Reimagining Our Streets: Bikes Will Lead, But They Will Not Be Alone

Bikes are a disruptive force on our streets. Thank God. I've spent my life watching a frozen standoff between cars and pedestrians, and it was well past time to start moving in a better direction.

Our streets have an interesting history. The pedestrians were there first. The cars arrived around World War I, and they hit this country like a tsunami, rearranging our built environment, our laws, and our minds. (To read more about all this, see Peter Norton's book Fighting Traffic.)

Before the cars came, the streets were open to all who wished to come and go - pedestrians, beer wagons, hansom cabs, horse-drawn trolleys, the occasional coach and four (that would be four horses). Things could be a bit chaotic, but when it came to getting killed, people seem to have been more worried about Typhoid Mary and other carriers of infectious disease.

When cars showed up, they had a number of advantages - they were big, and heavy, and fast. Before then, the occupants of the street had largely all gone about the same speed. Cars were also very popular. People loved their cars. Now that we're jaded, and overwhelmed by the sheer number of cars on our streets, it's a bit hard to imagine what it was like.

Cars came to own the streets in the 1920s. They basically muscled their way in, and they literally marginalized the pedestrians, pushing them over the curb and confining them to the sidewalk. (Sidewalks date back at least to Roman times, but until the car arrived, they were an amenity, not a ghetto.)

And so there things stood, until a few years ago, with pedestrians pinned to the sidewalk and cars owning the cartway - the street space between the curbs. Pedestrians were allowed to cross at the corner, but it was best to look both ways.

Then along came the bicyclists, and all of a sudden we are reimagining our streets.

I live in Philadelphia, and recently I attended the city's first Vision Zero conference, which was organized, not surprisingly, by the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. Bikes are going to lead the reimagining of our public spaces. But they will need some help - and I think they will get it.

Runners, for instance, have been doing Open Streets for years - they call their events races. The Broad Street Run has shut down the full length of Broad Street in Philadelphia on the first Sunday in May every year for decades.

Children used to play in the street. News flash: In Philadelphia, they still do, on the many little side streets of our town. Now, I live on Lombard Street, which is an access road for the Schuylkill Expressway, and I don't expect to see children in short pants and floppy hats shooting marbles in the middle of Lombard Street anytime soon. But one block away, on Addison Street, children often draw with chalk and play ball in the good weather as their parents sit on stoops, watching over their little ones and socializing with one another.

Restaurants are also getting more aggressive about pushing out on to the sidewalks and even into the streets. Special props to the bagel shop Spread on 20th Street, for figuring out what to do when the pope visited, and vehicular movement was greatly restricted in a large part of the downtown. Spread took the lane, with tables. And very happy customers.

Bikes will lead these groups, because bikes have organization, focus, and even a little bit of money. And because, for bikes, the issue is not optional.

We need bike lanes. We need a network of bike lanes that will allow people to get around town safely. This network will make the streets better for everybody. It will calm traffic, and it will make the streets safer for pedestrians to cross. (See, for instance,  the New York City Department of Transportation's 2014 report Protected Bicycle Lanes in NYC.)

And yes, this means that motorists will need to learn to share the road with the many other groups that have legitimate claims on the space.

Twice I have run down the middle of the Champs Elysees in Paris. And I was not alone. It was called the Paris Marathon.

Politics in the Rain

I wrote this back in the spring, shortly after the primary elections in Philadelphia.

On the morning of Sunday, May 3, I was standing on the Marine Parade Ground in Philadelphia’s old Navy Yard. It was raining.

I was handing out political flyers for Michael Turner, who was running for District Attorney. The recipients were among the 23,000 runners who had just completed the Broad Street Run, a ten-miler that starts in the northern part of the city, at Central High School, and runs pretty much in a straight, flat line south on Broad Street, scooting around City Hall about halfway, and finishing in the Navy Yard.

It’s a great race. I’ve run it a bunch of times, and it’s always been a thrill.

After about an hour, I was quite thoroughly wet, and I started to wonder why I was there. I could be at home, dry, eating a nice breakfast cooked by my wife (she likes to do that on weekends), and reading the Sunday paper. I didn’t stay with that thought very long, because right underneath it was what I really wanted to be doing. I wanted to be running the race.

Every time I talked to a runner, this feeling got stronger. I’d approach them as they were crossing the parade ground to go back to their cars, or the subway. They’d already had the chance to eat a little something and recover a bit, but they were still in that marvelous afterglow that lasts until the leg muscles start to stiffen. I’d congratulate them on their run, and be rewarded with the most beatific smiles. Then I’d talk to them a bit about Michael. They didn’t mind the switch. Quite a few of them thanked me for coming out and offering the information. And then they’d be off, some of them already starting to limp, and I’d be on to the next runner.

Afterwards I took the subway to my home stop at Broad and South, and as I came up from the rabbit hole I found myself looking at the Arts Bank. It’s a small, very nice performance space in an old bank building. And I remembered the Russians. A few years ago I had been in almost the same spot when a young man handed me a flyer. It was for a performance later that day at the Arts Bank by a troupe of Russian circus artists.

My wife and daughter and I weren’t doing anything else, so we went. The Russians were quite good, and we were a large part of the audience. As I recall, there were more performers than spectators.

Sometimes flyers aren’t enough. On Tuesday, May 19, they weren’t enough. Not only did Michael Turner lose, but the election came close to setting a new record for low turnout in Philadelphia.

Think of it. There are 1.1 million registered voters in Philadelphia. Nearly 900,000 of them are Democrats. The winner in the Democratic primary attracted a little more than 40,000 votes. (There is a general election in November, but it is widely considered to be a formality.)

This is not my idea of majority rule.

My wife and I volunteered on the Obama campaign. We registered voters, made phone calls, handed out flyers, made buttons. And we put up campaign workers in our home. One of them, whom I came to call The Mighty Quinn (not his real name), showed up after the primary, but months before the general election. I have never seen anybody, including my daughter, use a cell phone more.

I had no idea what he was doing, but my wife employed the expedient of conversation and soon knew what was going on. As she put it, “They’re identifying every vote in Pennsylvania, and then figuring out how to get it.”

The Obama campaign has come to be known for its novelties – the use of the Internet for fund raising, the enormous crowds that appeared, seemingly at the drop of a hat. But the real secret was they did it all – from mass communication on TV through one-on-one community organizing. And they were very methodical.

I have two thoughts about all this. First, the Obama people are a lot smarter and tougher than I realized during the presidential campaign. Second, the rest of us have a lot of catching up to do.