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.

Fixing Arch Street at Love Park

I actually feel a little sorry for the 1500 block of Arch street. It's a place where several powerful transportation ideas smash into one another, and the results are not pretty.

The intersection of Arch with 16th street is particularly ugly. It's a five-point intersection, and two of those points have two-way traffic.

The basic rectangular street grid here -- 16th street and Arch street -- was blessed a few years back with the arrival of Paul Cret's Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Don't get me wrong. I love the parkway -- modeled on the Champs Elysees in Paris, and all that. But I'm not sure anybody has ever really figured out what to do with the parkway traffic when it meshes with William Penn's street grid at 16th and Arch, coming in at an odd angle, just to make things more interesting. If somebody did figure it out, I'm not seeing the solution when I stand there at the corner and watch what goes on.

If the parkway weren't there, Arch street and 16th street would still be quite busy. 16th rumbles north to the Vine Street Expressway and points north; it also allows for a left turn onto both Arch and the outbound lanes of the parkway. Arch street is a major east-west artery that is one-way westbound for much of its length. But in the 1500 block, Arch is two-way.

Why? Well, the inbound parkway traffic has to go somewhere. The solution is to dump it into two lanes eastbound in the 1500 block of Arch and then force it to turn right on 15th, where it quickly enters the major scrum on the west side of City Hall (another story for another day).

So the 1500 block of Arch has three westbound lanes plus two eastbound through lanes -- plus another eastbound lane, closest to the park, which feeds into the garage underneath the park.

(I forgot to mention that 16th also has a right-turn only lane. Traffic coming up 16th can go straight, pick one of two left-turn options, or turn right and go into the garage, or go east on Arch and turn south on 15th. I'm still trying to figure out the utility of coming north on 16th and then almost immediately going south on 15th into the City Hall scrum. But I've watched people do it.)

Anyway, a pedestrian trying to get from Love Park to the One Parkway building, on the north side of Arch at 16th, must cross six lanes of traffic that is headed in a number of different directions.

One Parkway is a city office building with many workers and many visitors throughout the day. I've had reason to go there quite a bit over the years. Early on, I discovered a trick. The traffic lights are set up so you can cross halfway and stand at the median strip until the westbound traffic on Arch gets a red light and stops. (Well, usually it stops. After a while.) Then you can cross the rest of Arch, land on the sidewalk, and take a breath.

Lots of people do this. It's almost the normal way to cross. Six lanes, remember. I'm thinking it would be nice to have a little traffic island here, in the middle of the street. Then we could say the street was helping the pedestrians, instead of ignoring them.

It would probably be a good idea to extend the median island well eastward from the intersection at 16th. Motorists headed west on Arch occasionally decide to make a U-turn near 16th so they can enter the Love Park garage. This does happen with some frequency. I was out there the other day, for a little less than an hour, and it happened three times. A raised median island would at least discourage this behavior.

As for the intersection at 15th and Arch, I understand that changes are being made as part of the Love Park reconstruction. I don't know what the changes are, but I'm going to hazard a guess and suggest that it may make sense to extend the median island the full length of the 1500 block.

Add a little greenery on the island, and it would extend the aura of Love Park almost to the family court.

See also See also Love Park Underground, Extend the Diagonal, Turning JFK Boulevard into an Extension of Love Park, Love Park Redesign: Why Are There Still Five Traffic Lanes on 16th Street?