Car-Free in Philadelphia

Great discussion in a New York Times opinion blog on the possibilities of car-free living.  Though the claim is disputed in comments, Witold Rybczynski--a professor at Penn--makes this bold claim in his post:

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.  

Dream or Nightmare?

Love this piece of SEPTA angst from The Dream.

Heartrate City

First, thanks to @_missbee for the new twitter logo:













It got me thinking a little about hearts. In my daily sampling of tweets about Philadelphians' public transit woes, I often wonder about the parallel 'private' transit happening on the regions roads and highways. I suppose one of the hidden PR disadvantages of running public transit is that your clients have nothing but time to complain while waiting for and actually using your service. Drivers, on the other hand, we hope, are keeping a white knuckle grip on their steering wheels while commuting to work and have not time to thumb out their disgust with traffic. In other words, thanks to a mechanical bias built into the ways we commute, the twitstreams simply aren't sufficiently similar to compare the stress and irritation of driving vs. riding SEPTA.

So here's an idea. Let's take 100 daily public transit riders and 100 daily car commuters and strap heart rate monitors to them. Let's recruit them from the same communities and the same industries. And then let's look at their commute times and heart rates for one month. Let's make the data public and compare just how long and how stressful our commutes are. And hell, let's do a little oral history while we're at it!

Hypothesis: Driving sucks WAY more than riding SEPTA. And you'll feel much better about that bus that just drove by without stopping or the train conductor who shut the doors in your face if you know there's a sad sack somewhere on 95 North choking down a Croissanwich and spitting with rage at the Jetta driver who just cut him off to reach the Aramingo exit.

Deliberation

Beautiful shot from Market East Station by flickr user mezone.

There's already been quite a bit of chatter about the delay in SEPTA's new smart-card fare system, but it's well worth deliberating a little over this. It's a lot of money and still a few years away. It's smart to take it slow since some of the necessary technologies are still evolving. Still, if these descriptions are accurate, it's going to be quite a convenience and a significant improvement over even NYC's beloved metro card:

The "smart card" system will replace the tokens, tickets, and magnetic-stripe cards that passengers now use on buses, subways, trains, and trolleys. Passengers will be able to wave a card at a sensor on a turnstile or fare box and be on their way.

SEPTA wants a system that will allow passengers to use credit cards, prepaid SEPTA cards, and even cell phones to pay for their trips.

Everything is Amazing, and Nobody's Happy

Okay, there are some things that aren't amazing. That's true. People on Twitter keep reminding me of pee on the subway, and I'll agree that that's not amazing. But it's not the worst thing either. And how does a transit system as large as SEPTA fix that anyway? Signage? Pee monitors? You want money from your fare to go to mop-jockeys on every train? One of the greatest things about Philadelphia is that it never lets us get quite far enough away from each other to forget that there are people who are troubled and pee in public. We may pelt Santa with snowballs or riot in the streets occasionally, but it's the forced proximity of urban places like SEPTA buses and train cars that delivers us from indifference. That pee smell is humanity, and don't you forget it.

"I like bus butts and I cannot lie"

I swear that I am not making these videos. I wish:

More from a loyal Bus Watcher

It's hard to imagine YouTube's lucky54man topping BusWizard's Theme, and this isn't the song to do it, but it's a little glimpse inside the mind and habits of a dedicated bus watcher and presumed SEPTA lover: