Missing the Point

Biking to School

Outside Greenfield School, on 22nd Street.

In 2012, Professor Peter G. Furth wrote, "It is this writer's opinion that the turning point will be when children begin again riding bikes to school in large numbers. When bicycle infrastructure and children's safety become intertwined, funding for bicycle infrastructure will be secure." (John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, eds., City Cycling, 2012, p. 135.)

I found myself coming back to this quote while reviewing comments on proposed changes to the bike lane on 22nd Street in that bastion of reactionary progressivism, Philadelphia. And I must say I'm feeling a bit better about this go-round. The discussions this time seem much less emotional and adversarial than they were on Pine and Spruce, and on Lombard. I'm thinking it may be because of the proliferation of protected bike lanes in the heart of the city - Chestnut Street in West Philly, Market and JFK near City Hall, and 27th Street and South near the South Street bridge. Look - flex posts right outside my car window, and the world has not come to an end!

I do sense more goodwill this time around, and perhaps an increased comfort level. However, I still find people questioning the bike lanes, or perhaps their placement or configuration, using arguments that would benefit from a deeper understanding of the facts. Let's take a moment to review a few of these arguments.

Flex Post Are Ugly
Opponents of protected bike lanes like to say that flex posts are ugly, and, in certain parts of the city, they like to add that they are not in keeping with the historical character of the neighborhood.

Where to start. Okay, flex posts are ugly. They're also effective. As for violating historical context, I've been hearing this one for years, and I don't think I've ever provided a full rebuttal. Today's the day.

Let's agree that much of your neighborhood dates from the middle or late nineteenth century. Good for you. So how much of it looks the way it did in, say, 1870 or 1890?

When it comes to the houses, the answer is, quite a bit. Some blocks, particularly in the historic district, would make a nice movie set for a Victorian drama. Other blocks offer numerous additions from later periods, which Jane Jacobs tells us is a natural and organic form of neighborhood renewal.

Okay, now let's look at the street - the space between the houses. What do we see? Well, first of all, we see cars parked at the curb - usually an uninterrupted line from corner to corner, sometimes including the crosswalk, and basically preventing a full view of the nice Victorian buildings. Back in the day, there were no cars parked at the curb and, standing across the street, you could see everything, down to the boot scrapers and the mounting blocks.

There were no cars parked at the curb because cars hadn't been invented.

In fact, extended parking at the curb used to be illegal. As the old English common law put it, "The king's highway is not to be used as a stable-yard." I'm personally not surprised that people didn't want to park their horses at the curb overnight, but their wagons were also not welcome.

What did people use the curb for? Dropping people off at their houses, and also picking them up. And of course package deliveries, coal deliveries - it was a lively liminal space, something like a shoreline, and then it got frozen to death by car parking.

The pre-car days are the source of your expectation of being able to get out of a vehicle at the curb in front of your house and walk across the sidewalk and be home. What is robbing you of that expectation is cars parked at the curb, not bike lanes. And you were robbed a long time ago.

More Interlopers
How about some other modern interlopers? Well, for starters, take a look at the street paving. You may notice a lot of asphalt. In fact, that's all you notice, until somebody opens the road and shows you what's underneath. Along with the trolley tracks, you may notice some Belgian block.

Asphalt was available as a paving material in the nineteenth century, but it hardly had the monopoly it holds today. There were dirt streets, and cobble stones, and Belgian block, and wood block, and brick, and something called macadam, which was basically crushed stone kissed by a steam roller. (And the roads were often in a poor state of repair. For an amusing vignette of the state of American roads just before the start of the motor age, see James Longhurst, Bike Battles, 2015, pp. 62-63. There's even a quote from Mark Twain.)

In my opinion, asphalt is a very useful material that is also very boring to look at. I don't think we're going back to Belgian block, but the point here is that it's very unlikely that the street in front of your house was paved with asphalt in the nineteenth century.

And there were no painted lane markers - or any other striping - on the streets in the nineteenth century. (You'll notice, when people try to do this on Belgian block, it doesn't work very well.) Now that Philadelphia has virtually returned to unmarked streets, I think we can agree we would like to have the stripes back. Innovation is not necessarily bad - it's just not historical. (For lane markers see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011, p. 52.)

Although there have been road signs for a long time, most notably signs carrying street names, the traffic control sign is really a child of the motor age.  The stop sign was invented in 1914, the same year traffic lights were introduced. Signage also governed parking, and parking meters were introduced in 1935. (For the origins of the stop sign see Longhurst, p. 91. For traffic lights see Norton, p. 59. For parking meters see Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, 2011, pp. 380-382.)

(Bill's going to fall down a rabbit hole for a minute. Clay McShane does report some tile traffic control signs from Barcelona that date to about 1880. The signs depict a man leading a horse and were posted at alleys in the city's medieval quarter. See pp. 395-396 of the linked article.)

So there's quite a lot of visual clutter on our streets that did not exist in the nineteenth century. However, there were other things to watch out for, such as horse droppings, also known as road apples.

So maybe we can put up with a few plastic sticks in the street, and while we're at it maybe repaint the lane dividers.

We Did It to Ourselves
I need to return to what I have discovered is the basic message of this story. There is no biblical or constitutional right to parking at the curb. In fact, as we've seen, English law was very protective of the king's highway, and this same approach was followed in the United States right up to the introduction of the automobile. In 1889, the New York State Court of Appeals opined, "The highway may be a convenient place for the owner of carriages to keep them in, but the law, looking to the convenience of the greater number, prohibits any such use of the public streets. The old cases said that the king's highway is not to be used as a stable yard, and a party cannot eke out the inconvenience of his own premises by taking in the public highway." (See Longhurst, p. 90.)

All this changed when the cars came. They just showed up and took over. Pretty soon there were cars everywhere - parking, moving, and trying to move but unable to do so because of all the congestion. There was a moment in Los Angeles in 1920 that pretty much sums up the whole process. Fed up with the congestion, the city banned curbside parking in the downtown. The ban lasted nineteen days. Under immense pressure from car owners, including quite a number who were wealthy and powerful, the city rescinded the ban. (See Shoup, pp. 491-493.)

This is only one event in a long and complex history, but the basic elements are all there. We did this to ourselves. It didn't have to happen.

Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes
Back to 22nd Street, and the Greenfield School, where the new bike lane is slated to run at the curb next to the school, displacing the drop-off lane there to the other side of the street, where the bike lane is currently located. (There are two other drop-off lanes on Sansom and on 23rd; they will continue to be directly next to the school.)

So far the Greenfield people, and frankly all the 22nd Street people, seem much more reasonable than the people who showed up to the Pine-Spruce and Lombard Street hearings. Good will will carry you a long way in my book.

I think my main concern about Greenfield is that the focus of the discussion seems to be entirely on access by cars, with virtually no attention being given to access by foot and by bike. Even casual observation indicates that a very large proportion of the students here arrive by foot.

So here's my problem. If moving the drop-off zone on 22nd to the east side of the street creates a hazard for the children being dropped off, then the children who are walking to school are already at risk. The question, in my opinion, should not be the location of the drop-off zones, but rather the quality of the intersections.

The school community has already known success with what had been the worst intersection near the school, the one at Sansom and 23rd. The City responded to politely expressed concerns by installing crosswalks and a stop sign on 23rd. (Actually there are two stop signs, one on each side of 23rd. The one on the right-hand side is not in a good state of repair.)

So progress is possible. Perhaps one day people will just habitually do the Complete Streets thing and think about pedestrians and bicyclists as well as motorists when they look at streets and intersections. And maybe, just maybe, one day they will think that having a protected bike lane running directly next to a school is actually a positive rather than a negative.

I know. Call me a cockeyed optimist.

See also Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes, Legacy Street Signs, Cars and Bikes - the Back Story,  The Pavements of Asbury Park, The Supreme Court and Parking, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?