights worked to segregate traffic headed in different directions, but they did nothing to discourage the shortest way through.

A truck kissing the curb.

The South Street Bridge
Which brings us to the present day and to a particular corner in Philadelphia, where motorists turn right from 27th Street to go up onto the South Street bridge.

First the good news. The existing bike lanes on South Street and 27th Street finally got flex posts earlier this year. Back in 2017, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia made a detailed proposal concerning the bike lanes in this area. Adding flex posts was a big part of the proposal, and while the Bike Coalition plan for the lanes was, in my opinion, superior to the final result, I think any posts at all must be seen as a major step forward.

Here's the fly in the ointment. The Bike Coalition called on the City to "Install a mountable corner island at the corner of 27th and South to slow down motor vehicles turning onto the South Street Bridge."

Good idea. In addition to slowing traffic, it would discourage corner cutting, which is rampant here.

Cars do it too. Note the cracks in the sidewalk.

What did we get? Nothing. There is no marked bike lane at the corner.

I simply don't understand this. If you don't want to do an island, how about a mountable curb? Here's a mountable curb in Brooklyn, at Fulton and Bedford, where turning traffic apparently has trouble staying in its lane.

Do a curved version of this. But do something.

Fulton at Bedford, Brooklyn.

Why Care?
So why is this important? Because this intersection is a test case for the City's Vision Zero and Complete Streets programs. Are cars and trucks and buses prepared to make space for bicyclists and pedestrians?

Bikes and peds aren't asking for the whole space, just part of it. And perhaps we can all agree that it would be better if buses did not drive on the sidewalk.

This intersection is a tight space, and the tradeoffs are hard. I think all of the solutions will wind up with motor vehicles going slower.

I think adding a curved mountable curb at the corner would do a lot of good. Currently there is no indication for motorists, telling them that the space next to the curb is a bike lane, and suggesting that they take a line around the corner that stays out of the bike lane. Call me an optimist, but I think that many of the people turning this corner will be willing to follow directions if they are offered.

Large motor vehicles, like buses and trucks, do have trouble here, and some of them will still mount the curb, and that will continue to be an unsafe condition. However, I do think the mountable curb would greatly increase safety here.

There are other things that could be done, such as removing the eastbound turn lane, or moving the stop bar for the eastbound traffic further back from the intersection. Both of these would provide more room for maneuver on the westbound side.

I can already hear people complaining about increased congestion for motor vehicles, and more backups on the bridge and on Lombard. But here's the thing. The way to cut congestion for motor vehicles is to dramatically increase the number of people walking, biking, and taking the bus.

For a century, we've been giving more and more space to cars, and we have never solved the basic problems of congestion and crashes. More space for cars will not ever solve these problems.

But will more people actually walk and bike and take the bus if we give them decent infrastructure? Yes. Let's just take the bicyclists.  When it comes to cycling, numerous surveys have put the population into four categories. My favorite is No Way, No How, usually about a third of the population. What we have biking on the South Street bridge today are the Strong and Fearless, and the Enthused and Confident, perhaps ten percent of the total. Half the population are Interested but Concerned.

What are the people in this last category concerned about? Getting hit by a car and suffering a life-altering injury. Give them a complete network of protected bike lanes, and we could quintuple the number of people bicycling in Philadelphia.

And that's how you solve congestion in the main traffic lanes.

We're not all strong and fearless.

See also Intermittently Terrifying, Put Traffic Lights on the Schuylkill Expressway, No Turn on Red, Running of the Bulls on Lombard Street, Is It a Curve or Is It a Turn?