Impasse No More

Turning a Dead End into a Destination

The French have several words for a dead-end street. I like impasse, but there's voie sans issue or cul de sac - this latter implies a road that bulbs out at the dead end, giving enough space for a vehicle to turn around.  

Dead-end streets seem to have a negative connotation in America, much like back alleys. My feeling is that little streets are what you make of them. 

Philadelphia has lots of little streets. Some of them are quite beautiful, and some, like Elfreth's Alley, are even tourist destinations. And then some are terrible. And some are just muddling along, with a few nice features and a certain amount of dreck that drags the whole scene down.

The 2000 block of Latimer is a muddle street in the process of raising its game. It's a dead end that can only be entered from 21st Street. On 20th Street, St. Patrick's Church and its ancillary buildings occupy the full block from Rittenhouse to Locust.

Belgian Block

Not too long ago, a friend asked me to look at the repaving of the 2000 block of Latimer Street, which he said had been going on for nine months. The workers had carefully removed the Belgian block pavers, replaced the water main, and just now were getting around to resetting the pavers, and he was wondering how much longer it would take.

I'm glad I had a look. I'd never seen a reconstruction of a Belgian block street. It was a pretty elaborate thing. There was a concrete sub-pavement that joined seamlessly to the concrete curbs, forming a sort of bathtub without a drain. On the sub-pavement the workers laid a layer of sand; on this they placed the Belgian blocks, well spaced; and then they poured more sand into the gaps between the pavers. 

I was a bit concerned that they were creating a permeable pavement in a bathtub without a drain, but when I went back the spaces between the pavers had been capped with grout. Pretty impermeable.

I told my friend the workers should probably be done in a week or two, if they didn't go away for an extended period, which they had already done several times. I was wrong. The workers kept showing up, but the process of laying in the pavers was very slow.

So, aside from the historic preservation angle - we're a World Heritage City, so we should probably hold on to some of our legacy fabric - why go to the bother of replacing an old Belgian block street with a new Belgian block street, when it would be quicker and easier just to slather everything in asphalt? 

Have a look at the photograph below.

Now imagine what it would be like with an asphalt pavement in the place of the Belgian block. Asphalt is like a black river. It divides. Belgian block unites. See how the Belgian block and the concrete curb and sidewalk and the brick of the building and the green of the plantings are all talking to one another. (It would work even better with granite curbstones, but that's another story.)

The articulation of harmonious elements, particularly in texture and color, creates an outdoor floor and, I would argue, an outdoor room. Look at the photo at the top of this story and see if you agree with me.

Charming intimacy is easier to do with a small street than a wide street, which is one of the many reasons why I like small streets. 

The North Side

The photo at the top shows mainly the south side of the street. You can see that there's a continuous facade line,  or street wall. The north side is not quite so fortunate. Many of the north side buildings front on Locust Street and present a very utilitarian backside on Latimer.

This is to be expected. After all, back doors, fire escapes for the larger buildings, slots for parking cars - these are all part of life in the big city. The question is not what you do, but how you do it.

Take this building, for instance. I think it's just fine. I do wonder about what used to be where the new brick and the glass block window now are, but really, it is what it is, it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and I think it's reasonably well done and well maintained.

I have different feelings about this rather flimsy wood-slat wall with razor wire as icing on top of the cake. I really don't like razor wire. It's kind of a buzzkill when you're trying to create a warm, friendly, intimate street. And, in this case, if its purpose is to deter intruders rather than simply make everybody feel like they're in a war zone, I think it's highly ineffective. Any enterprising burglar would, in my opinion, hop up on the adjacent cinderblock wall and scan the area for his opportunities.

Buddy, go buy yourself a few more sensors, and hook them into your alarm system. And lose the razor wire. It's antisocial.

As for cinderblock, yes, it's ugly, but you can deal with it. My go-to suggestion is a mural. Isaiah Zagar has made a career of brightening up boring walls with his mosaics, mostly around South Street east of Broad. 

The Church Parking Lot

At the east end of the street lies a sizable parking lot that serves the various buildings of the St. Patrick's church complex. Back in the summer, I was chatting with a Latimer resident who told me that, when the street is not closed for construction, the lot is in use throughout the day, seven days a week. And this block of Latimer is the driveway.

In other words, this lot is an important access point for the church and its ancillary buildings. It is also the focal point for the whole street - the center of the composition.

So maybe it shouldn't have quite such a poor feel. Have a look at the gate. Despite the rust, it's in good condition, but it would look more at home standing outside a fertilizer warehouse. 

This is, after all, the same Catholic church that gave us the Sistine Chapel. Let's upgrade the gate. And I have a good example of what I think a more ambitious gate could look like. Let's go around to the front of St. Patrick's, where we can see the wrought-iron gate in the photograph below, complete with green trefoil clover.

The rear face of the clergy house is also problematic. There is a large expanse of blank wall above the ground floor that I think would make a lovely home for a large mural featuring a colossal rendering of St. Patrick expelling the snakes from Ireland.

The Value of Trees

Parts of this block are very bright in the sun, and parts are very shady. The mottled shade in the picture above comes from the several trees that live at mid-block. I personally think this street could do with a few more trees, although I'm not quite sure where to put them. This is, after all, a small street.

If you'd like to learn more about the ins and outs of Belgian block pavement, have a look at the website of the Philadelphia Society of Small Streets.

See also A Tale of Three Alleys, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor, City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street, Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, Streets Without Joy, Second and Chestnut, Missing the Point.

Quo Vadis, Philadelphia?

Major Strasser Has Been Shot! Round Up the Usual Suspects.

Philadelphia, 1988.

Lately I have often found myself comparing City Council president Darrell Clarke with Mitch McConnell, the quondam majority leader of the U.S. Senate, who would dearly love to return to that post. Even in his reduced state as Senate minority leader, McConnell has shown himself astonishingly effective in making sure that nothing gets done. As for Clarke, on his smaller stage in Philadelphia, I have grown old watching him delay worthy projects indefinitely. In its own, quiet, way Clarke's performance is just as impressive as that of McConnell.

The Quo Vadis in this story's title, by the way, is Latin for Where Are You Going. Quo Vadis was the title of an 1896 novel by Henryk Sienkiewicz, a Nobel Prize-winning writer from Poland. Several decades later, Hollywood worked its magic and produced the 1951 film Quo Vadis, starring Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, and Peter Ustinov; a young Sophia Loren appeared as an uncredited extra. The story is a historical drama, set in the Roman Empire at the time of the emperor Nero.

So, Quo Vadis? The answer in Philly is, I think, not a happy one.

In God We Trust. Everyone Else, Bring Data.

I see this most clearly in the area I'm most familiar with - the project of reimagining our streets so that they are safe and useful and possibly even pleasant for everybody. But I suspect that workers in other areas could come up with their own examples of the underlying disease. The history of the 2012 zoning code would, for instance, be an interesting study. (For generally hopeful stories from 2012, click here and here and here.) 

And what is the underlying disease? City Hall simply doesn't have any idea of where it wants to go, so it deals with whatever shows up under its nose on any given day, and has no sense of how the pieces of the daily hurly-burly might be gently herded together, headed up, and moved out towards a better future. 

As for my own experience with our long-suffering streets, I could rehash the old fights, but that would involve me talking about Emily Fredricks, and today I'm just not up to that. So instead let's look at an upcoming issue. We'll be looking at both politics and policy. 

I've been hearing a lot lately about bicyclists riding on the sidewalk, and how much pedestrians hate it. My own impressions tend to confirm that there's a lot more sidewalk cycling than there used to be. Certainly there's a lot more bicycling overall than there used to be, and we can add in the many privately owned electric scooters and skateboards.

However, impressions and anecdotes can be remarkably deceiving. As Michael Bloomberg has often said: "In God We Trust. Everyone Else, Bring Data." (There's even a T shirt.)

So I went looking for some data on bike-ped interactions in Philadelphia - near misses, crashes, injuries, and deaths. My pickings were mighty slim. In 2009 there were two bike-ped crashes that resulted in pedestrian fatalities. One of these occurred at 16th and Locust. (For a story by Allison Steele in the Inquirer, click here.)

Not finding what I needed in Philly, I decided to look for any useful data on the subject. A few years ago, I had spent quite a bit of time looking at New York City crash data. In 2011 the Bloomberg administration had started something called the Bicycle Crash Data Reports. My conclusion at the time was that bike-ped crashes were very rare - even though two pedestrians had been killed by bicyclists in 2014. (For more, see A Sense of Perspective.)

I went back to the Bicycle Crash Data Reports for New York City and reviewed the numbers for 2018, the most recent year for which data are available. Bicycle-pedestrian crashes led to 270 pedestrian injuries and 55 bicyclist injuries. There were no fatalities for either pedestrians or bicyclists. 

In the same year, crashes involving motor vehicles injured 10,783 pedestrians and killed 115.

My tentative conclusion for Philadelphia, in the absence of good data, is that sidewalk riding does not result in large numbers of deaths or serious injuries. 

However, I think we're making a big mistake if we think that the lesser injuries and near misses don't have a big effect on people. I don't have any data on these interactions, but I do have some very interesting data on near misses between cars and bicycles.

Intermittently Terrifying

A 2015 British study called the Near Miss Project got 1,532 cyclists from across the UK to keep diaries of their bicycling trips, noting near misses with motor vehicles, and grading them on a scale of 0 to 3, with 0 being annoying and 3 being very scary. Analysis of the data indicated that a bicyclist in the study was likely to have one "very scary" encounter a week.  

We make a mistake if we only look at "objective risk" - the kind of risk that can put you in the hospital. We need to recognize that "perceived risk" - getting scared out of your wits - is also real. (For more, see Intermittently Terrifying.)

I'd like to have similar data for bike-ped interactions, but I don't. So I'll use the data from the Near Miss Project as the best available analogy.

And so here's my conclusion: Sidewalk riding is a serious issue. People are getting injured, and they are getting scared out of their wits. A bicycle on the sidewalk means pedestrians do not feel safe on the sidewalk.

This issue needs to be addressed. The responses, as usual, may be put into three categories: enforcement, education, and engineering.

The Solution Triad

Enforcement. After the events of 2020, I am strongly disinclined to use an enforcement blitz to try to solve this problem. My feelings were reinforced when I recently came across a story in the Chicago Tribune. A study of enforcement against sidewalk cycling found that cyclists in majority black neighborhoods were eight times more likely than those in majority white neighborhoods to be ticketed for riding on the sidewalk. Those in majority Hispanic neighborhoods were three times more likely.

I don't think I'm opposed to all forms of enforcement. I remember, back in the early eighties, when my children were quite small, we were out in Rittenhouse Square, by the goat. There were a number of other children, mostly well under the age of six. They were running around and playing in the open space between the goat and the big tree in the pavement. I believe some may have been drawing on the pavement with chalk. And then a large boy, perhaps twelve, showed up on a bicycle and started looping around in the space. He announced that this was the way it was: He got to go wherever he wanted, and everybody else had to get out of his way. I explained to him that that was not the way it was. And he moved off.

I suppose we can call that enforcement. If so, I'm in favor of it.

So ... Philadelphia is in the process of creating a new, civilian corps of public safety officers. These officers will be unsworn and unarmed, and they will report to the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability, the home of the streets department. It seems their main focus will be on directing traffic in Center City during the rush hours, but they will also be able to write tickets for moving violations and parking violations, such as parking in a crosswalk. 

I'd like to see this group given the additional task of enforcing the law against sidewalk bicycling. It's possible that just telling people to get off the sidewalk will be enough, along with the occasional ticket for cyclists who are slow on the uptake. (One of the things you hear from sidewalk riders is "I pay taxes!" Perhaps people simply need to be reminded that being a taxpayer does not exempt you from following the law.)

Education. Education can be divided into two parts: developing the messages and delivering the messages. The messages are already in pretty good shape, but distribution can be a challenge. I think the basic problem here is that we lack good continuing education systems for adults - systems that would explain the rules of the road to the forgetful, and possibly even tie the rules in to the reasons for them. 

I don't think this is going to be an easy problem to solve.

Engineering. Finally we come to engineering.  The basic solution to sidewalk cycling is bicycle lanes. The Bicycle Coalition regularly surveys bicycle traffic in key areas of the city. Its 2019 survey found six percent of bicyclists riding on the sidewalk. When no bike lane was present, the rate was 25 percent. When a buffered lane was present, the rate of sidewalk riding approached zero. 

Round Up the Usual Suspects

So how will this play out? What tools will our City Fathers and Mothers use to solve the problem of sidewalk cycling?

Engineering. I think our leaders either can't or won't see the way that sidewalk cycling and bike lanes fit together as two pieces of a puzzle. I've noticed in the past that people tend to have tunnel-vision and think that a problem must be solved where the problem is seen. (This is the problem of the quarterback who only looks at one receiver.) The idea of fixing one part of the street (the sidewalk) by adding a bike lane to another part of the street (the vehicle lanes) is a bit subtle, but if you can't figure it out, you probably shouldn't be designing our streets. 

And that's where I think we are. After our leaders fail or refuse to see how engineering properly understood can solve this problem, they will fall back on a political analysis that will strongly favor motor vehicles, give lip service to the safety of pedestrians but basically ignore them because that's what politicians have been doing for a century, and continue their hostility to bicyclists because bikes and scooters and skateboards are the interlopers disrupting their vision of a motorist nirvana. This nirvana was a pipe-dream in 1908 and continues to be a non-starter today. (See Cars and Bikes - the Back Story and Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?)

Education. Setting up a broad-based and sustained educational program for the general public, with targeted outreach to key groups, would be a major undertaking and a novel one. I think it would also be complicated, requiring, for instance, coordination among several levels of government. 

And so I think our leaders will punt on education - or rather they will turn to enforcement as a form of education. 

Enforcement is a bandaid, so why are we so fond of it? I think there are two answers.

First, let's face a basic fact about the place where we live: Enforcement appeals to the savage heart of Philadelphia. The Quakerly overlay of friendly persuasion is just that - a veneer. Underneath, Philly is like a football team with a very thin playbook. And our go-to play is crime and punishment. 

Politicians know a reliable crowd-pleaser when they see one, and they use it again and again.

And that leads us to the second answer. By avoiding the underlying issue and using enforcement to tamp down the symptoms for a bit, the civic leader can be assured that the problem will, in due course, present itself again, allowing the leader to go through a well-rehearsed role - first, a flamboyant display of shock that this problem has resurfaced, followed by a repetition of the punishment that will again allay symptoms for a while. 

I've taken to referring to this scenario as the Mobius strip of Philadelphia politics - no matter how far you go, you alway wind up at the same place. Some people find this environment comforting. I find it depressing. I like to solve problems - and of course I don't have to worry about getting reelected. 

Wind in the Sails Needs Ballast in the Hold

As I have hinted above, I think our basic problem is that Philly is all politics and no policy. For many years I had thought that politicians understood the importance of balancing politics and policy. The basic idea is that the wind of politics fills the sails of the ship of state, and the ballast of policy, down in the hold, keeps the ship from tipping over in a heavy wind. 

Color me naive, but I thought this idea was widely understood. Then I encountered, in my daily life, the eight years of the George W. Bush administration. 

Penn professor John Dilulio worked in the Bush White House for a while, heading up the "faith-based" initiative. When he left, he wrote a letter to a journalist that was later published in Esquire, in which he explains that the White House under Bush had "no real process for doing meaningful domestic policy analysis and deliberation." (To see the whole letter, click here. The quote is in paragraph 16.) 

Because of all the terrible things that have happened since, I think we tend to forget how bad the Bush administration actually was.

And I think there's a tendency to believe that people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove are evil geniuses, but we should remember that the jobs they have built for themselves aren't very hard. It's easy enough to put a spoke in the wheel of progress. And a retrograde agenda is, relatively speaking, a piece of cake, because you're marching over ground that is very familiar.

On the other hand, actually doing things to make the lives of ordinary people better is quite hard in the best of conditions. That's another of the many underlying asymmetries in our politics.

But the larger issue is that these people bring essentially nothing to the common weal. They may be good at winning elections, but the good of the larger society is a tertiary concern at best. 

Some Memories

Let's go back to Philadelphia. I don't want to paint too dismal a picture of our recent history. There has been progress, but the path back started in a low place, and the trip has been painfully slow.

I have watched this progress being made, particularly in and around Center City. And Center City is alive today in ways it simply wasn't, years ago.

When my wife and I arrived in Philadelphia, at the end of 1979 with a three-week-old baby, I was struck by the empty spaces and the almost eerie silence. I found myself thinking of Florence after the Renaissance, a place living quietly on its past, and perhaps without much of a future. 

On the weekends, I would go for long walks with my son strapped to my chest in a Snugli. My main route was east through the little streets in Wash West, to Washington Square and Independence Hall. Sometimes we would peek in at the Liberty Bell. There were no barriers, and there were no people. And then we would go home in more or less the same way, varying the route a bit, especially in Wash West, where there are so many interesting little streets.

Occasionally in the evening, I would walk out alone, with a camera and a tripod, and take pictures. Here's a shot of General Reynolds on the north apron of City Hall. 

1985.

Day and night, I had two main reactions. First, this city has good bones. Second, where is everybody?

Around the corner from General Reynolds, on Market East, a few steps from City Hall, I found an old movie theater struggling to find an audience. It's tawdry, of course. But I also felt it was dispirited, as if it was simply waiting for its lease to expire.

1985.

Philadelphia lost 13.4 percent of its population during the 1970s, and it lost a further 6.1 percent during the 1980s. 

Bleeding People

In prior decades, the federal government had poured vast amounts of money into Philadelphia, and some of it was actually well spent. I'm thinking particularly of Society Hill. But Clark and Dilworth and Bacon were gone, and even Frank Rizzo, our first fascist mayor, left office a few weeks after we arrived. 

Philly started its long decline in population during the 1950s.  The population continued to decline without interruption until the census of 2010 showed a small increase. The seventies, with their 13 percent decline, were the worst decade. 

And then there was the MOVE bombing in 1985, which left eleven people dead and 61 homes burned to the ground over two city blocks in West Philly. Overall it was not a good decade, but there was a positive sign in 1987 when One Liberty Place opened, taking the lead in redesigning Philly's skyline. 

In the nineties Ed Rendell came along as mayor. Rendell knew how to be a booster, and I felt the spirit of the city change in a positive way. The population declined 4.3 percent in the nineties, and then the numbers turned up after 2000.

Today the place I live in looks very different from the tired old city we moved to at the end of 1979. There is a construction boom. It's hard to get a seat in Rittenhouse Square. Children don't just congregate in small numbers by the goat or the reflecting pool; there are a lot of them, and they are literally all over the square. People actually spread blankets on the grass and have picnics. This was not a happening thing in 1979.  

What's It All Mean?

I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I am, however, well aware that Philadelphia is still the poorest of America's large cities. And I continue to see on a daily basis the extraordinary dysfunction of our city government.

Philadelphia has come a long way in the last 42 years. Properly governed, it could have covered a lot more ground a lot more quickly.

We simply need to do better. Our politics continue to fail us. Improvements are stillborn, or born deformed, or mangled in youth. These tribulations do not make us stronger. For that, the opposition would need to bring ideas to the table. 

I believe, despite all the positive news, that we are not on a good track for the future. We need to change.

Crossing Chestnut, 1993.

See also What We Lost, Those Pesky Bike Lanes, It's the Road Design, Stupid, At Least It Makes People Laugh, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?

South Portland Avenue, Brooklyn

The Future Has Arrived

Imagine a world where you can stand and talk with a friend in the middle of the street for as long as you want. No horseless buggy is about to careen around the corner, horn blaring, expecting you to scatter like startled chickens.

It's here, on South Portland Avenue. Several blocks running south from Fort Greene Park are now open streets.

Motor vehicles, as you can see, are still allowed on the street. The ones in this picture are all parked. But movement is also allowed. Residents come and go. So do plumbers fixing pipes. Electricians, carpenters, masons, painters. The occasional no-name hatchback that turns out to be an Amazon delivery vehicle.

But there is no threat of death.

Here's a picture of the other end of this block, up by Fort Greene Park. 

If we turn around and look across DeKalb Avenue, we can see the South Portland gate to Fort Greene Park. 

The whole park is one large hill, and this is part of the gentle southern slope. The northern slope is much steeper and is dominated by a wide set of stairs, in the middle of which is a small stone house with a door in it.

Inside the Hill

Inside the door is the home of American soldiers and sailors who, during the Revolution, were captured by the British and held in old ships that had been converted into floating prisons.

The prison ships were located in Wallabout Bay, which later became the home of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. When you're in Fort Greene Park, you're two blocks from the Navy Yard. In the prison ships, the death rate from crowding, malnutrition, and contagious diseases was astronomical. 

The British took a very informal approach to burying the many dead - a short boat ride to shore and a shallow grave on the beach. Needless to say, bones quickly started to pop up through the sand.

The Revolution ended, but the problem of the bones didn't. The authorities didn't seem to know what to do with them, but in 1808 there was a mass interment in a tomb located near the intersection of Hudson and York. 

Then along came Fort Greene Park, designed by the landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who also designed Prospect Park in Brooklyn and Central Park in Manhattan. 

A decision was made to transfer the bones to the new park, a crypt was constructed, and the bones were transferred in 1873. 

The 149-foot Doric memorial column at the top of the hill came along a bit later, in 1908. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White made substantial revisions to the Olmsted and Vaux design for this part of the park, giving us, among other things, a new entrance to the crypt and a comfort station (now the visitor center) in addition to the memorial column. 

So Fort Greene is a cemetery as well as a park. Something of a condominium, with the living upstairs and the dead downstairs. Most of the people who died on the prison ships aren't here. Only some of them, but it's enough to make the point.

It is estimated that more than 11,000 died on the prison ships. This is nearly double the 6,824 Americans who died in combat during the Revolution. 

I like to sit on a park bench at the top of the hill and think of the fellows downstairs. There is sadness, of course. But my main feeling is gratitude. I look around at the living, young and old, who flock happily to this park to play, or perhaps to just sit on a bench. We're up here. They're down there. We are together.

Below is a picture of two parrots. Their owner has brought them to the park for a little air, and perhaps so they can be seen and admired. Yes, we are all here, and we are all together.

Mountable Curbs

Enough about the past. Back to the future. Let me start with a bit of traffic geekery.

Below we're at South Portman, looking across Fulton Street at the Greenlight Bookstore. We're also looking at a crosswalk that is interrupting a yellow-and-black mountable curb. The curb resumes after the crosswalk, out of the picture to the right. The purpose of these curbs is to encourage turning motorists not to drive into the oncoming traffic lane on the way to the lane they belong in. 

This particular shortcoming of motorists has been, I understand, rather common in the area around Fulton Street, and I'm thinking after you've driven your horseless buggy over a mountable curb once, you're likely to think twice before you indulge yet again in this particular motoristic failing.  

Here's an attempt to encourage drivers not to cut the corner when turning into South Elliott Place from DeKalb. Elliott is the next block west from Portman, and it is a one-way street headed south. So nobody except a fire engine should need to cross this, and a fire engine won't have a problem.

The Rest of the Tour

South Portman extends the open space of Fort Greene Park to the south. Willoughby Avenue creates a similar corridor of open space on the east. Below is a shot of Willoughby that seems to have almost as many dogs as people in it, and of course a streetery.

On the north side of the park, running next to Myrtle Avenue, we found the largest array of bike-share bikes that I think I have ever seen.

And just in case you forgot where you were, the local laundromat is happy to remind you.

Further Reading

There is a very good book on the prison ship martyrs: Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War (2008). See particularly pages 163-168, 178, 197-204, 205, 209-210, 215-217, 233-234, 237-238.

The New York City parks department has a good brief story on the prison ship memorial. To see it, click here. 

The open streets in the Fort Greene neighborhood are managed by the Fort Greene Open Streets Coalition. To learn more, click here.

See also Cutting Corners, Fitting the Solution to the Problem, Flexible Vanderbilt, Transit Memories.

Spindrift

How Spinmeisters Switch Gears

Asbury Park. No spindrift here - at least not today.

The word spindrift started its life in the ocean, where sailors used it to describe the lines of foam that would stretch out from the crest of waves during a gale. 

Spindrift developed a second meaning in 2010, when it became the name of a kind of sparkling water. (Apparently, none of the flavors contain actual sea foam.)

I would like to propose a third meaning for spindrift, this time in the field of political rhetoric.

Mission Creep

My inspiration for this proposal began with the term mission creep. Mission creep appears to have been born around 1993, in connection with the 1993 American intervention in Somalia. Generally the idea starts with a relatively simple mission with clear goals and then, as the situation evolves (which almost always happens), new goals get added. New resources don't necessarily get added, and a complete review starting with why are we doing this almost never happens.

America's forever war in Afghanistan is often presented as a classic example of mission creep. After 9/11, the United States went into Afghanistan with a few clear goals. First, displace the Taliban from government, thereby eliminating Afghanistan as a haven for terrorists. Second, disrupt and if possible destroy the al Qaeda terrorist organization. Third, capture or kill Osama bin Laden, the charismatic leader of al Qaeda. 

We quickly achieved the first two goals, and we had a near miss with the third. It wasn't at all clear to me, at the time, what happened with bin Laden. Initially, our commanders seemed pretty sure he was holed up in a mountainous area near the Pakistan border, which was called Tora Bora. We dropped a lot of bombs, and when the dust cleared we couldn't find him, and our commanders were unsure he had ever been there.

Clean-up operations continued in the newly conquered country, and then, in April 2002, President George W. Bush announced a new goal - constructing a new Afghanistan with a reboot of the Marshall Plan that restored Europe after World War II. This is called nation-building, and from April 2002 it was clear that we would not be withdrawing our forces any time soon. Still, it didn't look as bad as Vietnam. (The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful timeline for Afghanistan. To see it, click here.)

A Little Hitch in the Argument

This story is a nice example of mission creep, and I would be happy if the real story were that simple. However, we have the problem of what actually happened at Tora Bora.

My own thinking about Tora Bora was delayed by a distraction - the epic propaganda campaign that led to the invasion and conquest of Iraq in early 2003, and the increasingly ridiculous search for weapons of mass destruction that simply weren't there.

It was only when I read Nathaniel Fick's 2005 book, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, that Tora Bora swam back to the surface of my mental pond. It looked different.

In December 2001, Fick was a marine lieutenant leading a platoon that had been deployed to Afghanistan. It was part of a force of more than 1,000 marines commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis, who later became secretary of defense in the Trump administration. 

Fick and his marines were at a desert airstrip code-named Rhino, in southern Afghanistan approximately 90 miles from Kandahar. They began to hear that Osama bin Laden was holed up (literally) in mountainside caves near the Pakistani border: Tora Bora. They waited for the situation to clarify. Here's Fick (the Tora Bora story is in chapter 16): 

"After a week of swirling rumors, I began to suspect the mission was just wishful thinking by commanders who always wanted a bigger role in the game. Then the cold-weather gear arrived." Mountain fighting, you know. In December. At 10,000 feet. Warm clothes necessary. 

Then the plan arrived. "From the Jalalabad airfield, we would move overland to two valleys near the Pakistani border. There we would set up blocking positions while special operations units called in airstrikes on the caves where the fighters were hiding. If they tried to flee, they would run right into us." 

Fick and his marines were ready to go. Then the plan changed. The marines would not go, and Afghan soldiers would net Bin Laden instead. At the briefing where Fick heard the news, a colonel said that "fear of casualties had prompted the cancellation at the highest levels of the U.S. government." 

After the briefing a fellow lieutenant called the change a "Goddamn chickenshit decision." A staff sergeant expressed some concern about their Afghan replacements: "Afghan allies? We don't have any Afghan allies. We got Afghans who'll do what we say if it helps them and if we pay them to do it. Bin Laden will trade 'em a goat and escape." 

And it seems that is pretty much what happened. 

The Kerry Report

In 2009, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, chaired by John Kerry, released a report entitled Tora Bora Revisited: How We Failed to Get bin Laden and Why It Matters Today. Reviewing the material available in 2009, the report concludes that Osama bin Laden was definitely in Tora Bora at the end of 2001, and that we definitely knew he was there. (To see the report, click here.) 

Among the mountain of evidence, I found particularly telling the opinions of two intelligence analysts who had studied bin Laden for years, and who were listening to al Qaeda's unsecured radio transmissions in real time. They both concluded that bin Laden was there and talking to his troops. 

That higher-ups were willing to reject inconvenient evidence, and later go into the disastrous war in Iraq on the basis of transparently shoddy evidence about weapons of mass destruction, suggests that leadership was willing to bend the evidence, in both cases, to reach predetermined conclusions.

Both wars were run out of Central Command, based in Florida. General Tommy Franks was in command, and his deputy commander was Marine Lieutenant General Michael DeLong, who retired in 2003 and wrote a memoir, Inside CentCom, in which he declared that bin Laden had definitely been in Tora Bora. His former boss, Tommy Franks, was singing a different tune, and so General DeLong, in an op-ed story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, reversed his position, declaring: "There exists no concrete intel to prove that he was there at the time." 

In Washington this is called walking your original statement back. Another term is backpedaling. Since I'm writing about spin, let me suggest backspin. Why should we leave such a lovely term in the world of sports?

Unspin

So what are we looking at in Tora Bora - the beginnings of nation-building mission creep, or a well-camouflaged stratagem designed to ensure the forever war that we wound up with? I don't know, and I don't expect to find out.

Lying underneath the spin room is a basement that is the domain of unspin. Here live the things that people simply don't talk about. Occasionally, as in the case of General DeLong, there's some fumbling at the beginning of a story, and you may briefly see the lace fringe of a petticoat before all returns to order. But once the ranks have formed, and the word has been passed, unspin presents a nearly impenetrable barrier.

If you're interested in going down to the basement of unspin to determine the actual command decision-making process at Tora Bora, good luck. While you're there, see if you can find out who was in the room when Nelson Rockefeller died. (For a story in the New York Daily News, click here.)

A Fatal Flaw

Just in case you're leaning toward the theory of mission creep rather than artful manipulation, let me point out that the idea of nation-building in Afghanistan contains a fatal flaw. President Bush proposed a reboot of the Marshall Plan, which was implemented in Europe after World War II. But the original Marshall Plan was designed to help countries that were already nation-states - dilapidated, perhaps, but subject to renovation. 

Afghanistan simply does not look like a modern nation-state. It looks more like the rough and tumble of Renaissance Italy, where families like the Borgias set the tone and Niccolo Machiavelli gave his name to the realpolitik of the day.  Actually, Afghanistan looks even more like Germany before the rise of Prussia: a large collection of small, squabbly political units where alliances shifted frequently and larger outside powers dominated events, either by dangling large subsidies or by force.

As I mentioned earlier, one component of mission creep is a failure to revisit the basic rationale of a policy. In this case, however, I think we may need to look more closely at why the failure occurred. There's an old saying: Follow the money. For a piece in the Times that takes a shot at doing just that, click here.

Back to Spindrift

Okay, that was a long way around, but here we are back to spindrift - a child of mission creep that I hope may have a better career than its parent. 

Spindrift involves an evolution in political argument. It turns out that, just as missions can creep, spin can drift. I confess I had never thought of this before, but there I was reading an article about anti-vaxxers, and the idea dropped into my hand.

Writing in the Times (to see the article, click here), Tara Haelle described how, in recent years, anti-vaxxers have developed a new rhetorical approach - the concept that vaccine requirements impinge on personal freedom. In other words, to their traditional weapon of junk science, they have added a new weapon - junk politics. 

Haelle refers to the work of Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, noting that DiResta "found through Twitter analysis that there was 'an evolution in messaging.'" The anti-vaxxers discovered, according to DiResta, that freedom "was more resonant with legislators and would help them actually achieve their political goals."

Looks like spindrift to me. (DiResta and Gilad Lotan wrote an article on the Twitter research for Wired. To see it, click here.) 

Context and Implications

Naturally, both spindrift and mission creep are much older than their names. In her book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020, pp. 79-85), Heather Cox Richardson talks about how, after the Civil War, southern leaders shifted their political messages (at least those intended for a national audience) away from blatant racism, instead arguing against taxes and in defense of private property rights, which would be more palatable to northern businessmen. 

This all makes me a bit nervous. I had thought I had a grasp of how we are growing apart in this country. Lilliana Mason in her Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (2018), introduced me to the concept of sorting. The basic idea is that if you are a white evangelical Republican devotee of QAnon, you will have a great deal of solidarity with other people who fit that profile. And, given current patterns of settlement and communication, it is relatively easy to live a life that is almost entirely devoid of cognitive dissonance. (See How Do We Put This Back Together?) 

But now I see anti-vaxxers and reactionary politicians talking to one another, and I'm seeing not just sorting but also melding. It's not just that like attracts like. It is also that, when they get together, they grow more alike.

So, as the right shrinks, it may also become more unified, both in its ideas and in its internal trust levels.

I'd been hoping that the right might just fall apart, but now I think we need to watch for something with small reach but great destructive power.

Asbury Park. Spume but still no spindrift.

See also A Shortage of Serviceable Ducks, The Roots of the Republic, On Demagogues, Jim Crow Was a Failed State.

Rousseau and the Filibuster

Remember the Partitions of Poland

Turkey Vultures, Joe Palaia Park, Oakhurst, N.J.

I've gotten to a point in life where I'm not entirely sure what's on our bookshelves, or where exactly many of the books have come from. This situation, when it was new, used to bother me, but now I look forward to the joy of discovery.

Recently my wife handed me a paperback copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Government of Poland (trans. Willmoore Kendall, 1985). She asked me if it was mine. I don't believe I'd ever seen it before, and frankly I don't think I'd ever heard of The Government of Poland. 

It seemed destined for a trip to the local used book store - we have way too many books for our small house. But it was a very short book, so I decided to read it before sending it on its way. 

I'm very glad I did, for a variety of reasons, but I'm only going to talk about one of them here. Rousseau is talking about the liberum veto, a Polish veto power that makes the filibuster of the American Senate look positively timid. Here's what he says:

"There is, to be sure, something in the heart of man that clings more stubbornly to individual privileges than to those advantages that, though greater, are less exclusive; nor can anything save patriotism, enlightened by experience, teach him to give up, in favor of greater goods, a once-glorious right that has become pernicious through abuse and is now inseparable from that abuse." (P. 56.) 

It struck me that, in American politics, we seem never to discuss the fact that the filibuster is catnip for a senator's ego. It makes the senators individually very powerful, it allows them to act in a capricious and arbitrary way and not even explain themselves, and right now it may let them destroy democracy. And later, if they wish, deny that they had had that intention.

I suspect that Vladimir Putin may be very familiar with Polish history. If so, I bet he's looking at us and laughing up his sleeve.

See also The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.

Unnecessary Spaghetti

Getting On and Off the Ben Franklin Bridge

You can actually stand next to Isamu Noguchi's 1984 Bolt of Lightning, which stands at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. I hadn't realized it was possible to get close to the sculpture.  The way I got there is twisty, but it is neither illegal nor life-threatening.

Most people only see Noguchi's work while riding in a car on the bridge. It's not the best way to look at a piece of art. 

When I finally found myself standing next to it, I liked the sculpture for the first time. My windshield view had been of an undersized, disjointed, somewhat tentative piece dominated by its site, which was a boring mass of gray stone. All of it together struck me as lacking texture, depth, and color.

The actual sculpture is 101 feet tall and, seen from below, all the twists and turns finally make sense. Even the color of the key comes into its own. From the bridge, the key basically disappears. 

Here's a more formal portrait, not taken from a car.

The setting does get a lot of help from the trees in Franklin Square, on the other side of Sixth Street. I think more green would be helpful, particularly in the foreground. If you don't want to do trees, then maybe bushes in pots.

By the way, it's not like people aren't trying to improve this whole area at the foot of the Ben Franklin Bridge. Here's a formerly blank retaining wall that's part of the ramp that takes cars from the bridge to Seventh Street, and the Vine Street Expressway.

Here's a wider shot of the same area. Murals and a bit of gardening can go a long way.

(This wall is part of a large series of murals that extend on both sides of Sixth Street. They are called Electric Philadelphia and were installed in 2020. For more information, click here. For a story on other artwork connected to the bridge, click here.) 

Two Interstates and a Bridge Walk into a Bar

The foot of the Ben Franklin Bridge needs to accommodate a lot of traffic. After all, the bridge, the Vine Street Expressway, and I-95 all need to tangle together, and the result is going to be a bowl of spaghetti, as access and exit ramps and main roads all connect with one another. 

However, the foot of the bridge is smack in the middle of one of the most historical neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and one where the residential population is growing rapidly. Yes, people do live here, and developers are busy making more space for more of them. So maybe we need to look at the balance between the demands of a transportation network and the needs of a residential neighborhood.

Here's a shot of the Ben Franklin Bridge from Monument Plaza, where the Noguchi sculpture is located. Note that there are seven lanes of traffic. A moveable barrier allows the bridge to accommodate four lanes of traffic inbound, or four lanes outbound, depending on demand. So how do you get onto the bridge, and how do you get off?

(Note the blue gantry that spans all seven lanes, and carries the green and red signal lights.)

Turning Fettuccine into Spaghetti

One day my wife and I were driving up Fifth Street to get on the bridge. We do this a lot. But on this day, Lois asked me why there was such a strange merge on the access ramp. Here's a picture of what she was talking about.

As you can see, when Fifth Street crosses Race and becomes an on-ramp for the bridge, it suddenly goes on a diet, dropping from two lanes to one. Call it turning fettuccine into spaghetti. You'll notice that painted arrows apparently didn't do the job, so now we have orange cones as well.

The amount of space the orange cones allow for merging from the right lane into the surviving left lane is almost comically inadequate, and indeed the merge now frequently happens in the middle of the intersection - that is, smack in the middle of Race Street.

I hadn't liked this intersection and merge very much for a long time, but that's true about a lot of the things that Philly's streets do, and I have to pick and choose. Well, I chose this, and a few weeks later I was standing at Fifth and Race, taking pictures and wondering how to make things better. Not perfect, just better.

After fumbling around a bit, I found something. Here's a picture of the intersection and ramp from further south on Fifth Street. Note the parked van on the right.

You can see that, in front of the van, Fifth Street develops a turning lane at Race. It's important to be nice to the Race Street traffic here, because Race is the way you get to I-95.

However, I think we need to balance the Race Street turn with the need to merge for the on-ramp to the bridge. And here's what I would do. I would extend the existing parking lane to the corner, and make the next lane to the left the turning lane. 

I know, I know. People tromping up from Independence Hall, many of whom don't live here - we do love our visitors - are quite likely to arrive at Race Street in the right lane and not want to turn right. So they will merge, and the knowledgeable drivers in the far left-hand lane - the only one designated for bridge traffic - will of course courteously let them into line. 

Or not. That's the downside of my proposal. I do think, on balance, that my proposal would be a better use of this space. By better I mean safer.

The Many Complications of Fifth Street

By the way, Fifth Street here is a complicated little piece of real estate. Just before Race, Fifth actually splits into three pieces. What we've been looking at is the the left-hand piece, as you look north. Just to the right is the middle piece, which goes into a tunnel that takes you north of the bridge. 

There is also a pedestrian tunnel up on the bridge that allows you to walk underneath the seven lanes of traffic. Here's the southern entrance.

The tunnel is shallow and short, making it a relatively easy walk. There is an odor of urine, but it is not overpowering. And there are murals. 

(While we're on tunnels, Patco continues to work on reopening its Franklin Square station, which last operated in 1979. For a story, click here.)

Let's go back aboveground, where the right-hand piece of Fifth extends to Race and offers an alternative place to turn and go to I-95. It doesn't seem to get very much use, but I don't have any data.

If this right-hand branch is indeed superfluous, I think it would be a nice place to plant some trees and grass. The landscaping of the U.S. Mint, the very large building on the east side of Fifth here, reminds me of the Gobi Desert. It is a stark contrast to Independence Mall, on the west side of the street, where we have trees and grass and red brick. But, pending data, I'm not going to press the point.

(A trailing thought: It might be best to turn Fifth Street into three one-lane strands of spaghetti back in the mid-block, well before Race. I'd lose my parklet over by the mint, but this may be the best solution.)

Three On-Ramps

There are actually three on-ramps in this area. In addition to the Fifth Street ramp we've been talking about, there's a ramp that accepts traffic from Race Street, and another ramp that accepts traffic from Sixth Street, which includes vehicles that have just gotten off the Vine Street Expressway. 

The other two ramps have also had their road diets, with the orange cones.  

These three strands of spaghetti effectively block pedestrian access from the south to Monument Plaza and the Noguchi sculpture. Just before I took the picture above I had a brief and pleasant conversation with a police officer who asked me if I was going to try to walk across the access ramps to Race Street. I assured her I was not even thinking about it. She told me that people do try to cross here.

I believe her. I just don't want to think about it.

Okay, I do have a picture of the third on-ramp, but I'm getting tired of orange cones, and I think you may be as well. Let's move on.

Wait a second. Let me just add that I think the designers should be given credit for slimming each of these on-ramps down by a lane. I'm hopeful, with the next repaving, that they will actually move the curbstones in, so we can get rid of the orange cones. This is, after all, the closest thing Philadelphia has to a front door, and we want our front door to look nice, don't we.

A Park Waiting to Happen

My big surprise was waiting for me on the north side of the bridge. I'd been trying to figure out if there was a way to get next to the Noguchi sculpture, and looking at maps and aerial photographs and driving by on Sixth Street led me to believe that there might be a way. So I took the Market-Frankford line down to Old City and walked up Fourth Street, and there I found my new favorite street, North Marginal Road, which runs westward next to the bridge from Fourth. 

Actually, I mainly like the name, although North Marginal does have a nice Belgian block roadway and is also next to St.Augustine Church, which dates from 1848 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This is a replacement building. The original church, completed in 1801, was burned down during anti-Catholic riots in 1844. 

North Marginal takes you to an interesting bowl of spaghetti. Most traffic coming off the bridge continues on to Seventh Street and distributes itself from there, but there is a small earlier turnoff that takes you to Fifth Street. I'd never taken that turn. Well, here's what it looks like from a pedestrian point of view, looking from the north. (If you look carefully, you can see the blue signal gantry over the bridge deck, at the far left.)

The street on the right is Fifth Street. It runs northbound. You can see a lane splitting off and heading east. It hooks up with Marginal Road and takes you to Fourth, which runs southbound under the bridge. I looked at the piece of road directly to my left, and figured out that it was another branch of Fifth Street that runs north for several blocks as the tunnel slowly emerges from the ground. We'll get back to this branch of Fifth Street a little later.

You'll notice some small trees in the central area, which is paved with Belgian block. Here's where I got started thinking. My thoughts started small, but they just kept building.

There are 15 tree pits in this area. Only six have trees in them. The others have stumps. Here's a view from the south, next to the bridge.

I think we need to plant nine trees. And lose the Belgian block. Install grass.

Okay, look again at the eastern branch of Fifth, running down to Vine. It has no reason to exist. Let's replace it with grass. Look at the rather nice wrought iron fence east of the sidewalk. Behind it is a large rectangle of grass. You could join the green areas we have just created with the existing rectangle of grass and make a nice little park. 

Why bother? Who cares? Let me remind you that the population in this area is growing rapidly. I have seen preschool groups come from here and go to the grass and an actual playground in Franklin Square.

(Yes, there is actually a pedestrian crosswalk in this area that takes you across Sixth Street, and another that takes you across the exit ramp from the Vine Street Expressway and into Franklin Square. I have driven through this area hundreds of times, and I never registered that there was a crosswalk across Sixth. This might be an interesting study in human factors engineering.)

 Here's a group of preschoolers crossing Fifth on their way to play.

Not a lot of parks in this neighborhood. Let's add one.

Stretch Goal

And now for my stretch goal. My casual observation suggests that none of these streets is heavily used. If a traffic survey were to confirm my hunch, I'd say let's close the whole thing at the initial exit point up at the foot of the bridge, and turn it all into a park. 

The vast majority of the traffic coming off the bridge goes onto a very wide exit ramp that carries everyone over to Seventh Street, where they can get on the Vine Street Expressway or the local lanes on Vine, or go north on Seventh, or follow another spaghetti loop around onto Sixth, which runs south. So what's the point of the elaborate, and tiny, distribution network to Fifth and Fourth? I don't know.

I'd keep Marginal Road and its Belgian block pavement. It hooks up with North Lawrence Street, which hosts a variety of buildings, including a wholesale food distributor, in addition to a rear entrance for St. Augustine. This block, with its mixed uses, reminds me of Jane Jacobs' Greenwich Village.

Walkway to Nowhere

One more thing. Here's a piece of turf and trees that lies just west of Fifth.

 

You'll note there's a pathway. It apparently used to lead up to the walkway that runs across the bridge on the north side. Not anymore. When you reach Fifth Street - this is where the cars turn off from the bridge deck - you're not allowed to cross. You need to walk down next to Fifth until you reach Vine, cross there, and walk back uphill to the bridge walkway.

I say rip out this functionless and misleading walkway and plant grass.

Or, if you're willing to go whole hog on the park thing, keep the walkway and have an uninterrupted pathway from Sixth Street across the bridge to New Jersey.

Earlier Proposals

Let me now take you back to those thrilling days of yesteryear - 2015 to be exact - so we can look at some earlier proposals to improve the foot of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.

The first of these proposals came from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. They were interested in the southern on-ramps and suggested eliminating the ramp from Sixth Street and the ramp from Race Street. The Race Street traffic would have been sent to the Fifth Street entrance, and the Vine Street Expressway traffic, which uses the Sixth Street entrance, would have been given a new ramp next to the existing exit ramp from the bridge, allowing Vine Street Expressway traffic to exit directly to the bridge rather than use Sixth Street, as it currently does.

I was hesitant about this proposal - I had questions about cost and feasibility. But the idea of turning the area south of Monument Plaza into a garden was certainly attractive.

Shortly after the PHS proposal, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission came out with a design to calm traffic on Race Street from Eight to Sixth. The design included a bike lane. (For DVRPC's full report, click here. For the Old City District's Vision 2026 Framework, published in 2016, click here.)

Neither of these proposals has advanced since 2015. By 2017 the PHS proposal appeared to be thoroughly mired. 

As for the traffic calming on Race, I simply have no idea why this hasn't happened. It strikes me as basically a no-brainer - a cheap and effective way to calm traffic on Race and improve access to Franklin Square.

One Last Note

Someone might want to fix this bit of masonry. It's in Monument Plaza.

See also Transportation Should Not Trump Destination, Permeable Blocks, Second and Chestnut, The Invitation, The Future of Christ Church Park.

Checking in With MLK Drive

A Visit on a Gloomy Day

By the Art Museum.

In early August, the City of Philadelphia reopened Martin Luther King Drive to motor vehicles, but only on the upriver portion of the Drive, extending from Sweetbrier Drive to the Falls Bridge. The downriver portion, running from Sweetbrier down to the Eakins Oval in front of the Art Museum, remained closed to motor vehicles but open to people engaged in active mobility, such as walkers, runners, bicyclists, skate boarders, inline skaters. (For a story in the Inquirer, click here.)

The City had closed all of MLK Drive to motor vehicles in March 2020, and usage by body-powered vehicles skyrocketed. 

When the City originally said it was reopening MLK Drive to motor vehicles, it had intended to reopen the whole Drive, but inspection of the MLK bridge over the Schuylkill, located on the downriver portion of MLK Drive near the Art Museum, showed that the structure was more deteriorated than had been anticipated. Cars needed to stay off, but pedestrians and bicyclists could safely use the bridge and were welcome.

Naturally, there was a great deal of debate about the City's plan to reopen MLK Drive to cars. The active users, led as usual by the bicyclists, were not happy about losing MLK Drive; the car huggers were thrilled to get the Drive back. But all of it was predicated on the idea that the full length of MLK Drive would be reopened to cars. 

And that's not what happened. The crucial downriver segment of the Drive, from Sweetbrier down to Eakins Oval, remained closed to cars and open to uncars.

I'd been wondering for a while how that was working out, and so Friday I went out to MLK Drive and had a look. 

It was a quiet, gloomy day threatening rain. 

MLK bridge from the Spring Garden bridge.

There was construction activity. Workers were installing scaffolding under the bridge deck.

MLK bridge and the underpass to Kelly Drive. 

And it turned out that I had missed this year's Philly Naked Bike Ride. Oh well. 

Drat. Missed it.

There weren't a lot of people out - as I said, it was a quiet day. But the lower stretch of MLK Drive clearly remains Valhalla for active mobility. Here are two shots from the Spring Garden bridge.

Looking downriver.

Looking upriver.

I also had a look at the upriver section of MLK Drive. I don't have anything to add to what has already been said. I think the renovated sidepath is lovely and would be quite satisfactory except for the fact that it is utterly insufficient to handle the volume of traffic we have seen during the pandemic. And, as expected, some bicyclists are using the buffered shoulders on the cartway as bicycle lanes. I think it would have been much better if the City had installed a two-way cycle track on the river side of the cartway. 

One thing the current setup proves is that there is room for two motor vehicle lanes and a cycle track for bikes. Just look at the road, and then pick up the upland shoulder and its buffer and drop it down next to the shoulder on the river side. Then, with your foot, push the motor vehicle lanes over so they touch the upland curb.

I was in a car at this point, and so I decided to do the easy thing and drive back down Kelly Drive, on the other side of the river. There was quite a lot more traffic on Kelly Drive than there had been on MLK Drive, and the usual contingent was doing its 50+ mph in a 35 zone that should be a 25 zone. 

In my experience, Kelly Drive has always had more traffic than MLK Drive. After all the brouhaha about reopening MLK Drive, I think I had naively expected to see a lot more car traffic on MLK Drive. 

I thought about it a bit, and this idea came to me. MLK Drive, with the required turnoff at Sweetbriar, takes you to the zoo. Kelly Drive, with the aid of its direct connection to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, takes you to City Hall. So if you're in Wynnefield, and you want to go to City Hall, which way are you going to go?

What, in the end, did Council Member Curtis Jones gain for his constituents?

Then I had another thought. When the bridge closes completely for reconstruction, which will probably happen fairly soon, where are all the runners and walkers and bikers and skaters and scooters going to go? The quick answer is Kelly Drive, where there will not be room for them. (I went back to MLK Drive on Saturday afternoon, and in the intervening hours the upriver side of the bridge had been blocked off.)

Motorists have lots of choices for routes in this area - a century's worth of traffic engineers have made sure of that. But active mobility has only MLK Drive. I'm unsure what's going to happen here.

Head left to Schuylkill Banks.

See also The War Over MLK Drive; Is It a Park, or Is It a Traffic Sewer?