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A recent study shows that there was a slight decline in the number of cars heading into downtown Philadelphia each day, and a steady increase in mass transit use.
This information comes at an interesting time – just when ridership is increasing, there is also talk of increasing mass transit ticket prices.
In many ways Philadelphia is fortunate in that there are some natural limits to how much highway expansion can occur. One major freeway (the Schuylkill Expressway) is bound by sheer cliffs on one side and the river on the other. Experiences in other cities – Los Angeles and the Bay Area for example – have seen a dramatic rise in traffic congestion that paralleled freeway expansion efforts.
In a nutshell freeways seem to cause traffic congestion, rather than alleviating it.

Posted by Edd at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are only four commonwealths in the Union. Three - Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Virginia - were part of the original thirteen colonies, and Kentucky was the fifteenth member of the Confederation, as it was called back then.

This bit of historical trivia seems important today in light of what is occurring in one of those commonwealths, notably Pennsylvania, concerning the issue of transportation.

So let’s review. A commonwealth is a state governed for the common good, literally for the common weal, or common well-being.

Now let’s look at what is occurring in the commonwealth’s capital with regard to the transportation issue. In an article in this morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer the governor’s office has said that there will be no “patch” this time to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA). No federal highway funds “diverted” to cover the cost overruns in the southeast corner of the state.

But here is the key paragraph:

Legislators representing rural areas of the state, such as Rep. Fred McIlhattan (R., Clarion), said their constituents were reluctant to contribute more money for mass transit, which they saw as benefiting only metropolitan areas.

And to me this is indicative of much that is happening not just in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but also in the nation as a whole. If the “wifum question” (What’s in it for me?) does not have an immediate and concrete answer, many of us Americans just say no. Rural is more and more pitted against urban, with suburbanites squeezed in the middle.

Unless we return to conversations about the common good, the common well being of all our citizens – urban, rural, rich, poor and middle-class, children and seniors – then there is little hope that either our standards of living or the quality of our lives will stay the same let alone improve.

Right now "well-being in common" seems less like a platitude, and more like a good way to live, and perhaps the only way we will survive.

Posted by Edd at 7:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Spitting Out The N-Word

This past week’s adventures in public transit have not been all that adventurous. I am still the only white guy on the bus - going on two months now without a single mirror image of myself. It’s hard to figure that one. The law of averages should be on my side, I would figure. I guess I would figure wrong.

One event does stand out, though. Small potatoes when compared with global warming, urban violence and what to do with Anna Nicole’s remains, but stand out it does. There I was at my favorite intersection – Mt Pleasant and Germantown Avenues – the same spot where I met the bicyclist from a previous entry waiting for the H Bus. Two teenagers were sitting on the steps of the Germantown Avenue Presbyterian Church. The steps are a perfect place to sit waiting for the bus, especially since the backrest of bench at the bus stop has been vandalized. Why twist the back off a bench so that no one can sit and wait for a bus, I think. But I also digress…

So two teenagers are talking. I of course am invisible. I try to count how many times they use the word “nigger”. It is difficult to keep track. This isn’t just because of the frequency – at least ten times in the first minute that I am there. It’s difficult to keep count because of the number of times one of the boys is spitting onto the sidewalk. I stop with the word count for a minute and watch as this boy spits also more than ten times in one minute. Is there some connection, I wonder.

Well, as I watched them, I thought in fact that there was a connection. They were equally oblivious to both the spitting and the speaking. I noticed that neither had names. They referred to each other as “nigger”, and to just about everyone they know.

Now I get the whole taking-back-the-language-from-the-oppressors viewpoint. Reclaiming “queer” by the gay/queer community is a case in point. Be that as it may, I find the word nigger offensive no matter who uses it.

Maybe it is because of the family I grew up in and the times then. My grandmother used that word at every opportunity. I remember the arguments we had as children about going to visit her. How none of us wanted to, and how much that must have hurt my father’s feelings. I remember how he would try to stop her from spitting out that word. It was the tone that she used. Like a Gatling Gun spitting out bullets is the way I heard her venomous remarks. I didn’t like it as a small child, and I have never been able to hear the word without also hearing that hateful tone.

I guess, though, that I took away from that brief encounter (passive as it was) with these young men is just how unconscious we all can be. And how hateful speech can never really be totally rehabilitated.

I do think it strange that words, like most everything else, are also being privatized in our culture these days. Ethnic slurs used to be more open source than they are today. It seems that, as long as you are speaking about “your own people”, you can say the most hateful things. Will we ever get to the point that “our own people” is all of us? On that afternoon waiting for the bus it seemed like that time is still a long way off.

Posted by Edd at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night was a lesson in how fragile routine systems can be.
Like any complex system that runs on a schedule, mass transit systems are designed with limited capabilities for self-organizing. Drivers are expected to drive their routes. The schedules are designed with some of the unpredictability of shifting traffic patterns and so forth in mind. When stressed to the edges of those tolerances, however, it is easy to see just how fragile these systems are. And weather can be a major stressor.

Public transportation systems like the commercial airline industry - with its tight schedules and quick turnaround times (especially for discount airlines like JetBlue – is case in point. And metropolitan transit systems are another.

So last night I was standing at one of my usual bus stops, and noticed that there was an unusually larger number of people waiting for the bus. A gentleman there said they had been waiting for almost 45 minutes (buses on this route usually arrive every 10 minutes or so). Obviously, there was some serious problem upstream. The weather was bitter cold, and all the slush from the afternoon traffic had now turned into jagged icy ruts that were difficult to negotiate. It was not a stetch to imagine that there may have been an accident or some such calamity on the southbound route.

Here’s the thing, though. At least six or seven northbound buses kept right on going to the end of the line. That meant that there was no way to adapt to a critical situation. No way for drivers to cut their routes short – maybe offload passengers to another northbound bus, and turn around to pick up the passengers stranded at the southbound stops.

So, I was faced with one of those remarkably difficult decision trees. Do I wait for a bus, or begin walking the mile or so home? Do I risk being in the middle of the block when a bus goes by making the trudge home seem longer? Do I stand in the cold with the other penguins, or do I wander off like a polar bear? I chose the polar bear route.

Turned out to be a wise choice. No bus passed me during the half-hour journey across the frozen tundra of Germantown. Yet, thanks to a brief shopping spree last month to REI, I was reasonably warm (except of the acupuncture needles that seemed to be sticking into my face.

On that great trek I saw at least 3 more buses head up the northern trail. While at each corner I encountered more penguins.

At some point in critical situations like this one where mothers with small children and elderly folks were left shivering in the cold, I believe it is important to empower those on the front lines to take the initiative and break out of their routines. Or at least create a communication system that is less fragile than the transport one, so that supervisors can direct drivers to change their routes and allow humans to do what they often do quite well – adapt.

And speaking of elderly folks…
Also during the trek I saw several pedestrians yielding their right of way to motorists, even though they were at a cross walk and had a green light. I even saw one especially egregious case where a man in an SUV actually made a right hand turn right in from to an elderly woman trying to negotiate her way across the icy street. She was forced to not only stop, but also step back so that this picture of entitlement could complete his turn. I tried to imagine that he was a pediatric neurosurgeon - black bag sitting on the seat next to him - on route to a hospital to save a sick child. Only instead I saw what looked like a spoiled middle-class white guy, and all I could imagine was an extra-large pepperoni pizza with extra-cheese on the seat getting colder by the minute. But that's another story.

Posted by Edd at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To say the weather was bleak at the bus stop last night is a disservice to the word bleak. What is bleaker than bleak? Siberian? Whichever the apt word is, that is how it was standing on the corner of Germantown Avenue and Mt. Pleasant Street in Mount Airy waiting for the 23 Bus. Maybe it was the 19-degree temperature. Or it could have been the freezing rain. Or perhaps it was the wind. It might have been the 1-degree wind chill. I don’t know. What I do know now is the rather pleasant sound of power lines literally frozen stiff as they hummed like steel cables. It even sounded cold.

And then…
A bicyclist appeared across the street coming in my direction. As he passed, I smiled and said, “Balmy evening, isn’t it?” He stopped and smiled back and said, “This isn’t the coldest I've ever been.”
“Where was that?”
“Bismarck, North Dakota in the middle of winter”, he replied still smiling.
And so we began to chat.
He was dressed in a tight fitting orange down parka, black winter bicycle pants, several pairs of heavy socks and boots. His helmet was a bit of an oddity, though. It was black and white – looked more like a policeman’s motorcycle helmet than a bicyclist’s, with one minor alteration. On the top was a blinking light sitting atop a spindle-like device, so that the light arced back and forth. No way one of those aggressive Philadelphia drivers would miss seeing him!
Looking at his bike told me that his was a serious rider. He had an old steel framed Peugeot. I haven’t seen one of those in quite a while. (You can see one here, though.) He said he had been riding it for about twenty years.
He then pointed to his pack on the back of his bike, and said, “I’ve been keeping a log, and I have ridden 240,000 miles. Some years I rode 9,000 and sometimes 10,000 miles.”
“When did you start the log?” I asked.
“In February 1974.”
And then I looked closer at his face. “Can I ask you how old you are?”
“Seventy-four. My mother is ninety-five, but she is wearing out her warranty. I expect to live to be one hundred fifteen… no, one hundred eighteen.” He never stopped smiling.

We spoke some more about microbiology and macrobiotic diets and how there was someone even more important in France than Louis Pasteur who was a contemporary of his but whose name I never heard of who had a whole different take on biology and keeping food safe and how Pasteur on his deathbed said that he was wrong and that the other guy was right but now it is too late because we have embedded Pasteur’s model so deeply and all sorts of interesting facts half (or more) of which I had no clue about. (Breathe, breathe...)

Unfortunately, around that time I saw that my bus was slowly negotiating its way up the small hill to the corner, and it was time of us to go on our separate ways. As I walked the few steps it took to get to the waiting bus, I realized that the evening wasn’t so bleak anymore. Down right balmy, actually.

Posted by Edd at 8:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When the student is ready, the teacher will come, as the adage goes. The other day my teacher came disguised as a bus.

I was walking to the bus stop a few mornings ago on my way to pick up a car at the Philly CarShare pod not too far from my flat. When I was about a half a block away from the corner, I saw the bus about a block away. Great timing, I thought. I began to jog toward the bus stop, and as I heard the bus approaching I waved. There was a green light at the intersection and the bus kept right on going leaving me standing there a bit out of breath and really pissed off. I was absolutely furious at the bus for not stopping. Then it occurred to me how strange and how totally irrational it is to be angry at a bus.

Once I was able to get in touch with just how absurd my thinking was in that moment, my whole little story about what had just occurred began to unravel at breathtaking speed. I quickly realized that during that whole dramatic scene I had just painted there was no other person sharing the stage with me. What I had done was to waive to the bus. I had not taken a moment to turn, make eye contact with the bus driver, and make it clear to him or her that I wanted to actually take the bus. No doubt the driver interpreted my actions to mean the exact opposite of my intentions.

So, instead of riding on the bus for a few blocks, I was treated to a very pleasant twenty-minute walk to the car pod. I picked up my car in plenty of time to stop by my friends’, Richard and Marcia, house and have a cup of coffee with them. Richard showed me a short cut to where I was going in Northeast Philadelphia, so I ended up getting there a bit early.

The rest of the day went well. The training I did on Emotional Intelligence seemed well received by the employees at the Just Born PeanutChews plant in Northeast Philadelphia. (I even used this little bus story in the training to show how irrational we can become when our emotions highjack our thinking.)

Later that day, after I dropped off the car, I went back to Infusion, my favorite café in Mt Airy, to use their Wi-Fi. Heading home I waited for bus on the corner. Evidently, a bus was taken out of service because there were a number of people waiting at the bus stop.

Across the street there were three teenage boys hanging out and acting like three teenage boys with a basketball. I commented to an older gentleman nearby about their “youthful enthusiasm”. He laughed and then commented about how wild these kids are these days. A wonderful conversation ensued about the state of our culture today, and how so few people really get global warming these days. He then remarked about what it is going to take to get us freedom loving Americans to get out of our cars. He envisioned a day when driving will be rationed. This gentleman was obviously far from wealthy. In his late seventies, I would guess. He had no front teeth, and was wearing a winter coat that, while still seemed warm enough, had seen a number of winters. So much for stereotypes.

And there we were having this great conversation about the state of the world – the likes of which I rarely seem to have much these days. When the student is ready…

Posted by Edd at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One rather surprising finding after Week 1 in Philadelphia was the spillover effect it had on my time in the Bay Area. I found that just paying attention to my “transit habits” altered them, at least a little.

All in all there were a number of unexpected similarities to the two areas in terms of transit. Some remarkable differences to be sure, but still not everything was as different as I previously thought.

I noticed that, while in the Bay Area, I began to organize my time differently so that I didn’t need to drive as much as usual. It took some planning, and clearly there were times when it was truly impossible to avoid driving, but not as much as I had thought in the past. One stunning contrast, though, was the difference in cost of public transit. During the second week I was there I needed to go from Berkeley to the city. Driving is always an option, but the cost of parking in the city is on par with New York in most places. So, I drove to the West Oakland BART station, parked my car there and took the train under the bay into downtown San Francisco.

But here’s the thing: parking there cost $6 a day – a steal by most standards to be sure. And then there is the cost of the trip to the city – about 3 bucks each way. So, that’s $12 a day just to avoid one of the world’s busiest bridges. Compare that to $18 or so a week for a transit pass in Philadelphia. By the second day…

And then there is the race thing. I spoke to one of my young Verger colleagues there, Franklin Hysten, about why there are no white folks on the buses in Oakland. Franklin deadpanned, Wow, I noticed that, too! During the conversation he was reminded of the scene in the movie, Crash, where one character says that the reason the bus windows are so big is so that the rich people can see all the poor people taking the bus. The only problem with that observation is that the train windows are fairly big as well. But still.

We also spoke about one big difference between SF and PHL transit-wise is that lots of white people take the bus in SF. We came to the obvious conclusion – white people take buses when other white people take buses. Very few middle-class while folks take the bus in Oakland, so very few middle class folks take the bus in Oakland. (This of course leads to the next questions: How much of this dynamic is a function of race, and how much is about class?)

Arriving back in Philadelphia last night I was aware of an amazing confluence of well-functioning systems. Yesterday morning I left the flat in Berkeley a bit after 10 am, walked through the Cal campus to the Downtown Berkeley BART station. I waited about 3 minutes for a train. Two stations later I transferred to a train headed to the city (it was waiting across the platform), and then at the southern end of the city I made a final transfer to a train to the airport (after a wait of less than ten minutes). I arrived at the airport in plenty of time, got through security and boarded the plane without any hassles. The plane had about forty passengers on board, so everyone had their own row.

We had a great tailwind, so we arrived in Philadelphia about forty-five minutes early (about 8:45pm). I walked to the train platform at the airport and got there a little before 9. The train to the city arrived right on time at 9:12pm, and got to 30th Street Station at 9:30. The local train arrived on the next platform on time at 9:40 and arrived at my station, Tulpehocken, at 9:57 on the dot – right on time. A three-minute walk later and I was opening my front door at 10pm.

It was all so effortless. I know that it is not like this all the time, but when it is, it is a delightful way to move my molecules around.

One other thing I noticed on the two trains from the airport - how different the ads are on the train as opposed to the buses. On the buses there are lots of ads about HIV testing and fair housing, and ads for immigration lawyers. On both trains, though, I saw this ad from The Philadelphia Foundation:

If Warren Buffet

needs some help

giving away his money,

maybe you do, too.

On the 23 Bus there was this ad from the decidedly not not-for-profit, First National Fund:

CASH BY PHONE

$100 - $500

MAKE ONE CALL

You’ll get the cash you need

TODAY

If The Philadelphia Foundation ad ever appears on the #23 Bus line, then maybe we will be getting somewhere with Transit Publicus.

Posted by Edd at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My first week using public transportation in Philadelphia is winding down. Or is it winding up? Whatever. It is almost over. While I can’t say that I have had a breadth of experience – only two bus routes and two train routes in the city and suburbs – my experience does not lack depth. I have taken these routes at various times of the day and night, and I have used them during peak hours, off-peak hours, and weekends.

A little context may be in order. For the past year I have been spending most of my time on the west coast in the Bay Area and the Wine Country. When I decided to stay here in Philadelphia on a slightly more permanent basis (three weeks a month more or less), I was faced with the decision about “personal vs public transit”. So, I chose public for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being the cost of personal transport.

Saving money was not the only factor in my calculations, though. I have been in any number of conversations with various “fellow progressives” over the last few years about how important it is for all of us to begin changing our behavior in response to the global environmental crisis that is in the forefront of most of our minds these days. Just one problem, however. I did not see any of us (including me) actually changing that behavior, especially when it came to a choice about giving up our cars and relying on public transit to get us there and back again. So, I decided to forgo getting a car, and see what it is really like to join the masses that comprise mass transit.

Before I head off to the tailor shop to be fitted for some saintly robes, I do have a few carbon sins I need to confess. Once I make that confession and firmly resolve to sin no more, I will immediately head back to the Bay Area, get refitted for shoes that will leave a carbon footprint to rival Bigfoot’s, and engage in the wanton excesses that come with living in the land of the sixteen-lane freeway. And a more than passing mention must be made of the one hundred plus trans-continental flights I have taken over the past six years.

Maybe I should just cancel that fitting appointment at the tailor shop and get a hair shirt off the rack.

Ok back on track… So, what have I noticed in this first week with a diminished footprint? Well, let’s deal with the obvious first. It is both the most obvious and least discussed aspect of the public transit conversation – black folk take buses; white folk take trains. I don’t know how this happened. It has no power of law (at least black folks are free to sit anywhere they wish nowadays), but it might as well have the power of law the way it plays itself out. For me, as a middle-class white man, taking the bus means that I will be the only white guy on the bus, and usually the only white person period. Not so for trains, though.

Taking the train is an exercise in middle-class predictability. I know I will be surrounded by others who look like me, act like me, and probably think like me (although I hold tenaciously to the delusion that my thinking is somehow unique). Oh there are any number of persons of color on the train, but the most striking difference is the number of white middle-class passengers that are regulars.

Perhaps the bus routes have something to do with this. Maybe it is the perceived unpredictability of the bus schedules. Maybe this, maybe that. But here’s the thing, so far the buses and trains have pretty much taken me anywhere in the city I wanted to go.

Before I close this first week’s journal entry, I need to mention another form of public transit I use here from time to time – Philly CarShare. This non-profit organization has dozens of “pods” scattered throughout the city with cars (mostly Priuses) parked in designated spaces. I can then reserve a car on the web. There are enough pods nearby that I have never had a problem reserving a car at the time I needed one. The cars have a computerized sensor on the windshield and I have a doohickey fob thingy (sorry to be so technical) that I put on my keychain, which allows me to swipe and drive. The cars cost $7 per hour and that includes gas, insurance, maintenance, everything. For anyone living in Center City, this is an unbelievably sensible way to go – both from an economical and environmental perspective.

Well, that’s it for now. Next entry in a few weeks when I return to Philadelphia.

Stay safe. Be green.

Afterthoughts... after the jump.

Continue reading "Transit Publicus – Week 1" »

Posted by Edd at 7:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)