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| Walnut at 13th. |
Mayor Kenney recently said we may be staying at home until Labor Day. I've given this some thought, and I think he's probably right. The coronavirus is highly contagious, and people can carry it without having any symptoms. This is a really bad combination.
I personally think we won't be out of the woods until we have a vaccine. However, if we work really hard at developing and deploying tests for the virus and for its antibodies, and if we develop public health surveillance systems that are highly effective, I think we can start to open up a bit before the vaccine arrives - always, however, being on our guard.
I don't know about you, but I'm already tired of staying home. My wife and I have been at home for more than a month, and Labor Day would put us at 26 weeks, or six months.
I really look forward to our daily walks, and I think we need to recognize that our current regime is not nearly as restrictive as those in, for instance, France and Italy. For an idea of what things are like in a poor suburb of Paris, read this article.
If we're going to do this through the summer, I think we absolutely need to be able to get outdoors, and do it safely. I think we need more space, and I think we need better managed space.
I've been saying for a while that we need a lot more space, but I haven't said how much more space. Here you go.
The Hoop Skirt Theory
Social distancing currently requires maintaining six feet between yourself and other people you don't live with. This is up from three feet in the earlier days. And in normal times I think we can say your personal space on one of Philadelphia's small sidewalks is more like two feet. Frequently intruded upon.
Six feet might not sound like such a huge jump - only twice the earlier guidance, maybe three times your normal two feet. But let's have a look at the total area you're taking up. In your mind, draw a circle around yourself two feet from the center of your body - say somewhere around your esophagus.
Now calculate the area of the circle. I went back and dredged up some grammar school geometry. The area of a circle is pi (3.14) times the square of the radius (4). This comes to about 12.5 square feet.
What happens when the radius is 6 feet? It's about 113 square feet, or roughly ten times what you're used to. So we can jump ahead and say, as a general proposition, that we need about ten times more space than we've been accustomed to. This need is greatest in the places with small streets and small sidewalks, where there wasn't any wasted space to start with.
The sidewalk in front of my house is 11 feet 8 inches wide. The stoop is 28 inches deep. So continuous clearance is 9 feet 4 inches.
Imagine putting on a hoop skirt 12 feet in diameter and walking down my sidewalk. People are actually talking about hoop skirt social distancing online.
It might be fun for some computer whizz to develop a model of what social distancing actually looks like on our sidewalks. Since the six-foot circle is imaginary, two circles can overlap - you only need six feet of distance between people, unlike two people wearing our hoop skirts, who really would need twelve feet. And many of us are actually moving, often rather erratically as we stop to read our phones or look into the window of a closed store. I don't think a model of motor-vehicle traffic would do us justice.
Oakland and Friends
Other cities seem to have figured out that our current regime is not providing enough space. We, however, continue to shovel people onto the Schuylkill Banks and expect them to socially distance when there simply isn't enough space. Maybe give them a bigger pipe, or a second pipe. I've written about repurposing the outer lanes of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to provide another route to Kelly Drive and Martin Luther King Drive. I wouldn't move to enforcement until I'd provided adequate space.
As I said, other people seem to have figured out that social distancing requires a lot more space than is currently available, and they're moving to fix that. Oakland is repurposing 74 miles of city streets, allowing local motor-vehicle traffic only and creating shared public spaces where drivers must recognize the right of pedestrians and bicyclists to be in the street.
Oakland is in a class by itself, but other cities are also making significant moves. (For a story in the Guardian, click here. For a story in the Times, click here.)
And in Philly we're trying. The Bicycle Coalition and the Clean Air Council have sent a letter to the mayor, urging expansion of space for pedestrians and cyclists. Five members of City Council, including Council's president, co-signed the letter. And several community groups, including the Center City Residents' Association and the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, have also sent letters to the mayor. (For a story in the Inquirer, click here.)
Walnut Street
Recently Inga Saffron of the Inquirer suggested adding Walnut Street to the list of streets that should be repurposed. I'm quite fond of this idea. As Inga reports, part of the 1300 block of Walnut has already been repurposed (see photos at the beginning and end of this story). The street space between 13th and Juniper is being used as part of a quarantine site that has been established at the Holiday Inn Express located on the north side of the block.
As Inga puts it, "Since buses and other traffic have to be diverted anyway, why not block off the rest of Walnut Street in Center City? It’s not like businesses are open. Turning Walnut into a place for joggers and cyclists could make central Philadelphia feel less desolate than it does now."
Will this happen? I have no idea.
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| Walnut at Juniper. |
See also Relieving Pressure on the Schuylkill Banks.
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