On a Slow Boat to China

Dolce far niente

20th & Manning on a quiet summer day.

"On a Slow Boat to China" is the title of an old Bing Crosby song, where two lovers are dreaming about a protracted getaway. Nowadays the phrase has a more quotidian meaning, and people normally use the briefer phrase slow-walk, as in "Let's slow-walk this project."

"Slow-walk" strikes me as a rather dry, bureaucratic locution, perhaps with a slight odor of death and decay. The Bing Crosby phrase is, to my mind, richer and full of life. I hadn't been aware of the romantic overtones, but I think you can feel them. I'm comforted by my thought that the new bike lanes for Spruce and Pine are standing shoulder to shoulder at the rail of a ship in the South Seas, enjoying the peace and moonlight together.

And going nowhere fast.

Why Does the Slow-Walk Matter?
Currently Philadelphia finds itself in the midst of an effort to reimagine its public spaces - including, notably, its streets. There are two key issues here: bicycling and car parking. There are other important issues, but if these two issues are not adequately addressed, the whole effort is doomed to failure.

Vision Zero
Recently I attended the annual Vision Zero conference, held this year on the campus of Temple University. The conference celebrated several important victories, including state authorization for automated speed cameras on Roosevelt Boulevard. This was a significant and hard-won achievement, and I don't mean to take anything away from it when I mention that we still have some unfinished business in Harrisburg.

There is, for instance, the issue of letting local police officers use radar guns to catch speeders. Currently in Pennsylvania, only state troopers are allowed to do this. For 50 years, municipalities have been asking for the law to be changed, to no effect. Pennsylvania is the only one of the 50 states that does not allow local police forces to use radar guns.

Mayor Kenney delivered the closing remarks of the conference, mentioning, among other things, the recent, dramatic increase in the city's budget for repaving streets. He also said, "We want you to continue to give us a hard time." Well, mayor, here you go.

An adequate repaving budget is of course absolutely necessary, but it is not sufficient to take this city where it needs to go. In terms of  business strategy, you're at the LODO stage - lights on, doors open. You have streets, but you haven't yet figured out what to do with them. For instance, do you want to devote one-third or two-thirds of a street to long-term storage of cars? Or are there other, more valuable uses for that land?

Parking
In general, when it comes to parking, Philadelphia is woefully behind the curve. I serve on the parking committee of a little city at the Jersey shore, Asbury Park, which is light years ahead of Philly. As one example, in February of this year, Asbury shifted its metered parking from pay by numbered spot to pay by license plate. It has also moved its residential parking permits from hang tags on the car mirror to license plate recognition. And you can buy your residential permit online. The Philadelphia Parking Authority has some low-hanging fruit available here.

Let's take a look for a moment at Center City Philadelphia. The congestion is legendary, both in the traffic lanes and in the parking lanes. (The two are related.) What many people don't understand is there are plenty of parking spots in Center City. They're just off the street. In the most recent survey of Center City garages, in 2015, the peak occupancy rate was 73.9 percent. A much better number for peak occupancy would be 85 percent.

Why is it a better number? Because it would free up space on the street. As I mentioned in 2014, "You could take all the cars parked at meters in Center City and sweep them into the garages, and you'd only get the garages to 85 occupancy."

How do we move parked cars to garages and reduce the pressure on our streets? There are three prongs to this trident.

Dynamic meter pricing.
The idea of charging a market price for parking in a city's downtown, and varying that price as demand varies during the course of the day, on different days of the week, and in different seasons of the year, is simply no longer a new idea. It's not mysterious, and the methods used to implement it are no longer to be considered rocket science.

Dynamic pricing had its Broadway debut in San Francisco a decade ago, with the help of a federal grant. (For more, see Parking in San Francisco.) Since then it has spread across the country; Asbury Park has been doing dynamic pricing for years. Philly really needs to wake up and smell the coffee.

Turn parking spots into loading zones.
However, I think I've actually given up waiting for City Council to start charging market rates for curb parking in Center City. So here's an option. Convert regular parking spaces into loading zones, which are in fact desperately needed. Again, our approach to what is now the parking lane (or lanes) should be: What is the highest and best use of this space?

Yes, such a move would mean that motorists might well have to park in a garage when they would prefer to park on the street, and they will undoubtedly mention that thought to their elected representatives. On the other side is the fact that delivery vehicles are regularly blocking traffic lanes and frequently making Center City almost impassable. Not because the delivery drivers are bad people, but because there's no place else for them to stop.

I'd do Chestnut Street first. Much of the parking lane on Chestnut Street in Center City is already given over to loading zones - but only until 10 a.m., when they generally revert to being regular two-hour parking spots. As I mentioned last year, "Not coincidentally, the phenomenon of delivery trucks unloading in the bus lane explodes right after 10 a.m. It seems only logical to extend the time of the loading zones further into the day. I do think this simple and incremental move would help a lot."

Vacancy tax for garages.
Commercial garage prices also need to come down. You'd think that operators would be dissatisfied with a 74 percent peak occupancy, but it's possible that they're making more money at that price point than they would if they lowered prices and increased their occupancy. There are times when public policy and private profit don't both optimize at the same point. (Who knew? For more on this, see Professor Shoup's Parking Book.)

So how do we encourage garage operators to fill their garages, and meet an obvious public policy goal? As I put it in 2014, "Price controls have a habit of backfiring. But you could tax empty parking spots in garages. For the first 15 percent, the tax could be zero. Below 85 percent peak occupancy, the tax would be greater than zero. Just a thought."

As far as I can tell, nobody has ever put a vacancy tax on commercial garages. Vacancy taxes on residential properties, however, seem to be becoming something of an item. Paris has had one since 2015, and New York City may soon be getting a "pied-a-terre" tax. 

Bikes
People who should know better continue to denigrate bicycling. Peter Walker of The Guardian recently wrote a book titled How Cycling Can Save the World, and he wasn't kidding. If you really care about getting people around in cities, and not killing people in traffic crashes, and saving the planet, and generally improving the happiness and well-being of the people, then you should care about bicycling.

To succeed in Philly, bicycling needs a network of protected bike lanes. This would likely quintuple the number of people riding bikes, and basically change the whole story of what goes on on our streets.

Not too many years ago it looked like things were headed in that direction, but after a good start the bike network got mired down, and progress in recent years has been excruciatingly slow.

The poster child for slow-walking is the proposed upgrade to the Pine-Spruce pair of bike lanes, which are the backbone of the city's network of bicycle lanes. They were originally installed in 2009, and were due (overdue) for restriping when a proposal surfaced to upgrade the lanes by adding flex posts. I won't rehearse the years of wrangling that have ensued. And I'm not going to tell you how I feel about this process.

Instead, I'm going to look on the bright side. It is actually possible that the lanes will be redone this year. What could possibly go wrong? Well, I'm mindful of what happened down by the South Street bridge, on 27th Street and South Street. The lanes there were restriped; they were also supposed to get flex posts, but somehow that didn't happen.

I've heard a number of stories about how all that came to be. I've decided not to repeat any of them. I just hope we don't get a replay up on Pine and Spruce.

Leadership
I won't deny that parking and bicycling are difficult political issues in Philadelphia - inflammatory, even. Still, I think it's worth pointing out that these issues simply are not hard on the level of policy or on the level of urban design and traffic engineering. And the solutions are not expensive.

What I think we lack is leadership. This shortcoming manifests itself in several ways.

In parking we generally get distraction - proposals that are popular and often amusing, but which consume way too much oxygen and prevent us from solving the underlying problems.

There was the parking amnesty, a bandaid if ever there was one. And the proposal to increase the minimum requirements for off-street parking in new construction, at a time when virtually the whole rest of the nation is moving toward zero parking minimums. I'll stop there.

As for bikes, it's the slow-walk that's the derailleur. People who oppose bikes don't seem to have any cogent, or even coherent, arguments left. So now it's the slow-walk.

But guess what? There are elections this year - the primary in May and the general in November, and perhaps some of the actors in our little drama will Shuffle Off to Buffalo. (Also the title of a romantic song, this time about a honeymoon in Niagara Falls.)

16th and Market. Is the light really green?

See also At Least It Makes People Laugh, Intermittently Terrifying,  It's the Road Design, Stupid, The Supreme Court and Parking, Taming Chestnut Street, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?

Intermittently Terrifying

Slate has a nice story about this picture.

I find bicycling in Philadelphia to be intermittently terrifying. I know that our streets are not actually a war zone. I've read the statistics, and I understand that the chance of my dying on a bike is smaller than when I walk to the grocery store.

But it doesn't feel that way. I've had my eye out for some actual data on this topic, and on April 4 help arrived from England.

Peter Walker has a simply nifty new book entitled How Cycling Can Save the World. He's a writer for a very good English newspaper called the Guardian, and he regularly covers biking issues. (He also worked as a bicycle messenger shortly after getting out of college, in both London and Sydney, Australia.) I suspect that this book will become one of the standard texts for people interested in reimagining our public spaces, along with Jeff Speck's Walkable City. It's aimed at the general reader, but it's also crammed with the latest research results.

The Near Miss Project
Those research results include a 2015 British study called The Near Miss Project that neatly fills the gap between crash data and our perceptions of danger.

The study was led by Dr. Rachel Aldred, who teaches at Westminster University, which is located in London. She and her colleagues recruited 1,532 participants from across the UK. The participants kept a diary of their cycling on a preselected day and rated any incidents on a scale of 0-3, starting with annoying and ending up with very scary.

According to the researchers, the data from the Near Miss Project "can represent a missing link between 'perceived risk' (how risky people think cycling is) and 'objective risk' (how risky it actually is, in terms of injuries and/or deaths). This is because they may tell us about 'experienced risk' - how risky cycling feels. Studying experienced risk could help us understand why perceived risk seems much greater than objective risk." (From the report entitled Cycling Near Misses, page 6.)

And indeed experienced risk does deepen our understanding. The researchers calculated that a cyclist was likely to encounter one "very scary" incident every week.

Drivers do thuggish things to bicyclists on a regular basis. And we now have the data to prove it.

So my personal perceptions were not overblown. It really is scary out there. If, once a week, you find yourself inches away from turning into road kill, then I think you have a legitimate beef. (For examples of life on the road in the UK, see this article in the Guardian.)

Control Bias, Familiarity Bias
As the Near Miss researchers suggested above, there is a suspicion that bicyclists have been overreacting. If you look at fatality rates rather than absolute numbers of fatalities, you will probably be less inclined to see overreaction. But I concede that it's a subtle argument. And standard psychology suggests that it's reasonable to at least look for overreaction.

In 2012 John Pucher and Ralph Buehler pulled articles together from 21 scholars on four continents and put them out as a book called City Cycling. There's a very interesting chapter on women and bicycling.

I was quite taken with how normal psychological processes may increase the perception of danger. "In particular," the authors note, "familiarity bias and control bias may reduce the perceived risks associated with car travel and increase the perceived risks for cycling." People tend to like things that are familiar and over which they feel a sense of control.

When you're riding a bike in traffic with cars, you are not in control. Of course a network of protected bike lanes would increase bicyclists' sense of control and decrease the perception of danger.

The familiarity argument is, to me, less straightforward. The basic idea is that if you do something more often, you become more familiar with it, and with familiarity comes a rising comfort level.

I think Dr. Aldred's data can lead us to a different view - one where regular exposure to very scary incidents can lead to a major increase in the fear factor.

Once again, however, a network of protected bike lanes would significantly decrease the ability of motorists to create "very scary" incidents with bicyclists, and bicyclists would tend to become more comfortable as they used the lanes more.

(See Jan Garrard, Susan Handy, and Jennifer Dill, "Women and Cycling," in John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, eds., City Cycling, MIT Press, 2012, pp. 211-234, at 225.)

Choosing Our Future
As I've said before, I personally think that a network of protected bike lanes could quintuple the number of people bicycling in Philadelphia.

But do we, as a city, really want to do that? I'm not at all sure.

Such an increase in bicycling would change the city dramatically - and I would argue that the changes would be good. But others, I fear, are clinging to the failed dream of the car. Detached house, a car or two in the driveway, picket fence. But no traffic jams, no deadly crashes, no smog. They're not part of the dream. Of course they are part of our reality today.

If you're still clinging to the dream of the car, you need to make the connection between your car's tailpipe and the asthma inhaler in your child's pocket. You need to stop dreaming, or at least recognize the nightmarish aspects of your dream.

And I think that's going to be a stretch for a number of people, some of them quite powerful.

See also A Sense of Perspective, Death as an Acceptable Outcome, Vision Zero in Philadelphia, We Should Not Overestimate the Driving Skills of the Typical Philadelphia Motorist, Zombie Arguments in Bike Safety.