There are only six American downtown districts that are dense enough to support mass transit, which you need if you’re going to be carless: New York City (Midtown and Downtown), Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco. That’s it. The breaking-point for density and mass transit feasibility seems to be about 50 persons per acre, which means families living in flats and apartments, rather than single-family houses, even row houses. Not necessarily high-rise apartments, but at least walk-ups.I'm glad Philadelphia makes that list, since it's true that you can live in Philadelphia without a car. It's a fact some of SEPTA's most passionate critics tend to forget, possibly because many of them have not lived for long outside of one of those five cities. But I think he probably overstates the case just a little. Once you've got mass transit, it can constitute its own organizing principle for a city offering car-free (or nearly car-free) living to those living in transit-adjacent corridors. That's largely the problem with selling people on the virtues of public transit. It's not quite like offering a service like high-speed internet access or central water, where there's demand in the places people already live. Mass transit is a service that creates its own demand, its own new constituencies, simply by coming into existence. In that sense, "demand" for public transit has to be reckoned in a more abstract way than demand for coffee shops, bars, grocery stores and other commercial endeavors.
Philadelphia is lucky to have the transit corridors it already has. They've made the kind of density we enjoy (or at least some of us enjoy) possible. Few cities have demonstrated the courage to build mass transit corridors with a future like Philadelphia in mind.
That's why I may never ever leave.
to be honest, i was a little surprised to see DC was not on the list. Especially because the photo at the top of that story is even of Clarendon in Virginia, a place most definitely metro accessible.
ReplyDeleteYeah, people extol the virtues of the DC Metro--its modernity and its cleanliness, mainly--but never having used it myself, I can't attest to its reach. The thrust of the discussion at NYT is about what it takes to live car-free. Can people live reliably car-free in DC?
ReplyDeleteI love that you can live in Philadelphia without a car. Unlike the other cities on the list, however, development in Philadelphia has not clustered around transit corridors as much as it has in DC or Boston. Think: Why are Broad St and Market St so crappy when they have subways (or the El) running under (or over) them?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, some of our suburban areas are beautiful examples of transit oriented development. Lancaster Ave, Jenkintown, etc. But we don't seem to recognize these places as assets, we just take them for granted. It's time we changed our mindset.
That's absolutely right. That's kind of why I started this blog and twitter account. I think people get too caught up in the day-to-day hassles involved in actually using the system and lose track of the bigger picture--what it makes possible in terms of lifestyle, walkable full-service neighborhoods, etc. When they simply believe that "septa sucks" they're less likely to make housing decisions based on proximity to it. To some extent the Frankford section of the El has started to see more of those clusters of development. The Market St. section, not so much. Maybe now that the El project is mostly done, development will accelerate.
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Best of luck
Fred