Kreuzberg

Life after the War on Cars

Not Kreuzberg. Pedestrian street, Jersey City, N.J., 2025.

During the holidays at the end of last year, I spent some time with a young friend I hadn't seen in a while - he's been living in Berlin, in a neighborhood called Kreuzberg. As we were walking on a chilly night along Locust street, near Rittenhouse square in Philadelphia, he remarked that his visit to the United States had brought into sharp focus a quiet but major change in his life. He noted that, since his arrival back in the United States, he had spent a fair amount of time climbing into cars, riding somewhere, and then climbing out again. He said it felt unusual, and perhaps it was even a bit uncomfortable. In Kreuzberg, he added, he almost never got into a car; that was the way he lived and the way his friends lived. He guessed that 98% of people movement in his neighborhood did not involve cars, but rather public transit and bicycles. He didn't mention walking, but perhaps that was because he took walking for granted - so obvious that it didn't need to be mentioned. 

I had the impression from my friend that Kreuzberg was considered a "cool' place to live, perhaps something like New York's Greenwich Village in the old days, and the indefatigable researchers at Wikipedia confirmed this impression. It's definitely cool.

It also has an interesting history. After World War II, Kreuzberg, or at least most of it, was allocated to the American sector, and it became home to Checkpoint Charlie, a control point where traffic was funneled to the Soviet sector. Adjacent to the south side of Kreuzberg is the Tempelhofer Feld, which as Tempelhof airport played an important role in the Berlin Airlift during the Cold War. It is now Berlin's largest city park and, according to Wikipedia, "the largest inner city open space in the world."

A bit to the north of Kreuzberg is the Brandenburg Gate, which is often thought of as the center of Berlin. I've never been to Berlin, but I have the impression that Greenwich Village, or perhaps even Tribeca, may be fitting analogues for Kreuzberg.

Still, the idea that 98% of movement does not involve an automobile seemed a bit fanciful to me. 

Back in 2016 I wrote a story entitled Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different? Among the many things I learned was that Germany had been working hard to promote bicycling for many years and had experienced considerable success: "Berlin's bike commuting share went from 6 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2008." So Berlin has been working from a strong base. 

I decided to have a look at more recent data and went again to Wikipedia, where I found an article entitled Modal Share. The compilers decided to use trips to work; theoretically it would be better to do all trips, but it's much harder to do that, and comparability of data declines quickly. The data are for metro areas and not core cities. 

Modal Share Berlin (data 2023)

Walking 34%; Cycling 18%; Public Transport 26%; Private Motor Vehicle 22%.

Modal Share New York City (data 2019)

Walking 30.7%; Cycling 1.1%; Public Transport 32.1%; Private Motor Vehicle 30.2%

Modal Share Houston (data 2016)

Walking 1%; Cycling 0%; Public Transport 2%; Private Motor Vehicle 91%

You'll note that the American numbers do not add up to 100%. The German numbers do. The American numbers are also a lot older.

I hunted around a bit. I'm comfortable saying there is nothing like Berlin in the United States.

I was thinking that I would not be able to get data specific for Kreuzberg, which is a very small slice of Berlin and, because of its location and population, I was beginning to think that it might actually get to my friend's 98% not by car. Then I stumbled around a bit more, and to my surprise found an interesting conference paper from 2025 that provided microdata for a slice of Kreuzberg, specifically "a neighborhood around Lausitzer Platz in the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district of Berlin." Here you go:

Modal Share Kreuzberg baseline

Walk 28.9%;  Bike 19.8%;  Car Mode 13.2%; Passenger 8.9%; Public Transport 29.2%

Because these numbers break out car passengers as a separate category, the percentages are not directly comparable to the modal share numbers above. But if we drop out the car passengers, and just count the cars, and recalculate all the percentages, car modal share will still be well below 20%. In this context, I'm interested in the number of cars on the street, and not the number of people in the cars (which I'm guessing is considerably higher than an American number would be).

Kreuzberg seems to have reached a level of private car use that feels like 2%, even though it's somewhere between 10% and 20%. As they say in marketing, perception is reality. I prefer the concept that reality is reality, but people do make decisions based on perception. At some point, the physical shift to less car usage seems to translate into a mental shift where cars no longer dominate our thinking about streets, and we we are free to think of other things.

I've been wondering for a while about how far down we need car use to go before we can declare the war on cars over. This would be the point at which perceptions shift. Cars will no longer feel like an occupying army, and the fear of vehicular mayhem is minimal. My guess, based on the data above, is that the target is below 20% but above 10% mode share for cars. If I'm right, Kreuzberg is already there; Berlin is basically there. Houston is hopeless. New York could probably close the gap in a decade or two if they buckled down and really worked at it. 

All of this is just a speculation, of course. You could build a whole research program and maybe come up with a smaller range; the range might vary from place to place. Maybe the perception shift doesn't exist. Personally, I think there is a tipping point, and I wouldn't be surprised if 10-20% turned out to be the range. And 20% is going to be a lot easier to reach than 2%.

I could stop here, but the Kreuzberg conference paper really deserves further discussion. Under the title Effects of Street Space Redesign on Travel Demand in Berlin, Germany, "this study describes the application of an agent-based travel demand model in combination with a microscopic traffic simulation model to simulate the effects of a baseline scenario and a redesign scenario of urban transport infrastructure on a small spatial scale of an inner-city neighborhood." Good heavens. The reading gets easier.

The study notes that many cities "are trying to create a more accessible and sustainable environment by promoting mixed-use neighborhoods and shifting urban mobility to more sustainable modes of transport. ... Modeling and simulating the impact of policy measures provides administrations with data and visualizations to discuss the design and implementation plans with citizens and thus create acceptance."

This last bit really caught caught my attention. Philadelphia has a Neighborhood Slow Zones Program. I think it might want to look into using this tool to work with community members. Certainly the idea of using a few tweaks - the right tweaks - to create a 30% reduction in car traffic in a small area is attractive, and letting neighbors try various options with the model would probably be very popular with the neighbors.

There's a good bit more in the paper, but I'm already in well over my head here, so I think I'll swim back to where I can put my feet in the sand.

See also The Troglodytes Showed Up, They Threw Rocks at Mayor Dilworth, A Turning Point, Drunken Episcopal Bishop Kills Bicyclist, Willoughby Avenue, Fort Greene, Brooklyn. 

General Strike

It's Time

Iranians bury their dead.

How about a one-day general strike calling for the removal of the president and the immediate cessation of American attacks on Iran?

At least we would be keeping faith with the people in the photo above.

I understand that many people tend to disparage general strikes. And it's true that they can be turned around by the bosses, who standardly like to portray the strikers as greedy and selfish.

But recently I ran across a 1913 book by John Spargo, entitled Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism. I was leafing through it to see if there was anything interesting, and Chapter III caught my eye with the heading Syndicalism and the General Strike. There is a long list of general strikes that failed to achieve their objectives. One strike that is generally considered a success took place in Belgium in 1893. Its aim was not economic, but political. It sought universal male suffrage.

As Spargo notes (p.115), "the demonstration was so far successful that in the course of a few days a new suffrage bill was introduced and passed, which, while it did not grant universal suffrage, did abolish some odious property qualifications and greatly extend popular suffrage."

Spargo goes on to critique the strike: "The 'strike' was short. It was really a demonstration of power. The workers did not attempt to measure their strength against that of the capitalist State. It was for an object with which a great part of the middle class fully sympathized as well as the working class as a whole, union or non-union, radical or conservative. The object, suffrage  reform, was not one the attainment of which would have destroyed capitalism. As in the English struggle for popular suffrage, many members of the capitalist class joined in the demands of the workers." (Pp. 115-116. For a modern story on this strike, click here.)

We need to do something. The Republicans are frozen like deer in the headlights. People are dying. There's a sense that things are spinning out of control. Because they are. We need to bear witness. After the March 28 march, it's time for a general strike.

I'm not expecting a replay of the events of May 1968 in Paris. But I wouldn't mind being pleasantly surprised.

See also How the Dam Breaks, Somotomo, We Will Not Let Them Down.

Pandora's Box

What Hath Trump Wrought?

Pandora and her box.

I think Donald Trump is only beginning to realize that he has opened Pandora's box. Although I doubt that he has any idea who Pandora was. 

Appropriately, for Trump World, Pandora never existed. She was a character who lived in the world of Greek myth. We first meet her in the Works and Days of Hesiod, who seems to have lived around the same time as Homer. Hesiod's brief sketch leaves a lot to the imagination, and for the last several millennia writers have rushed to fill perceived gaps and embroider the work of others. 

This is one of the basic Greek myths that describes how humans came to be what they are. It actually starts with Prometheus, the fellow who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, thereby giving a kickstart to civilization. Zeus, the principal god, was not happy. I'm going to give you the version by Robert Graves, in his Greek Myths (Illustrated Edition, 1981, p. 49). 

"Zeus had Prometheus chained naked to a pillar in the Caucasian mountains, where a greedy vulture tore at his liver all day, and there was no end to the pain, because every night his liver grew whole again." 

But Zeus was attacking on several fronts. Prometheus had a brother named Epimetheus. Pro had warned Epi to accept no gifts from Zeus. Zeus had other ideas. "He ordered Hephaestus to make a clay woman, and the Four Winds to breathe life into her, and all the goddesses to adorn her. This woman, Pandora, the most beautiful ever created, Zeus sent as a gift to Epimetheus," who had not yet heard of the vacation that Prometheus was enjoying in the Caucasus, because it hadn't happened yet, so he followed his brother's advice and politely declined the offer. Shortly thereafter, Zeus sent Prometheus to his mountain, and shortly after that Epimetheus heard the story, and shortly after that he and Pandora got married. 

It turned out that Zeus had made Pandora "as foolish, mischievous, and idle as she was beautiful. Presently she opened a jar, which Prometheus had warned Epimetheus to keep closed, and in which he had been at pains to imprison all the Spites that might plague mankind: such as Old Age, Labour, Sickness, Insanity, Vice and Passion. Out these flew in a cloud, stung Epimetheus and Pandora and then attacked the race of mortals. Delusive Hope, however, whom Prometheus had also shut up in the jar, discouraged them by her lies from a general suicide."

The sexism here is just as rampant as it is in the Garden of Eden, but hope is apparently a girl, and we do owe the survival of humanity to her. So there's that.

Exactly what was in the box has been the subject of speculation and debate for a long time. I personally lean to something more like the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and death. (You can get an argument over whether the guy on the white horse is conquest, but I prefer pestilence because we already have war over on the red horse, and infectious disease really does deserve a nod here.) 

When it comes to the Pandora story, feel free to make your own list. Everybody else has.

About the box. The indefatigable researchers at Wikipedia seem to have solved a puzzle. Hesiod clearly calls the box a jar, or pithos. These were large jars the Greeks used to store things like wine, oil, and grain. In the sixteenth century, when the famed humanist Erasmus was writing his book of adages (Adagia), he tells the story of Pandora in Latin and translates pithos as pyxis, or box. Tsk, tsk. 

Anyway, once all the stuff got out of the jar, it stayed out. In recent years we've nibbled around the edges. We had been using vaccines to tamp down things like measles and polio. until Trump and RFK Jr. came along. And, since World War II, we have, until this writing, been able to avoid World War III, although, frankly, way too many Trumpies are looking forward to the end of the world, and they may just get what they want if Trump keeps bungling things in the middle east.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted the picture above in 1871. I found it in Wikimedia Commons. 

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

I Think We Need a Mural Here

One Way to Make a Street Friendlier

The other day I was walking north on 18th street in Philadelphia, heading for Market street, and I looked up at the buildings in front of me, and I saw something I had never noticed before. A blank wall. I've looked at this view more times than I care to think about, but the blank wall had never registered before. All the other buildings around have windows in their walls. This building has windows too, but not on the south side.

I think I've usually been distracted by the large olive (with pimento and toothpick) decorating the Continental Mid-town restaurant, at the bottom in the picture above. But on this day, I actually managed to focus on a blank canvas. 

The canvas belongs to the Sonesta hotel, which fronts on Market and runs south on 18th to Ludlow, where our blank wall resides. (The 18th street side of the building is home to Ruth's Chris steakhouse.)

Interestingly, the north side of the building, where the front of the hotel is, also does not have windows (except for the ground floor) and already has a rather attractive mural, which came to us through Mural Arts Philadelphia in 2015. It's by an artist named MOMO. 

I think Mr. MOMO's mural needs a mate.

Here's the canvas, viewed from Ludlow street. There are no windows on the ground floor. The canvas extends down to the sidewalk, where it occasionally competes with some dumpsters.

But what happens, you say, if a new, tall building goes up at the corner of 18th and Ludlow? This is not an idle question. Much of this block has already been redeveloped, and there is even a hotel, called Motto by Hilton, at 31 South 19th, which flanks a restaurant named Condesa on Ludlow. And there's another building under construction just to the east. (Don't worry: Tony's Shoe Repair is still there.)

And yes, a tall building at the eastern end of the block would obscure the view of our mural from Chestnut. But it would not obscure the view from Ludlow. 

I think a mural here would make this whole area feel more inviting, and possibly even homey. That blank white wall strikes me as a bit cold and vacant. 

Here's a story. I actually took two pictures of this view. The first one did not have the fire escape, just the vacant wall and the sky. I wasn't sure which one to use in this story, so I asked my eight-year-old grandson which picture would be most likely to engage a viewer and cause that person to be receptive to the idea of a mural in this location. He studied both photographs side-by-side for a few moments, and then told me he thought the shot with the fire escape would be more effective. He said of the potential donors, "They feel safer because they have a way to get out."

I'm still thinking about my grandson's statement. I think it works on a number of levels, and probably not just on Ludlow street.

See also A Mural Is Born, A Few Deft Touches for Back Streets, Bluestone to the Rescue! and Which Side Are You On? and City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street, My New Favorite Alley.