To Unlocking our Parking Lanes
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| New loading zone, Pine near 18th. |
People who live in what is sometimes called CCRAville live in a very nice place. Geographically, it is the southwest quadrant of William Penn's 1682 plan for Philadelphia. The present-day City Hall sits in the square that was at the center of Penn's plan; a bit to the southwest lies Rittenhouse Square, and a bit further to the southwest lies Fitler Square. Rittenhouse and Fitler squares are the lungs of CCRAville.
This part of the city was largely developed in the nineteenth century, and today many of the tree-lined streets in the area are flanked by rows of red brick and brownstone houses from that time. It is, generally speaking, a prosperous, well-tended area. But it is not without its problems - this is, after all, the real world. And one of those problems is parking.
Finding a curbside parking space in CCRAville is a challenging process in the best of times. And sometimes, frankly, it's impossible. I speak from personal experience.
The shortage of open space at the curb makes it very difficult for people to gain access to the area. And so the plumber who arrives to fix the leak in your basement may very well wind up parking illegally, possibly in a crosswalk or possibly blocking a traffic lane. All these maneuvers contribute to congestion on our streets, and sometimes they are quite dangerous.
Recently the City government and the Philadelphia Parking Authority (a state agency) agreed to do something about this problem. They worked together to install loading zones at or near the end of each block of Pine and Spruce streets, running between Broad and 22nd - basically running east-west through the middle of CCRAville. (For the City's flyer explaining this project, click here.)
The Center City Residents' Association, the local community group that looks after CCRAville, encouraged this project from its conception and through a lengthy gestation.
The final result, in place since June, is a great success. Illegal parking on these streets has declined dramatically, improving traffic flow and increasing safety.
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| The rules of the game. |
A Long Backstory
You might think that putting up a few posts and some small signs is a quick and easy process. You would be wrong. I can trace the roots of this project back for a decade, and I think others could probably add a few years to that.
What I'm going to do here is tell you the story as I saw it. Like an infantry soldier in a trench, my view of this project was quite limited. I know what I did; I know some of what the people around me did. I can't tell you what was going on with other people further down the trench line, and I have no idea what the colonels and the generals were thinking and doing.
When I retired in 2009, my daughter got me a gmail account, and my wife set me up with a blog called westwordsphilly. The blog started as a friends and family affair, with me processing my departure from corporate life for a small audience. I soon found myself writing about health insurance - I had worked for an insurance company and developed a strong interest in reforming the industry. This led me to work on the campaign to get Obamacare passed. And then, after the bill became law, I found myself looking at other topics. I had worked for the New York City Planning Commission in the 1970s, and as I walked around CCRAville it struck me that we weren't managing our streets any better than we had been handling health insurance.
I had been an avid runner and bicyclist, but I was particularly annoyed by the parking in my neighborhood, and in due course I found Donald Shoup, a professor at UCLA who had been analyzing parking for decades and was in the process of revolutionizing the entire field.
That's a story for another day. Today, all we need to know is that, if curbside parking is free or very inexpensive, and off-street parking is more expensive, the street will always fill first.
Many of our City leaders do not understand this mechanism even today. When confronted with streets where curbside occupancy is 100 percent or more, City Council tends to respond by trying to create more off-street parking. The main problem with this approach is that it doesn't work.
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| Bug truck, 1600 block of Pine. |
Implementing Shoup in Philly - or Not
At this time, ten years ago, I did not have the idea of reimagining our streets lane by lane, and I certainly had not thought about how changes in one lane could affect the other lanes. And, frankly, I didn't yet know much about parking. In all this, I don't think I was alone.
I saw three things. First, what we were doing wasn't working. Second, we needed to reimagine the whole street and not just nibble around the edges of various problems. And, third, the arrival of bicycles in large numbers could drive reform.
I had been talking with various friends about these ideas, and on May 4, 2014, I wrote an email emphasizing the importance of bicycling to the reform of our streets: "I can't help thinking that bicycles, starting as a disruptive force, may well be the catalyst for a long-needed solution. Bicycle lanes, reduced speed, improved intersections, better separation of traffic overall, and more attentive drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists."
Be careful what you ask for. CCRA president Jeff Braff was one of the recipients of this email. He was an enthusiastic bicyclist, but in his CCRA job he naturally heard a lot of complaints about parking in the area, and he was interested in getting a better understanding of the issue. So, I suppose we could say that talking about bicycling brought me to working on parking. Jeff asked me to work with Mike Axler, CCRA's assistant treasurer, to count the parking spaces in CCRAville, something which had never been done. (To this day, nobody knows how many parking spots actually exist in large swaths of Philadelphia.)
Mike and I agreed; we received our commission from Jeff on September 15, 2014, and promptly started counting parking spots. Jeff had hoped we could finish in three weeks, but the work carried us well into 2015. The summary report of our study was published in the Center City Quarterly in summer 2015, p. 19.
I'm not going to go through all the details here. If you're interested, have a look at the stories on my blog that are listed at the end of this article.
For me, the most surprising number was that no more than 13 percent of the households in CCRAville were parking a car on the street. Roughly half the households didn't own a car, and the rest were parking off the street.
So a small minority of residents were monopolizing the curb space in CCRAville, and virtually everyone in the area was suffering from a lack of access, whether it be visits from friends and family, a house call by the friendly local plumber, or the ability to drop off groceries that you've brought back in your carshare car. (See, in particular, Parking: Storage v. Access.)
I'll just add one more number. The parking authority had issued more than twice as many Zone 1 parking permits to CCRAville residents as there were Zone 1 parking spots in CCRAville. (See Parking Permits and Musical Chairs.)
All this struck me as an easy act to follow. And Professor Shoup had provided the tools to make the system function effectively. My thought was that we should use them.
Needless to say, things did not go well.
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| Cash machine, Starbucks. Spruce near 18th. |
Not
It took a couple of years, but I eventually came to understand that Philly was simply never going to use fancy tools like variable pricing or uniform price auctions to manage its public parking. But we did manage to head off a bad move by City Council that involved something called parking minimums.
Parking minimums are legal requirements that new construction contain a certain minimum number of parking spaces. In 2012, Philadelphia adopted a new zoning code that substantially reduced parking minimums. (Professor Shoup's recommendation is to abolish them.)
In 2017, when City Council introduced a bill to raise parking minimums, CCRA president Wade Albert wrote a letter to Council President Darrell Clarke and Council Member William Greenlee. Here is one paragraph of a fairly long letter:
"CCRA further opposes the bill because it is not at all clear that mandating more parking space for multi-family housing will in any way reduce the shortage of on-street parking. A relatively recent study of car owners in CCRA's neighborhood conducted in [2014-2015] by CCRA members Bill West and Michael Axler concluded that there are many vacant parking spaces in local garages and lots. And this is not surprising, given that many individuals with cars often choose not to pay for garage parking (with a monthly average cost likely between $175 and $275) when they have the option of parking on the street with permits that only costs [sic] $35 on an annual basis."
The curb will always fill first. And CCRAville dodged a bullet.
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When the loading zone fills,
there will be spillover. |
Loading Zones in Residential Areas
And Professor Shoup had given me another tool - loading zones in residential areas. I first wrote about a version of this idea in 2015, and in 2016 I applied the idea to Pine and Spruce streets, where the concept was particularly appealing because the bike lanes there were being severely impacted by cars and trucks blocking the lane. The 2016 story contains one of my favorite lines: "I don't think the bike lane is the problem. I think the parking lane is the problem."
Later, I joked to a friend about this article: "Needless to say, it didn't exactly move and shake the movers and shakers."
And things were quiet for a while.
A Pivot Point on Chestnut Street
In the summer of 2019, the City greatly increased the number of loading zones on Chestnut Street. (For an article in the Inquirer, click here.) On September 26, 2019, CCRA president Maggie Mund wrote to Jeannette Brugger of the City's Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability. Here is part of what she wrote.
"The Chestnut Street loading pilot is still in its early stages, but it already seems clear that increased provision of legal loading zones has dramatically decreased the incidence of illegal parking or stopping in the traffic lanes, thereby substantially reducing congestion and smoothing traffic flow.
"Chestnut Street is a commercial corridor, but we believe that these lessons are also applicable to residential zones, which have seen a dramatic increase in package delivery, as well as pick-ups and drop-offs by companies such as Uber and Lyft.
"CCRA would be very interested in exploring with you the possibility that the CCRA area could become a pilot zone for testing the utility of increased numbers of loading zones in residential areas."
This proposal was received positively, but in the end nothing came of it. I recall that one of the problems was picking an appropriate area in which to conduct the pilot. Virtually every block in CCRAville would have benefited from loading zones, so how do you pick.
And then of course, early in 2020, the Covid epidemic arrived, and this project went into long-term storage.
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| If only the vehicles looked half as interesting as the buildings. |
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| Same spot: Spruce near 21st, July 4. |
Another Pivot Point
It turns out, though, that the idea of installing substantial numbers of loading zones in residential areas was not dead. Randy LoBasso of the Bicycle Coalition had been talking with the parking authority, engaging in what the Quakers call friendly persuasion, and asking them to increase the effectiveness of their enforcement activities on the Pine-Spruce bike lanes, which were being crippled by cars and trucks blocking the lanes. In September 2021, those talks bore fruit.
"In September, the Philadelphia Parking Authority announced that it was creating a dedicated unit of bicycle-mounted enforcement officers, who would be ticketing cars illegally parked in bike lanes and bus lanes. CCRA ran a survey in its weekly email newsletter, asking residents if they would be willing to see more loading zones added to the parking lane on blocks of Pine and Spruce where the crosstown bike lanes run. The response was overwhelmingly positive. In October, CCRA wrote to the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability (OTIS) asking the City to work with us on installing loading zones in this area. OTIS responded affirmatively, and planning is expected to begin in January 2022." - CCRA Streets Committee Report for the Year 2021, submitted December 9, 2021.
Here's the text of the letter from CCRA president Rick Gross to Chris Puchalsky of oTIS on October 4, 2021.
"Dear Chris,
"We read with interest the Philadelphia Parking Authority's announcement that it was forming a special, bicycle-mounted unit of enforcement officers. Their mission: Write tickets for motor vehicles parked illegally in bike lanes and bus lanes in Center City and University City.
"It's worth noting that people parking in this way often don't see any option, because there are no spaces available in the parking lane.
"CCRA has been looking at the issue of parking congestion in our area for some time. We have been discussing the idea of creating one or two loading zone spaces per block in areas such as Pine and Spruce from Broad Street to 22nd, where there are bike lanes and where the parking lane is almost always at 100 percent occupancy or higher. The loading spaces would operate during the day and then revert to regular spaces in the evening.
"After the PPA announcement, CCRA surveyed its members regarding this notion, and 83% of respondents replied affirmatively to the idea.
"We would like to see a loading zone pilot for Pine and Spruce between Broad and 22nd. We think this should be done in conjunction with the PPA's enforcement pilot.
"We would be happy to collaborate with you on this project, and we look forward to hearing from you in the near future."
Planning progressed, and in October 2022 I joined representatives from the City and the Philadelphia Parking Authority for a walk-through of Pine and Spruce, between Broad and 22nd streets. It turned out that quite a few of the blocks had idiosyncrasies that needed to be dealt with. This is what walk-throughs are for.
We met at Spruce and Broad and walked to Spruce and 22nd, where something interesting happened. It was outside our study area, but we noticed that the block of Spruce between 22nd and 23rd had signage on the north side of the street barring parking during the day. The blocks east of 22nd had only one lane for motor vehicle traffic, so why two lanes here? We discussed. People went back to the office and researched and discussed. In the end, nobody could understand why the north side of the street was no parking during the day. And in 2023, the signs were changed to allow parking both day and night, adding thirteen spots - a baker's dozen - of daytime parking in an area where parking is famously tight.
In August of 2023, CCRA received notice that the City planned to skip the pilot phase and install the loading zones on a permanent basis.
Finally, in June of this year, while I was at the beach, I received an email from Anna Kelly, one of the people I had been working with at the City, informing me that the loading zones had been installed. That was a very happy day.
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| What a street corner can look like. |
Streets Are for People
Early on, I saw the need to look at the whole street. Call me slow, but I only gradually came to the unifying principle that streets should be designed for people. I did not come to this idea by myself. Just as Professor Shoup educated me on parking - and particularly loading zones - Jan Gehl, with his book Cities for People, educated me on the many ways, large and small, that design of our public spaces can make them interesting and welcoming.
I think the pope's visit to Philadelphia in 2015 was an eye opener for many people. Streets can be very versatile, if only you let them. And then in the pandemic we had the streeteries. We also fiddled with Open Streets, but in the end didn't do nearly as much as we had hoped.
Many people, including many in positions of power, are definitely not on board with this new approach. After all, for many years our streets have been for transportation and sanitation, and basically everything else was unimportant.
But I feel that seeds have been planted and taken root and cannot be easily extirpated. And I'm hopeful for the future.
See also Parking: Storage v. Access; Measuring the Health of a Parking System; Parking Permits and Musical Chairs; The Supreme Court and Parking; Reimagining Our Streets: Bikes Will Lead, But They Will Not Be Alone; Barnacles at the Curb.
