The premise: driving sucks because of cars

Not because of pedestrians, cyclists, buses, horses, or turtle crossings

I don’t love driving in Philly – too much traffic, too hard to see past parked cars at intersections, and you get honked at if you wait for a pedestrian to cross.

Some of that is a cultural phenomenon, of course. People honking while you wait for a pedestrian is a hard thing to “design out” of a city’s driving experience.

But other factors – stuff like the volume of traffic and visibility at intersections – are fully possible to influence by changing how our streets are designed.

And I think an important point that is often missing when talking about street safety is this: as a driver, I don’t want to hit anyone. I don’t want to hit a pedestrian, I don’t want to hit a cyclist, I don’t want to hit a car. And I know that’s true of just about every one of the other drivers out there (tinted-window cars notwithstanding; only they can see through the opaque glass that encases their hearts).

My goal when I’m driving somewhere is to get to my car, drive it where I need to go without incident or traffic, and park near enough to my destination to comfortably walk the last bit.

This is all obvious, though. Of course we all want to get where we’re going without hurting anyone and without it being a pain in the ass to get there. But I also recognize how that calculus gets trickier when we’re talking about the 1.6 million residents of Philadelphia (and however many suburbanites, contractors, farmers market-ers, and tourists are passing through at any given time).

How do we make sure we get the benefits of all these people contributing to our city, while maintaining safe places and routes between places in our city?

That is where street design can’t take sides. With well over 6 million people in the Philly metro area, we can’t waste the space we have. At that scale, you need efficiency more than you need convenience.

Put differently, in a scenario where 50% of Philly’s residents needed to be on the road at the same time, that’d be 800,000 cars. At an average 20 feet per car (allowing a few feet of space between each car), that’s over 3000 miles of road taken up by cars front to back. (The city maintains about 2500 miles of road, for context) And that’s with no one driving into the city for work or leisure.

I think we know this intuitively with how bad traffic gets, but to state it plainly: advocating for a city where cars are the only reasonable way to get around won’t end well. Even if the city doesn’t grow its population, the present state of traffic is unenviable at best.

The only way to improve traffic is to get more cars off the road – and you won’t do that by enabling cars in the city with free (or functionally free) parking. You’ll do that by providing safe, comfortable, reliable ways to get around the city without a car. By protecting bike lanes, by daylighting intersections, by making priority bus lanes.

So to put a bow on my message here: let’s make driving suck less, by making not-driving suck less.