My New Idea

Clearing a Route Through the Heart of the City

We could have been a leader. Instead we will be slow followers, picking our way along the parade route, dodging the horse droppings left by the cavalry in the lead. Philadelphia used to be a leader, back in the days of Dilworth and Bacon. Yes, we made a lot of mistakes, but at least we were attempting to mold the future in a positive direction.

New York City recently announced that it was going to do 100 miles of Open Streets, upping the ante on Oakland, California, which is only doing 74 miles.

We're not doing anything; we're not going to do anything. And City Hall won't even tell us why.

I and many others have politely asked the City for a number of marginal improvements - repurposing the outer lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway and roads in West Fairmount Park and Roosevelt Park and a few other places. This would involve closing them to cars and opening them to pedestrians and bicyclists.

The small ask didn't work. So, just for the record, I'm going to tell you what I really think. Why should Dilworth and Bacon have all the fun?

This idea got its start with the outer lanes of the Ben Franklin Parkway. Giving these lanes to peds and bikes is a no-brainer. If you'd like a fuller explanation, click here. And then Inga Saffron of the Inquirer suggested repurposing Walnut Street. This isn't quite a no-brainer, but I'll leave struggling with the details to our capable traffic engineers.

So I was staring at these two stretches on a map, and the thought occurred to me that we could connect them, and provide a highway for pedestrians and bicyclists from the heart of Center City to the Art Museum and the wilds of Fairmount Park beyond. Well, at least to Martin Luther King Drive and Kelly Drive. It's pretty bucolic, but no elk or moose or bison. And you can ride a bike to Valley Forge if you're so inclined.

I looked at 20th and 22nd streets, and picked 22nd because it's a bit wider and already has a bike lane. Then I said let's make it two-way; finding a southbound mate for the bike lane on 22nd has been basically impossible. So we'll club up the northbound and southbound traffic on 22nd, and while we're at it make the other pieces two-way as well.

Certain people will immediately say this repurposing of 22nd Street is impossible. Just look at Trader Joe's with its heavy traffic into the parking lot on 22nd. And then of course, there are the entrances and exits to the Vine Street Expressway. To quote the Princess Bride: "Inconceivable!"

Well, here's the thing. We're still letting cars onto 22nd Street. But only for one block or less, and they have to go slow. They're doing this on 14th Street in New York City, and it's working well.

But that won't work here, you say. Yes, people can turn onto 22nd from Market, but when they're done shopping and leave the parking lot, they'll have to go to Arch, and then they can only turn left.

But wait. The street is two-way for cars also. So a customer leaving the Trader Joe's lot can turn left or right and go to Market or Arch. Actually better options for egress than exist currently.

As for the Vine Street Expressway, the eastbound entrance and exit are largely unaffected by these changes. Drivers exiting would still have the option of turning on 23rd or proceeding on Winter. And if they're headed for Park Towne, they can do that because it's less than one block.

As for the westbound exit, drivers could still go to the Parkway and turn, or head up into Fairmount on 22nd. People would have to use the Parkway to access the westbound entrance - no more tromping up 22nd Street at 50 mph. Sorry for the inconvenience.

What does all this give us? The future. I'm not going to rehearse all the arguments in favor of a balanced transportation system, instead of the predominantly automotive system that we currently have. What I will say is that I think this setup would be pretty cool, and like the Schuylkill Banks and the bike lanes, the City could brag about it when they try to attract large corporations like Amazon. And I think it would be extremely popular with the people who live here. And pay taxes. And vote.

Will it happen? No. With Dilworth and Bacon in the saddle, I think we might have had a good shot at actually getting some of this stuff done. With this mayor, and this city council, and this streets department, I just don't see it.

Still, to paraphrase Senator McConnell, I will persist. Why? I am a member of the Vaclav Havel school of optimism. Here's what he said:

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out." - Vaclav Havel

See also My Life in Fairmount Park, Transportation Should Not Trump Destination, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets? Love Park Redesign: Why Are There Still Five Traffic Lanes on 16th Street? Put Traffic Lights on the Schuylkill Expressway.

Make Walnut an Open Street

The Hamster Cage Should Come with a Wheel to Run On

Walnut at 13th.

Mayor Kenney recently said we may be staying at home until Labor Day. I've given this some thought, and I think he's probably right. The coronavirus is highly contagious, and people can carry it without having any symptoms. This is a really bad combination.

I personally think we won't be out of the woods until we have a vaccine. However, if we work really hard at developing and deploying tests for the virus and for its antibodies, and if we develop public health surveillance systems that are highly effective, I think we can start to open up a bit before the vaccine arrives - always, however, being on our guard.

I don't know about you, but I'm already tired of staying home. My wife and I have been at home for more than a month, and Labor Day would put us at 26 weeks, or six months.

I really look forward to our daily walks, and I think we need to recognize that our current regime is not nearly as restrictive as those in, for instance, France and Italy. For an idea of what things are like in a poor suburb of Paris, read this article.

If we're going to do this through the summer, I think we absolutely need to be able to get outdoors, and do it safely. I think we need more space, and I think we need better managed space.

I've been saying for a while that we need a lot more space, but I haven't said how much more space. Here you go.

The Hoop Skirt Theory
Social distancing currently requires maintaining six feet between yourself and other people you don't live with. This is up from three feet in the earlier days. And in normal times I think we can say your personal space on one of Philadelphia's small sidewalks is more like two feet. Frequently intruded upon.

Six feet might not sound like such a huge jump - only twice the earlier guidance, maybe three times your normal two feet. But let's have a look at the total area you're taking up. In your mind, draw a circle around yourself two feet from the center of your body - say somewhere around your esophagus.

Now calculate the area of the circle. I went back and dredged up some grammar school geometry. The area of a circle is pi (3.14) times the square of the radius (4). This comes to about 12.5 square feet.

What happens when the radius is 6 feet? It's about 113 square feet, or roughly ten times what you're used to. So we can jump ahead and say, as a general proposition, that we need about ten times more space than we've been accustomed to. This need is greatest in the places with small streets and small sidewalks, where there wasn't any wasted space to start with.

The sidewalk in front of my house is 11 feet 8 inches wide. The stoop is 28 inches deep. So continuous clearance is 9 feet 4 inches.

Imagine putting on a hoop skirt 12 feet in diameter and walking down my sidewalk. People are actually talking about hoop skirt social distancing online.

It might be fun for some computer whizz to develop a model of what social distancing actually looks like on our sidewalks. Since the six-foot circle is imaginary, two circles can overlap - you only need six feet of distance between people, unlike two people wearing our hoop skirts, who really would need twelve feet. And many of us are actually moving, often rather erratically as we stop to read our phones or look into the window of a closed store. I don't think a model of motor-vehicle traffic would do us justice.

Oakland and Friends
Other cities seem to have figured out that our current regime is not providing enough space. We, however, continue to shovel people onto the Schuylkill Banks and expect them to socially distance when there simply isn't enough space. Maybe give them a bigger pipe, or a second pipe. I've written about repurposing the outer lanes of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to provide another route to Kelly Drive and Martin Luther King Drive. I wouldn't move to enforcement until I'd provided adequate space.

As I said, other people seem to have figured out that social distancing requires a lot more space than is currently available, and they're moving to fix that. Oakland is repurposing 74 miles of city streets, allowing local motor-vehicle traffic only and creating shared public spaces where drivers must recognize the right of pedestrians and bicyclists to be in the street.

Oakland is in a class by itself, but other cities are also making significant moves. (For a story in the Guardian, click here. For a story in the Times, click here.)

And in Philly we're trying. The Bicycle Coalition and the Clean Air Council have sent a letter to the mayor, urging expansion of space for pedestrians and cyclists. Five members of City Council, including Council's president, co-signed the letter. And several community groups, including the Center City Residents' Association and the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, have also sent letters to the mayor. (For a story in the Inquirer, click here.)

Walnut Street
Recently Inga Saffron of the Inquirer suggested adding Walnut Street to the list of streets that should be repurposed. I'm quite fond of this idea. As Inga reports, part of the 1300 block of Walnut has already been repurposed (see photos at the beginning and end of this story). The street space between 13th and Juniper is being used as part of a quarantine site that has been established at the Holiday Inn Express located on the north side of the block.

As Inga puts it, "Since buses and other traffic have to be diverted anyway, why not block off the rest of Walnut Street in Center City? It’s not like businesses are open. Turning Walnut into a place for joggers and cyclists could make central Philadelphia feel less desolate than it does now."

Will this happen? I have no idea.

Walnut at Juniper.

See also Relieving Pressure on the Schuylkill Banks.

Go to the Light

Simple Rules for a Postmodern City

Emerging from the deep at Dilworth Park.

One afternoon recently my wife and I took the train back from New York, and we found ourselves standing in the great hall at 30th Street Station, and neither one of us felt like standing in the cab line. So we walked across 30th Street and down the SEPTA rabbit hole. We'd been intending to take the trolley, but I managed to lead us down the stairs to the track for the Market-Frankford Line.

I have a habit of making wrong turns underground. I don't think I'm alone, but I've lived long enough to know that the occasional wrong turn can be an invitation to discovery. So we decided to take the MFL to 15th Street.

I'm glad we did. We got off at 15th Street right next to the stairs that go up and east to Dilworth Park. And there, still standing on the MFL platform, we looked up the stairs and saw the light. It was reaching down from Dilworth Park, and beckoning to us.

Here's a rule. When people are underground, show them where the light is. It makes them less anxious. And if you can cap it with a grand entrance into a truly fabulous public square, that would be nice.

The designers at Dilworth Park didn't invent the idea of orienting on light, and they didn't invent the grand entrance. But they pulled both ideas off, bigtime. I'm grateful.

One level of circulation? Or two? Or three?
Many Americans prefer to travel on ground level. Is this preference intrinsic to human nature, or is it simply the comfort of the familiar, which opens up the possibility that people can be lured underground with good design and decent maintenance?

I hadn't reviewed my thinking about multi-level circulation around City Hall in a while, so I took a few walks and snapped a few pics. Overall, I'd say I have more good news than bad news, and also I just have news - things I hadn't thought about before.

Claes Oldenburg, Clothespin, 1976.

Clothespin Forever!
Before the new entrances in Dilworth Park, I'm going to guess that everybody's favorite door to the underground was the one that wraps around Claes Oldenburg's clothespin. It's a wonderful piece of sculpture, and the space fits it like a glove. The space is basically a hexagonal pit with a staircase that hugs the perimeter; the bottom of the hexagon functions as a kind of traffic roundabout, sending pedestrians off on a variety of vectors. After the new guys across the street, the space at the foot of the clothespin feels a bit cramped, but I think I may just have to get over it.

Escalator to What?
The clothespin is west of 15th Street, just south of Market. To the north of Market, midway to JFK, lies another entrance that I find more problematic.

To its credit, this is an older example of daylighting the trip upstairs. And there is an escalator.

Yes, but why here?

But why is it here? The midblock location means most people will walk past convenient entrances at the corner of Market or JFK, and when you get downstairs you confront a T intersection. If you walk straight forward you walk into a pretzel shop. To the left and to the right there's quite a lot of transit. There's decent signage, but still it's a midblock location downstairs as well as upstairs. Don't get me wrong; it's functional. But it is a bit clunky.

Desire Lines
Over in Rittenhouse Square a few years back a new footpath was born. Originally it was a dirt path - quite muddy in the wet weather.

As Market Street West kept building new office buildings, the number of people walking from the PATCO train on Locust Street through Rittenhouse Square increased - and guess what? They cut the corner on 18th Street, walking over grass from an east gate to a north gate. I watched this happen on my own walks to and from work.

This is called a desire line. Eventually it was paved.

Do the escalators over on 15th lie on anyone's desire line? I don't think so.

Light Boxes
So why are the escalators there? I think I know. They're located in one of several light boxes (or light wells) that dot the neighborhood. These are big square holes in the ground, with glass walls that let light permeate sideways into the concourse (there are three levels of pedestrian circulation in this area: ground level, concourse, and train platform).

The light they provide is welcome, even though it is insufficient. As I understand the history, these boxes are remnants of Ed Bacon's proposal for this area, which was much more ambitious about connecting the ground level and the underground, both visually and physically.

Time for some history. The redevelopment of Penn Center, or Market Street West, came about when the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to demolish a railroad viaduct that ran through the area. And Ed Bacon decided to kibitz on the redevelopment plans. According to my old friend Ken Halpern, "Conceptually, Bacon thought that rather than just clear the site, the railroad should actually excavate to one level below ground. A sunken garden with flowers and fountains could then let light and air down to commuters using the subway, trolley, and commuter rail complex located below grade at this spot, later to be called Penn Center." Office towers would be oriented north-south to maximize light to the street and the lower level. (Kenneth Halpern, Downtown USA, 1978, p. 107.)

The railroad decided to go in a different direction: "The final solution for Penn Center placed the towers in the east-west direction, with a concrete deck instead of a sunken plaza. Bacon did manage to get the railroad to provide three sunken gardens." (Halpern, p. 107, caption 159.)

At any rate, the escalators are located in one of the light boxes, and another one has an elevator. Why not? The light boxes were already doomed to failure. Why not get some moving stairs and even an elevator in there and claim a victory for modern technology, if not for modern architecture?

The Big Fail
The escalators aren't terrible. Here's what is. Readers of this blog may recall a previous discussion of the underground entrance to the Love Park garage.

This is an extremely convenient underground connection between an 810-car parking garage and City Hall, the Municipal Services Building - basically the entire City Hall district. Say it's raining and you're late for lunch at the Bellevue. No problem. Take the concourse down South Broad to Walnut. Exit at the famous hotel's front door.

I do think the design and current physical state of this garage entrance leave something to be desired. It's not like the Love Park designers don't know how to do a garage entrance. Here's what they did up on the surface.

One Win, One Question Mark
Further west there are two newer buildings that have done interesting things with their connections to the concourse.

The Mellon Bank building, which runs from Market to JFK along 18th Street, has a nice, fairly understated doorway that connects to the Suburban Station concourse. A nondescript corridor leads from the door to the building elevators.

As you're walking to the elevators, if you look to your left, you will see this.

This is a really pretty space. What is it for? I don't know. The stairs do lead to doors that take you to the outside world. As you can see, there doesn't seem to be a lot of through traffic.

I called the building manager, CBRE, and spoke with Tom Flach, who told me the space was originally intended to be a restaurant. That concept didn't gain traction, so now it's used from time to time for tenant events. I told him how much I loved the structure, and he mentioned the child's toy K'NEX. I think he's right. I'm channeling my inner child when I gaze at this wonderful little glass house, homesteading among a gaggle of truly enormous office towers.

The entrance way to the Comcast building, across the street, is similarly understated, but even before you go in you can see people at the cafe tables in the food court. Upstairs from the food court, at ground level, there is a large plaza in front of the building, populated by an outdoor cafe and lots of bicycle parking. Every time I go there it seems they've added more racks. In the large lobby there is the famous 87-foot video wall that has become a significant tourist attraction.

As Inga Saffron wrote shortly before the building officially opened in 2008, "It's still early, but Comcast's plaza cafe and concourse mall promise to become a bustling urban nexus." And that's what happened.

But that's not all that happened. The concourse mall leads to a large, pleasant corridor that takes the visitor all the way to Arch Street, where (gasp) there is a midblock crossing (installed in 2015) that takes you on a lovely midblock ramble through a plaza next to a large fountain and delivers you to Logan Square. You can also go to the Wawa on the north side of Arch Street.

Recently my friend John Friedman and I were exploring and we found the corridor that leads to the new Comcast building. It's open to the public and very nice, but long and serpentine. We asked a young man who was walking near us if we were headed the right way, and he said yes and then made sure we got to the escalator that takes you up through the lobby to a very nice coffee shop on the mezzanine. After you do this once, the navigation is easy. Another win, in my opinion, supplemented by yet another midblock crossing on 18th if you prefer being outside.

So it does seem that we're getting better at this underground circulation stuff. From Dilworth Park to the Comcast building, we have good examples of cutting edge urban design. In between we have some older efforts that fall short. I'm hoping that somewhere there is a constituency for going back and fixing some of the mistakes. I'd start with the underground door to the Love Park garage.

Remember the rules: use daylight to reduce anxiety and provide orientation; find the desire lines and use them; and build entrances that are an invitation and not a threat.

See also Road Diet by Love Park - a Natural Experiment; Love Park Garage: Close the 15th Street Exit.