People who object to putting a fair price on parking often claim that it would be a regressive tax falling primarily on the poor and working class. That assertion is not supported by the arithmetic. Based on an unscientific survey of Philadelphia’s poor and working class, conducted by watching Twitter keyword searches for the last …
Category Archives: Threats to Life and Safety
Visualizing parking is the first step to resolving parking politics
A new map shows exactly which block faces in Philadelphia require the pittance of $35/year to keep a car on them. The terms of parking politics in this city may never be the same. Lauren Ancona’s previous magnum opus was a map showing the boundaries of the PPA parking permit districts, a work that landed …
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Looking back, looking ahead: New Year’s roundup 2015
In the last night of the year, five things we’ll remember from 2014: The year of citizen action. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much when Conrad Benner launched a change.org petition to get SEPTA to run the subways overnight. But it worked, and now another petition has sparked progress on a second front, in …
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How do we stop Civil Engineers from killing people?
A young girl is in the hospital, not expected to survive. Her cousin has leg and head injuries, and her mother is also injured. And mild-mannered Minnesotan Chuck Marohn is in a white-hot rage about it. I don’t fundamentally disagree with his point that we’ve shielded civil engineers from our liability- and litigation-happy traditions, and …
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Whose roads? Our roads! An introduction to American highway blockade
As the country recoiled Monday night from the injustice of the non-indictment in Ferguson, something genuinely new happened. At first, here in Philadelphia, it was like any other of the sickeningly familiar outpourings of grief and anger that have motivated people into the streets before, with a large mass of people starting at City Hall …
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An open letter to City Council, concerning MonkeyParking
To the Honorable Seventeen Paintmunching Knaves, Long May You Reign. It has come to our attention that one among you, the Honorable William Greenlee (D-At Large), who has done the previously-thought impossible and distinguished himself from your ranks by his sheer dumbfuckery, has discovered the internet sufficiently to have heard of MonkeyParking. MonkeyParking is a …
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Weekly Roundup: Pay as you enter, IBEW settles, police body cams, Greenlee may be a fool, and Previdi definitely is
Another edition brought to you by the World’s Worst Blogger: In the end of an era, SEPTA has announced that, beginning on September 1, pay-as-you-leave will be abolished on the Suburban Transit routes out of 69th Street Terminal where it is currently the rule. This will standardize the entire SEPTA transit system on the more …
I-495 bridge closure: how to go around the snarl
Today has been a second consecutive day of traffic nightmare in Delaware, as the First State copes with the failure of the I-495 Christina River Bridge. While people making short trips to Wilmington or Philadelphia should switch to transit, those relying on the I-95 corridor for longer trips may not have such an easy alternative. …
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Carmageddon Delaware: I-495 bridge to be closed “for weeks”.
DelDOT officials have confirmed what many suspected when Interstate 495 was closed late Monday after an inspection: shifting support pillars have left the Christina River Bridge unsafe to drive on, and the bridge will remain closed indefinitely until major repairs are complete. That means Interstate 495, the main highway link between Southeast Pennsylvania and points …
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“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee”
Smoking gun e-mails have now been produced that definitively tie the September 2013 closure of approach lanes at the George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to the office of Governor Christie. They additionally provide concrete evidence that the action, taken by Christie appointees at the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey (PANYNJ) who …
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Sic Transit Philadelphia 