Bike Lane Seeks Mate

Miss Lonelyhearts on 22nd Street

Sansom from 24th. A very wide street. Needs a bike lane.

So it looks like we're going to get the upgrade to the bicycle lane on 22nd Street, and the lovely new lane will run right by the curb next to the Greenfield School at 22nd, between Chestnut and Sansom. What a great way to get your kids to school if you live to the south.

But then ... how do you get home? The traffic on 23rd can be fierce - occasionally it reminds me of sharks in a feeding frenzy. The craziness peaks on the blocks between Market and Walnut. Why does this happen here? I think the underlying issue is that the City, lacking alternatives, is treating this little street as an arterial highway. (The City has done something similar with 15th Street near City Hall. See Transportation Should Not Trump Destination.)

In the north, we have the Vine Street Expressway, which dumps exiting cars directly onto 23rd. They fly south to Market, where they're joined by jumpy survivors of the scrum out by 30th Street Station, turning south and hoping to get to a better place soon. Then, at Chestnut, refugees from the Schuylkill Expressway turn south, all praying the madness will end quickly. Finally, at Walnut, there's often some amazing jockeying for position as people belatedly remember they want to turn right onto the bridge. I have at various times been all of these drivers.

I may be missing something, but I don't think there's any way to make 23rd Street safe for children on bikes. Not all the news is bad, however. The recent addition of crosswalks and stop signs on 23rd at Sansom has made that intersection much safer for pedestrians crossing 23rd.

24th from Market viaduct. Chestnut viaduct being rebuilt in background.

So here's my idea. How about 24th Street? It's one of Philadelphia's famous intermittent streets - here for a while, gone for a bit, then back again. This segment is much calmer than neighboring 23rd, partially because there's no through traffic from the north - it arises just south of the Market Street viaduct. As it heads south, it has a number of advantages - for instance, it completely avoids both Walnut and Chestnut by passing under them. At 24th, both these streets are up on viaducts that connect to the bridges.

There's no bike lane, but there's also very little traffic, and most of that is relatively calm. And 24th leads a bicyclist to Spruce, which gets you to the Schuylkill Banks. After Spruce, 24th leads to the bike lanes on Pine, Lombard, and South.

And - wait a minute - I do have one block where a bike lane would be very useful and where there's plenty of room for it: the 2300 block of Sansom. There's currently head-in parking on the north side of the street, and it looks like there's still room for three lanes of traffic. In fact there's so much room that motorists often seem a bit lost when navigating this block. Quite a few of them often don't seem to understand that it's a two-way street.

So I think this would be a good place to get the bikes away from the car traffic. Just pull the head-in parkers out from the curb a bit, and drop in a bike lane next to the curb. With the newly improved intersection at 23rd, I think this lane would be a significant gesture of welcome to parents who are thinking about biking their kids to school, but have concerns about the route home. I even think the motorists might have a better sense of place on the narrower right-of-way for motor vehicles, especially if someone were to paint a median stripe.

2300 block of Sansom. Note how skinny the 2200 block is, at right.

As for the families that live in the northern part of the catchment area, the 22nd Street bike lane will be a great way to get home. For getting to school in the morning, I'd personally recommend the Schuylkill Banks, if it's not too far out of the way. Again, I don't like 23rd for children on  bikes.

One last thought. I think this one-block bike lane is such a good idea that maybe we should do it soon. Maybe just fold it in with the 22nd Street reconstruction.

Afternoon on 22nd Street. Waiting patiently for a mate.

See also Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes, Intermittently Terrifying, Focus on the Short Trips, Missing the Point, Transportation Should Not Trump Destination.

Missing the Point

Biking to School

Outside Greenfield School, on 22nd Street.

In 2012, Professor Peter G. Furth wrote, "It is this writer's opinion that the turning point will be when children begin again riding bikes to school in large numbers. When bicycle infrastructure and children's safety become intertwined, funding for bicycle infrastructure will be secure." (John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, eds., City Cycling, 2012, p. 135.)

I found myself coming back to this quote while reviewing comments on proposed changes to the bike lane on 22nd Street in that bastion of reactionary progressivism, Philadelphia. And I must say I'm feeling a bit better about this go-round. The discussions this time seem much less emotional and adversarial than they were on Pine and Spruce, and on Lombard. I'm thinking it may be because of the proliferation of protected bike lanes in the heart of the city - Chestnut Street in West Philly, Market and JFK near City Hall, and 27th Street and South near the South Street bridge. Look - flex posts right outside my car window, and the world has not come to an end!

I do sense more goodwill this time around, and perhaps an increased comfort level. However, I still find people questioning the bike lanes, or perhaps their placement or configuration, using arguments that would benefit from a deeper understanding of the facts. Let's take a moment to review a few of these arguments.

Flex Post Are Ugly
Opponents of protected bike lanes like to say that flex posts are ugly, and, in certain parts of the city, they like to add that they are not in keeping with the historical character of the neighborhood.

Where to start. Okay, flex posts are ugly. They're also effective. As for violating historical context, I've been hearing this one for years, and I don't think I've ever provided a full rebuttal. Today's the day.

Let's agree that much of your neighborhood dates from the middle or late nineteenth century. Good for you. So how much of it looks the way it did in, say, 1870 or 1890?

When it comes to the houses, the answer is, quite a bit. Some blocks, particularly in the historic district, would make a nice movie set for a Victorian drama. Other blocks offer numerous additions from later periods, which Jane Jacobs tells us is a natural and organic form of neighborhood renewal.

Okay, now let's look at the street - the space between the houses. What do we see? Well, first of all, we see cars parked at the curb - usually an uninterrupted line from corner to corner, sometimes including the crosswalk, and basically preventing a full view of the nice Victorian buildings. Back in the day, there were no cars parked at the curb and, standing across the street, you could see everything, down to the boot scrapers and the mounting blocks.

There were no cars parked at the curb because cars hadn't been invented.

In fact, extended parking at the curb used to be illegal. As the old English common law put it, "The king's highway is not to be used as a stable-yard." I'm personally not surprised that people didn't want to park their horses at the curb overnight, but their wagons were also not welcome.

What did people use the curb for? Dropping people off at their houses, and also picking them up. And of course package deliveries, coal deliveries - it was a lively liminal space, something like a shoreline, and then it got frozen to death by car parking.

The pre-car days are the source of your expectation of being able to get out of a vehicle at the curb in front of your house and walk across the sidewalk and be home. What is robbing you of that expectation is cars parked at the curb, not bike lanes. And you were robbed a long time ago.

More Interlopers
How about some other modern interlopers? Well, for starters, take a look at the street paving. You may notice a lot of asphalt. In fact, that's all you notice, until somebody opens the road and shows you what's underneath. Along with the trolley tracks, you may notice some Belgian block.

Asphalt was available as a paving material in the nineteenth century, but it hardly had the monopoly it holds today. There were dirt streets, and cobble stones, and Belgian block, and wood block, and brick, and something called macadam, which was basically crushed stone kissed by a steam roller. (And the roads were often in a poor state of repair. For an amusing vignette of the state of American roads just before the start of the motor age, see James Longhurst, Bike Battles, 2015, pp. 62-63. There's even a quote from Mark Twain.)

In my opinion, asphalt is a very useful material that is also very boring to look at. I don't think we're going back to Belgian block, but the point here is that it's very unlikely that the street in front of your house was paved with asphalt in the nineteenth century.

And there were no painted lane markers - or any other striping - on the streets in the nineteenth century. (You'll notice, when people try to do this on Belgian block, it doesn't work very well.) Now that Philadelphia has virtually returned to unmarked streets, I think we can agree we would like to have the stripes back. Innovation is not necessarily bad - it's just not historical. (For lane markers see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011, p. 52.)

Although there have been road signs for a long time, most notably signs carrying street names, the traffic control sign is really a child of the motor age.  The stop sign was invented in 1914, the same year traffic lights were introduced. Signage also governed parking, and parking meters were introduced in 1935. (For the origins of the stop sign see Longhurst, p. 91. For traffic lights see Norton, p. 59. For parking meters see Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking, 2011, pp. 380-382.)

(Bill's going to fall down a rabbit hole for a minute. Clay McShane does report some tile traffic control signs from Barcelona that date to about 1880. The signs depict a man leading a horse and were posted at alleys in the city's medieval quarter. See pp. 395-396 of the linked article.)

So there's quite a lot of visual clutter on our streets that did not exist in the nineteenth century. However, there were other things to watch out for, such as horse droppings, also known as road apples.

So maybe we can put up with a few plastic sticks in the street, and while we're at it maybe repaint the lane dividers.

We Did It to Ourselves
I need to return to what I have discovered is the basic message of this story. There is no biblical or constitutional right to parking at the curb. In fact, as we've seen, English law was very protective of the king's highway, and this same approach was followed in the United States right up to the introduction of the automobile. In 1889, the New York State Court of Appeals opined, "The highway may be a convenient place for the owner of carriages to keep them in, but the law, looking to the convenience of the greater number, prohibits any such use of the public streets. The old cases said that the king's highway is not to be used as a stable yard, and a party cannot eke out the inconvenience of his own premises by taking in the public highway." (See Longhurst, p. 90.)

All this changed when the cars came. They just showed up and took over. Pretty soon there were cars everywhere - parking, moving, and trying to move but unable to do so because of all the congestion. There was a moment in Los Angeles in 1920 that pretty much sums up the whole process. Fed up with the congestion, the city banned curbside parking in the downtown. The ban lasted nineteen days. Under immense pressure from car owners, including quite a number who were wealthy and powerful, the city rescinded the ban. (See Shoup, pp. 491-493.)

This is only one event in a long and complex history, but the basic elements are all there. We did this to ourselves. It didn't have to happen.

Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes
Back to 22nd Street, and the Greenfield School, where the new bike lane is slated to run at the curb next to the school, displacing the drop-off lane there to the other side of the street, where the bike lane is currently located. (There are two other drop-off lanes on Sansom and on 23rd; they will continue to be directly next to the school.)

So far the Greenfield people, and frankly all the 22nd Street people, seem much more reasonable than the people who showed up to the Pine-Spruce and Lombard Street hearings. Good will will carry you a long way in my book.

I think my main concern about Greenfield is that the focus of the discussion seems to be entirely on access by cars, with virtually no attention being given to access by foot and by bike. Even casual observation indicates that a very large proportion of the students here arrive by foot.

So here's my problem. If moving the drop-off zone on 22nd to the east side of the street creates a hazard for the children being dropped off, then the children who are walking to school are already at risk. The question, in my opinion, should not be the location of the drop-off zones, but rather the quality of the intersections.

The school community has already known success with what had been the worst intersection near the school, the one at Sansom and 23rd. The City responded to politely expressed concerns by installing crosswalks and a stop sign on 23rd. (Actually there are two stop signs, one on each side of 23rd. The one on the right-hand side is not in a good state of repair.)

So progress is possible. Perhaps one day people will just habitually do the Complete Streets thing and think about pedestrians and bicyclists as well as motorists when they look at streets and intersections. And maybe, just maybe, one day they will think that having a protected bike lane running directly next to a school is actually a positive rather than a negative.

I know. Call me a cockeyed optimist.

See also Getting Kids Back on Their Bikes, Legacy Street Signs, Cars and Bikes - the Back Story,  The Pavements of Asbury Park, The Supreme Court and Parking, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?

Cutting Corners

Mark Twain and the Venetian Gondolier

South Street bridge. So what is the acceptable casualty rate here?

In 1867, Mark Twain took a trip to, among other places, Venice. Here's what he has to say about gondoliers cutting corners:

"I am afraid I study the gondolier's marvelous skill more than I do the sculptured palaces we glide among. He cuts a corner so closely, now and then, or misses another gondola by such an imperceptible hair-breadth that I feel myself 'scrooching,' as the children say, just as one does when a buggy wheel grazes his elbow." (This is in chapter 23 of Innocents Abroad.)

My original thought had been that the phrase originated at the dawn of the motor age, but upon further reflection I wouldn't be surprised if the term went back at least to Roman times. It's easy enough to imagine a man in a toga scolding a careless charioteer by yelling, "Don't cut corners!"

Of course the man in the toga would have said it in Latin. I wondered what that would sound like, so I asked Emily Marston and Ashley Opalka, my mentors in all things classical, and they guided me to this: "Noli angulos praecidere!"

Cars Cutting Corners
At any rate, cars didn't invent corner cutting, but they clearly made matters worse, and, not surprisingly, official efforts to control corner cutting date back to the beginning of the motor age.

I took this picture, and then I jumped to the left.

In 1903, a wealthy New Yorker named William Phelps Eno published "Rules for Driving," a four-page document. New York City adopted the "Rules," making it the country's first official traffic code. As a counter to corner-cutting, Eno adopted something called the outside left turn. Drivers were instructed to move straight into the intersection until they reached the center and then make a virtually 90 degree turn, with the center point of the intersection always to their left. So pretty much the opposite of cutting a corner.

Not too shabby. Maybe even four feet of clearance.

Eno also suggested that New York install a post at the center of the intersection, to mark the spot. The city did this in 1904 at numerous intersections.

The center post came to be called the "silent policeman," and it spread rapidly across the country, as did Eno's "Rules."

Note fragging on the little red bathmat at the crosswalk.

Neither the posts nor the "Rules" were received with unmixed enthusiasm, and it appears that something of a guerrilla war developed against the posts, with large numbers being destroyed. Traffic regulators moved on to traffic lights; the first practical traffic lights appeared in Cleveland in 1914. (For more on all this, see Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011, chapter 2.)

I think of the silent policeman as a taciturn and rather stiff fellow standing at the center of a roundabout - the basic idea was to get cars moving in a circular direction around a main point. But this small piece of infrastructure could hardly do the job on its own, and the typical intersection remained a classic crossroads, with two streets intersecting at more or less right angles, and everyone seeking the shortest way through, as they had done before cars. Traffic lights worked to segregate traffic headed in different directions, but they did nothing to discourage the shortest way through.

A truck kissing the curb.

The South Street Bridge
Which brings us to the present day and to a particular corner in Philadelphia, where motorists turn right from 27th Street to go up onto the South Street bridge.

First the good news. The existing bike lanes on South Street and 27th Street finally got flex posts earlier this year. Back in 2017, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia made a detailed proposal concerning the bike lanes in this area. Adding flex posts was a big part of the proposal, and while the Bike Coalition plan for the lanes was, in my opinion, superior to the final result, I think any posts at all must be seen as a major step forward.

Here's the fly in the ointment. The Bike Coalition called on the City to "Install a mountable corner island at the corner of 27th and South to slow down motor vehicles turning onto the South Street Bridge."

Good idea. In addition to slowing traffic, it would discourage corner cutting, which is rampant here.

Cars do it too. Note the cracks in the sidewalk.

What did we get? Nothing. There is no marked bike lane at the corner.

I simply don't understand this. If you don't want to do an island, how about a mountable curb? Here's a mountable curb in Brooklyn, at Fulton and Bedford, where turning traffic apparently has trouble staying in its lane.

Do a curved version of this. But do something.

Fulton at Bedford, Brooklyn.

Why Care?
So why is this important? Because this intersection is a test case for the City's Vision Zero and Complete Streets programs. Are cars and trucks and buses prepared to make space for bicyclists and pedestrians?

Bikes and peds aren't asking for the whole space, just part of it. And perhaps we can all agree that it would be better if buses did not drive on the sidewalk.

This intersection is a tight space, and the tradeoffs are hard. I think all of the solutions will wind up with motor vehicles going slower.

I think adding a curved mountable curb at the corner would do a lot of good. Currently there is no indication for motorists, telling them that the space next to the curb is a bike lane, and suggesting that they take a line around the corner that stays out of the bike lane. Call me an optimist, but I think that many of the people turning this corner will be willing to follow directions if they are offered.

Large motor vehicles, like buses and trucks, do have trouble here, and some of them will still mount the curb, and that will continue to be an unsafe condition. However, I do think the mountable curb would greatly increase safety here.

There are other things that could be done, such as removing the eastbound turn lane, or moving the stop bar for the eastbound traffic further back from the intersection. Both of these would provide more room for maneuver on the westbound side.

I can already hear people complaining about increased congestion for motor vehicles, and more backups on the bridge and on Lombard. But here's the thing. The way to cut congestion for motor vehicles is to dramatically increase the number of people walking, biking, and taking the bus.

For a century, we've been giving more and more space to cars, and we have never solved the basic problems of congestion and crashes. More space for cars will not ever solve these problems.

But will more people actually walk and bike and take the bus if we give them decent infrastructure? Yes. Let's just take the bicyclists.  When it comes to cycling, numerous surveys have put the population into four categories. My favorite is No Way, No How, usually about a third of the population. What we have biking on the South Street bridge today are the Strong and Fearless, and the Enthused and Confident, perhaps ten percent of the total. Half the population are Interested but Concerned.

What are the people in this last category concerned about? Getting hit by a car and suffering a life-altering injury. Give them a complete network of protected bike lanes, and we could quintuple the number of people bicycling in Philadelphia.

And that's how you solve congestion in the main traffic lanes.

We're not all strong and fearless.

See also Intermittently Terrifying, Put Traffic Lights on the Schuylkill Expressway, No Turn on Red, Running of the Bulls on Lombard Street, Is It a Curve or Is It a Turn?

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.

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?

The Correct Strategy: Fight

Siege Tactics: Isolate and Diminish

Benito Mussolini near the end of his career.

I'm a peacemaker at heart; I like compromise. Now is not the time.

We need to recognize the times we are in, and make appropriate adjustments to our expectations and behavior.

There is no compromising with Trump. And we need to stop trying to find ways to help the Republicans clean up the mess they have created. After Hoover, Nixon, and now Trump, I'm done with them.

Trump hasn't been the same since Hope Hicks quit. He's lost Kelly and Mattis and Cohn - you may not like them but they were grownups. If he loses the kids, he's got nothing but Melania, and I don't think she's very fond of him.

My sense is that Mueller has the goods on his sons, his daughter, and his son-in-law. I don't see why we should trade them for a presidential resignation. The more he's isolated, the weaker he is. Take them all down, in good order.

I think it's up to the Republicans to figure out what to do with the president. When Democrats try to find a compromise for the good of the country, what they're really doing is enabling the Republicans. Democrats should stay in their lane and keep doing everything they can do to isolate and diminish the president, who is in fact helping greatly in this work.

Yes, there's going to be a great deal of damage. There already has been. And the die-hards have been with us since South Carolina was founded by wealthy slave-holders from Barbados. I want their power diminished as much as possible. But more importantly I want the persuadable middle to finally process the concept that fascism is a really bad idea that doesn't end well.

Trump is looking puffy and disoriented, and he frequently just doesn't make sense. The guy is falling apart. Keep hammering him, and don't let him get up off the floor.

The president is under siege.  Keep him there until his goose is cooked.

See also An Inflection Point, Fascism, Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil,  What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?

Submerged Narratives

What Happens When They Surface?

General store interior, Moundville, Alabama. Walker Evans/FSA, 1936. 

I remember being told this story years ago, by someone I was inclined to believe. A little old lady (please don't shoot me - that's what the guy said), possibly in Kentucky or Tennessee (it was a long time ago and I'm not sure), ran a story in the newsletter she produced for her church. The story said that the Procter & Gamble logo - a circular image of the Man in the Moon and thirteen stars - was actually a sign that P&G worshipped the devil. P&G started to receive phone calls, and was understandably alarmed. Lawyers and investigators went nuts trying to run the story down, and eventually found the little old lady, who said she had received the information from a trusted source and was mortified to learn that it was inaccurate. Meanwhile the story had been copied from church newsletter to church newsletter and had taken on a life of its own.

I have no idea whether this story is accurate, but the rumor did start in the 1980s, and it was remarkably persistent. Eventually P&G saw no option but to get rid of the logo.  (Here's a 1985 story on the early days of the rumor, from the New York Times.)

All of this, you will note, took place before the rise of the Internet. Indeed, the medium of communication was paper. There was a second coming of the rumor, on the Amway voice mail system, which led to an award, not against Amway, but against several former Amway distributors, in 2007.  (Here's a Times story from 2007.)

My point here is twofold. First, there have always been submerged narratives. Second, electronics amplifies these narratives, but it does not invent them.

So the next time some techie stands on a platform and tells you all is new, don't believe it. All they have is a bigger megaphone. And that doesn't make you smarter. It just makes you louder.

I don't suppose anybody cares too much about the death of the P&G logo - although it was a nice piece of graphic art - but the lesson is that even submerged narratives can do a bunch of damage.

For some time now, historians have been looking into these submerged narratives. It turns out there are a lot of them. Some of them surface, and even confront the controlling narrative of the time. But others remain quietly insignificant for the world at large.

The Cheese and the Worms
Here's a submerged narrative from the sixteenth century.

Domenico Scandella, aka Menocchio, was born in 1532 in the Italian region of Friuli, which extends from the Adriatic to the Alps a bit northeast of Venice. Menocchio lived almost his whole life in a little town at the foot of the Alps called Montereale, where he worked mainly as a miller and served as mayor in 1581.

I find myself thinking of Menocchio as the crazy uncle who comes to Thanksgiving dinner and shares his fantasies with the rest of the family, of course presenting them all as incontrovertible fact.

It being the sixteenth century, Menocchio's main subject of discourse was religion, and his masterpiece of speculative theology is now known as The Cheese and the Worms. Carlo Ginzburg uses the phrase as the title of his biography of Menocchio, which was originally published in Italian in 1976.

Ginzburg recalls sitting in an archive in Udine, which is not too far from Montereale, during the summer of 1962, going through records of old trials, and coming across a reference to a man who maintained that "the world had its origin in putrefaction" (p. xi - citations are to the 1980 English edition). He made a note; other research intervened; but eventually he got back to Menocchio and wrote his story.

Menocchio had been telling friends and acquaintances about his ideas for years, and eventually word got back to the Inquisition. He was denounced for heresy in 1583; in 1584 he was arrested, imprisoned, and put on trial.

Think of these proceedings as Menocchio's Thanksgiving dinner. With the Inquisitors, instead of family and friends.

He let it all hang out. "The world had its origin in putrefaction?" Happy to explain, your honor. "I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed - just as cheese is made out of milk - and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels." And one of the angels is God. (Pp. 5-6).

Things then become a bit more conventional, with Lucifer taking a fall and God creating Adam and Eve.

The Inquisitors had been asking witnesses whether Menocchio spoke "in earnest or in jest," and whether he was of sound mind. The answers came back that he spoke in earnest, and he was not mad. One of Menocchio's eleven children, Ziannuto, tried to keep the off-ramp open. He put out the word that his father was "mad" or "possessed." He also hired his dad a lawyer. (Pp. 6-7.)

For his part, Menocchio just asked for the cranberry sauce and forged ahead. He had unkind words for the Virgin Mary and the clergy, and he rejected all the sacraments except communion, where he insisted that Christ was not present in the wafer, but rather the Holy Spirit (pp. 4, 5, 9-11).

Menocchio even suggested that lawyers in court should speak in the vernacular, and not in Latin, so that the common folk could follow the proceedings (p. 9).

Not surprisingly, the Inquisitors found Menocchio guilty of heresy. He was sentenced to life in prison.  In 1586, his sentence was commuted; he was allowed to go home to Montereale and told to speak no more of his many ideas (pp. 91, 93, 95).

And it appears that, for a number of years, he did just that. Eventually, however, he started talking again, and the Inquisitors got wind of it. He was rearrested in 1599 and declared a "relapsus" (pp. 103, 110).

It was not a good time to be a relapsed heretic. In fact, it could get you killed. There was some back-and-forth in Menocchio's case, but in the end the pope himself sent word that Menocchio must die. And that's what happened (pp. 127-128).

Why Kill Menocchio?
With his death, Menocchio slipped from obscurity to oblivion, where he remained for nearly 400 years, until Carlo Ginzburg told his story. I wouldn't say that Menocchio has now achieved the fame of a rock star, but last year, in 2018, the movie Menocchio appeared. So, a biography that's forty years old and still in print, and now a biopic. Not too shabby.

Reading his story from the vantage point of the 21st century, I found myself asking, "Why did they bother to kill this crazy old coot?" I suspect some of my readers may have been harboring similar thoughts for the last several paragraphs. I think, upon reflection, that the answer is two-fold.

First, Menocchio was definitely a heretic. Let's just talk about The Cheese and the Worms, and leave the other stuff on the side.

Have a look at the Apostles' Creed, one of the basic statements of Christian faith. Here are the first seven words: "I believe in God the Father Almighty." Seven words in, and Menocchio is already on shaky ground. Add the next five words - "maker of heaven and earth" - and he's toast.

At the center of Menocchio's downfall, Ginzburg places "the refusal to attribute the creation of the world to the divinity" (p. 56).

Second, we need to remember that, at this time, the Roman Catholic Church was fighting for its life. Let's take a moment and review some highlights from European History 101. In 1517, the Protestant Reformation began when Martin Luther published his 95 theses. Eventually, much of northern Europe, still considering itself Christian, declined to recognize the authority of the pope in Rome. Rome responded with the Counter-Reformation, largely engineered during the Council of Trent, which lasted from 1545 to 1563. The Wars of Religion, as they are called, culminated with the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which devastated Germany in particular, killing as much as one-third of its population. After this catastrophe, religious animosity continued, but outright bloodshed declined.

So Menocchio propounded his ideas at an inauspicious time. Thought control through the Inquisition was already well established. And it wasn't just for obscure Friulian millers. Giordano Bruno was one of the most interesting intellectuals of his generation, and he also faced the Inquisition at roughly the same time as Menocchio.

Although Giordano Bruno supported the novel view of Copernicus that the earth revolved around the sun, it seems that the Inquisition was primarily interested in more standard deviations about the nature of the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and similar issues. He was found guilty and  burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.

And then came Galileo, who also supported the Copernican system, publishing a book on the subject in 1632. This time the Inquisitors were not amused, and in 1633 they forced him to recant. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

So much has changed between Galileo's time and ours. And I do think it's hard, from the vantage point of the 21st century, for us to place ourselves back in that time. Perhaps it helps to trace some of the changes as they came along. In this regard, I think it's useful to jump the Atlantic and look at some things that went on in the American colonies in the seventeenth century.

Let's first look at the Puritans in Massachusetts, who got their start a few years before Galileo's trial. The Puritans weren't interested in people whose religious views differed from theirs. Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams, who was expelled from Massachusetts because he thought for himself. One writer calls early Massachusetts "a theocracy that brooked no dissent, religious or political."

Over the course of the seventeenth century, though, tolerance did get a foothold in the colonies. This was particularly true in William Penn's Pennsylvania, founded in 1681. Penn welcomed settlers of all faiths, not just his fellow Quakers. And they came - Huguenots, Mennonites, Amish, Catholics, Lutherans, and Jews. Anyone familiar with the history of Pennsylvania recognizes that the ideal of tolerance was not always matched by reality, but the fact that the ideal existed was a significant break from the European past.

Flash forward a hundred years to the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment, where there is the notion that the new federal government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Lurking under this rather legalistic language, I think I detect a new idea - the idea that we should stop slaughtering one another over theology.

The amendment goes on to protect freedom of speech, and of the press, "and the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Menocchio would not have recognized this new world. Menocchio had a lot of grievances (he was like the American colonists in this regard - have a look at the Declaration of Independence) and he longed for nothing so much as a hearing.  As he told the Inquisitors, "I said that if I had permission to go before the pope, or a king, or a prince who would listen to me, I would have a lot of things to say; and if he had me killed afterwards, I would not care." (P. 9.)

Free speech, freedom of religion, and a government that listens to the people. Okay.

Pierre Clergue, the Lusty Priest
A basic problem with the old order was that the church had, from the time of Constantine the Great, become a part of the government, and its ears had become attuned to the voices of power and increasingly deaf to the voices of the people.

It has been observed that, as secular power increases, spiritual authority tends to decrease. This creates an empty niche for people who wish to present themselves as the new spiritual authority.

To see how this plays out on the ground, let's parachute into the fourteenth century, to a little village on the northern edge of the Pyrenees called Montaillou, and have a look at the village priest, named Pierre Clergue.

Montaillou is the title of a book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. It was published in French in 1975 and in English in 1978, and provides a portrait of this little town between 1294 and 1324, relying on remarkably rich records of the Inquisition.

Montaillou, located at an elevation of around 1,300 meters, was a farming and sheepherding settlement that in the early fourteenth century had a population of around 200 or 250. The Clergues were one of the most important families in the area. They were prosperous peasants, and they had also cornered effectively all the official power in the town. Pierre, as the village priest, was the religious authority, conducting services, hearing confession, and collecting tithes, which are taxes owed to the church. (The penalty for not paying your tithes was excommunication.) His brother had the title of bayle, which made him the chief civil officer, collecting taxes and enforcing the law. Together, the two brothers had a very nice little version of Tammany Hall. They pretty much controlled the town and the town's relations with the outside world, and Pierre was definitely the senior partner. (See chapter 3.)

Pierre also had an eye for the ladies. On page 155, Le Roy Ladurie lists twelve of his mistresses whom we know by name. Among them was a young cousin, Grazide Rives, who later married Pierre Lizier. "At that time," she told the Inquisition, "I was a virgin. I think I was fourteen or fifteen years old. He deflowered me in the barn [borde] in which we kept the straw." (P. 158.) Another conquest was Esclarmonde Clergue, Pierre's sister-in-law. (Leviticus 18:16 suggests in strong terms that a man should not have sex with his sister-in-law.)

Pierre also had a long affair with a local noblewoman, Beatrice de Planissoles. Beatrice told the Inquisition that they practiced a form of birth control that she perceived to be effective. There was an herb, which was wrapped in a tiny piece of linen. "And he had a long cord which he used to put round my neck while we made love; and this thing or herb at the end of the cord used to hang down between my breasts," as she told the Inquisition (p. 173). And he would insert the herb in her vagina before they had sex. And if they were ever concerned that the herb had gone astray - in moments of passion, such things have been known to happen - she could always tug on the cord, put the herb in his hands, and he could replace it.

Effective or not, it was a nice game. Pierre clearly enjoyed entertaining Beatrice. At one point, they were both in the village of Prades d'Aillon, and he prepared a bed for them in the church so they could spend the night there. "Oh! Oh! How can we do such a thing in the church of St. Peter?" she protested (p. 309). Very 1960s.

They had interesting conversations. On the subject of incest, something of a personal interest for Pierre, he had this to say: "When the world began brothers knew their sisters carnally, but when many brothers had one or two pretty sisters, each brother wanted to have her or them. Hence many murders." And so sex between brothers and sisters was forbidden (p. 52). I suppose we should give Pierre high marks for originality, but it probably would have been safer not to go there.

Pierre was a powerful man and an accomplished seducer. Normally, friendly persuasion would work, but if it didn't, as Le Roy Ladurie puts it, "he might say to a woman, either you sleep with me or I'll see that you are denounced to the Inquisition in Carcassonne." (P. 67.)

Denounce her for what, you ask. Well, it turns out that many of the people in Montaillou were adherents of the Cathar, or Albigensian, heresy. This was essentially a reboot of the third century Manichean heresy. Without getting into too much detail, the Cathars believed that evil existed independently of good, which implied that God was not almighty.

The Cathars didn't view themselves as heretics, but rather heroic Christians pursuing a better path within the church. There were two kinds of Cathars - a small elite known as perfecti and the larger group of followers, called credentes. The perfecti at this time were shadowy figures moving from place to place, ministering to their flocks, but rarely staying in any one spot for long. The credentes, on the other hand, pretty much blended in with the regular Catholics. They practiced baptism and went to confession and mass. They also had an underground side, hiding perfecti in their houses, giving them alms, and guiding them to the next safe house. But to an outsider, life in Montaillou would have looked normal and Catholic. (Pp. viii, 265, 310-311, 325.)

However, the church took a dim view of Cathars, and a threat of denunciation to the Inquisition would have been a powerful motivator to compel compliance with whatever Pierre Clergue wanted.

One of the most interesting parts of all this, to me, was that Pierre Clergue was himself a Cathar heretic. It took the Inquisitors a very long time to figure this out, but Pierre eventually wound up in the famous jail in Carcassonne, where he died.

Simon de Montfort, Trouncer in Chief
There's even another layer beyond this, though. The church had been fighting for a century to eliminate the Cathars. They should have been gone, but the flame of heresy had not been extinguished. It had been greatly diminished; it had gone to the mountains, and gone underground, but it had not been completely destroyed. Montaillou was the last center in France of the Cathar heresy. (Pp. vii-ix, xii, 231.)

Let's dial back from 1320 to the year 1200. Cathars were all over southern France, and not just up in the Pyrenees. They were in the lowlands, and in the big towns, and in the chateaux of the nobility.

There's a liminal space between being submerged and being fully on the surface. Swimmers know this space when they float on their backs on a summer day, and gaze up at the sky. Submariners in World War II called it "decks awash."

I think of the Cathars in, say, Toulouse in 1200 as being decks awash. If you looked, you could see them, but they weren't particularly demanding your attention. Frankly, they'd already taken over, and they were doing just fine where they were.

The church saw the Cathars, and it launched a preaching campaign. Things didn't go very well. In 1204 there was even a great debate, in Carcassonne, between Catholic and Cathar clergymen, with a large audience in attendance. Things still didn't go very well. (Zoe Oldenbourg's Massacre at Montsegur, published in English in 1961, is still my favorite history of the Albigensian Crusade. The Carcassonne debate is on page 91.)

In August 1205 reinforcements arrived in the form of a young Spaniard, the future St. Dominic. He really put his heart into it, but in the end it wasn't enough.

The church moved on to enforcement. In 1208, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade to suppress heresy in southern France. In July 1209 an army of crusaders showed up in front of the town of Beziers and, through a stroke of good luck, captured it quickly. The crusaders then killed all the inhabitants. On that day it didn't matter whether you were a loyal Christian or a Cathar heretic. If you were in Beziers, you died.

Terror works. The resistance largely collapsed. The crusaders did lay siege to Carcassonne, which surrendered after a few days.

In their own minds, at least, the crusaders had achieved their goal of conquest. The question now was how to manage the occupation. Several senior nobles, including the duke of Burgundy, were asked to stay behind and lead the effort. They all declined. Did they sense the looming quagmire? Perhaps.

Terror works up to a point. It creates fear and perhaps temporary compliance. But it also winds a spring of anger, which is only waiting for its moment.

In the end, the job went to Simon de Montfort, a lesser noble who nonetheless had substantial lands near Paris and was an experienced soldier who had served in the Fourth Crusade. Most of the crusaders went home, leaving Simon with only a small permanent force at his disposal. In the coming years it would be supplemented from time to time by fresh detachments of crusaders, whose presence was always temporary.

Simon was a capable soldier, but he lacked troops, and so he relied on terror as he played what was in effect a rather large game of whack-a-mole. Towns and castles would submit to him and swear an oath of loyalty. He would leave to deal with another insubordinate castellan, and rebellion would rise in his rear.

To Simon it may have looked like anarchy, but it wasn't. It was the feudal system doing what it was best at - resisting an outside invader. Of course, the system had been designed to deal with Visigoths and Vikings and Vandals, and not the pope and the king of France.

At any rate, Simon was good at his job; in 1216 the king of France rewarded him with the title Lord of Languedoc. Then one day in June 1218 Simon was fighting, once again, outside the walls of Toulouse. As Oldenbourg relates, Simon's brother, Guy de Montfort, "was wounded by an arrow fired from the ramparts. As Simon hurried across to him, lamenting loudly, he was struck on the head by a stone from a stone-gun, which (the Chanson tells us) was served and fired by women and young girls. 'A stone flew straight to its proper mark, and smote Count Simon upon his helm of steel, in such wise that his eyeballs, brains, teeth, skull and jawbone all flew into pieces, and he fell down upon the ground stark dead, blackened and bloody.'" (P. 198.)

The war continued, with the king of France playing an increasingly prominent role. In 1271, Languedoc became a direct dependency of the French crown.

Even before the start of the crusade, the Cathars had been using an old fort at the edge of the Pyrenees as their headquarters. Montsegur was a small place perched atop a remarkably steep pinnacle of rock. As life in the lowlands became increasingly perilous for the Cathars, Montsegur grew in importance as a refuge and stronghold. In 1243 the crusaders launched a siege of this almost, but not quite, impregnable position. The siege lasted nine months, until March 1244; when the defenders finally agreed to give up, they were given good terms, but the 200 or so perfecti in the fort had to die. It was, by all reports, quite a bonfire.

I think we can call Montsegur the end of major combat operations, although massacres and roundups continued for a very long time. In 1308 the Inquisition came to Montaillou, arrested almost all the adult and adolescent residents, and carted them off to jail in Carcassone. Some were released fairly quickly; others stayed longer. I do wonder how the children and sheep did without any grownups around.  (Montaillou, pp. 63-64.)

During the course of this long conflict you can see feudalism gradually crumbling, along with early stirrings of the centralized French nation-state. What we do not see, from the start of the Crusade in 1209, is any sustained effort to win the hearts and minds of the people. Instead we had the Inquisition. People were encouraged to abandon their heretical beliefs and return to the Catholic faith, and if they did so they were allowed to live. If they refused to recant (as almost all the perfecti refused), or if they relapsed (as Menocchio did), they would normally be killed.

The church had mounted a campaign of persuasion before the start of hostilities, with earnest preachers such as St. Dominic doing their best. But after the war began, even the Dominicans found themselves going on a war footing. In 1233, a few years after Dominic's death, the pope put the Dominicans in charge of the Inquisition.

I'm inclined to think that the Inquisition was one of the great institutional innovations of the high middle ages, comparable to the rise of the universities, but with very different effect.

As Oldenbourg puts it, "Other later epochs were to experience the pressure of similar police-state terrorization; but it is the Dominican Inquisition which must take credit for having actually invented the system. Once the trail had been blazed, there were plenty of imitators ready to follow them along it and perfect their methods: though it would seem that, apart from purely technical improvements, there was very little left for them to discover." (Pp. 308-309.)

What Do We Know about Alternate Narratives ?
Alternate narratives serve a purpose. They explain stuff. Take the Procter & Gamble rumor, at the beginning of this story. Maybe the little old lady just asked herself, "Why does such a boring company have such an interesting logo?"

I made this up, of course. Maybe she thought this, and maybe not.

On the other hand, I don't know whether she actually existed. Having a little old lady as your protagonist personalizes the story in a pleasant way, and the story itself provides a zany but engaging answer to a question that she may never have asked. Other narratives, like a competitor planting disinformation, aren't nearly so much fun. How easy it is to slip through a door into a world where belief is more important than fact, and conjecture can rapidly harden into received wisdom.

What can we learn from Menocchio? For me, the key thing about him was how grounded he was in the material world - things he could see and touch. His analogy of the cheese and the worms is, to me, very telling. Menocchio was literate; he had access to books, and he read them. But his key insight came from his daily life.

He thought he had witnessed the spontaneous generation of life, so he had no problem building his story of the creation of the world on a foundation of old cheese.

The humble maggot has fooled many people over the years. The egg that produces a maggot is very small. Maggots do seem to come out of nowhere, but they don't. (They do go on to become flies, which then plant more of the tiny eggs.)

Joseph Leidy, a scientist who lived in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, spent a considerable amount of his time trying to convince people that they had not witnessed the spontaneous generation of life. He seemed to find this business of batting down incorrect conclusions a bit frustrating, but he soldiered dutifully on, answering letter after letter as politely as he could. (See The Last Man Who Knew Everything.)

On to the Cathars and the independent existence of evil. Christians have been wrestling with the problem of evil for several millennia now. St. Augustine's thought was that evil is simply the absence of good - a state of disorganization, if you will.

I confess to considerable sympathy for St. Augustine's point of view. Most of the evil I have seen has come through the slow grinding of bureaucratic processes, where many people touch an issue, and arguably good intentions, deformed by other arguably good intentions, can lead to poor outcomes.

I've led a sheltered life. Let's go back to Montaillou in 1310 - a shepherd stands in a snow-dappled alpine meadow, staring at an angry she-wolf who is clearly willing to kill him to get at the sheep he's guarding. Does he care much about the hungry wolf pups at home in the burrow? Or is he more worried about the fact that all he has in his hands is a shepherd's crook? If he had the time and inclination to analyze the wolf's motives, would he see a state of disorganization or evil incarnate?

I think people need narratives that relate to their lived experience. When the controlling narrative fails to provide that, alternate narratives will emerge.

Tolerance, Anyone?
So how should we deal with all these competing narratives? One thing I'm pretty certain of is that suppression is a bad idea. If you've got a century to spend, and you're willing to seriously damage the institutions that you're trying to defend, you may be able to declare victory at some point. That's what happened with the Albigensian Crusade.

Or you could try tolerance. America is, of course, the land of alternate narratives. Many people came here because they were being persecuted for their ideas in their home countries. Others simply bring with them the ideas and culture of a place that is very different from the United States. And then there were the hippies in the 1960s who just decided to think for themselves. Or was it the marijuana talking?

It's America. We don't all have to believe the same thing or view the world the same way. But we do need to respect the other guy's right to do the same thing. It seems a bit odd to have to say this in the United States, but the way things have been going lately, I feel obliged to mention it.

We actually do have a controlling narrative. It's enshrined in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Let me translate, freely. Respect the competing narratives. Fight over facts. Do not impose your beliefs on others who do not share your beliefs.

Social Media
We do have a problem with our social media. I think the problem is manageable, and frankly it's not new. Communications have been gaining in reach and speed since the invention of the printing press. The idea of removing the middleman is also not new. Around the time Gutenberg was printing his bibles, Martin Luther was suggesting that Christians did not need a large clerical bureaucracy to mediate between God and the individual. You could just get down on your knees and dial up the deity directly.  Now, that was a big deal.

I think the basic problem with the social media, as currently constituted, is their tolerance for anonymous authors, or false identities, which amounts to the same thing.

Aristotle, in his book on rhetoric, said that there were three main elements of a speech: ethos, pathos, and logos. Logos is logical argument, pathos is the appeal to emotion, and ethos is the identity and character of the speaker.

On social media, we need to know who is talking to us. Have a look at these two statements:

"Hi, my name is Ivan. I'm a colonel in the KGB. Hillary Clinton is bad. Donald Trump is good!"

"Hi. I'm Dorothy, a church-going, God-fearing little old lady in Kansas. Hillary Clinton is bad. Donald Trump is good!"

In our current situation, Ivan may be the only one telling the truth. Or maybe he's lying too.

I think the social media require other reforms as well, but I think knowing the speaker is basic.

See also How Do We Put This Back Together?