Transit is what makes a city go. If you’re going to have large functioning high density mobile populations, you either need lots of well planned highways and many-lane roads, or you need good public transit.
Philly on the whole, was not designed for the automobile. Its highway systems are less dysfunctional than say Los Angeles or New York, yet they are a textbook- no, make that the textbook example of varied consequences of 1960s highway planning.
I-76 cuts through Fairmount park, severely diminishing its accessibility, transversability, general usefulness, and as a result- usership, of an otherwise largely pristine refuge from the urban expanse of Philadelphia.
I-676, the Vine Street Expressway, serves as the dividing line between North Philadelphia and Center City, and depresses a varying width of surrounding blocks along its length, with frontage on vine street consisting of some residential and commercial property, but a disproportionately high number of underdeveloped lots, vacant lots and structures, and parking lots for Center City. This is to spite the fact that the mostly below grade highway is about as unobtrusive as it could be short of being completely buried out of sight, with various greenscaping projects along its many overpasses.
Outside of the highways at rush hour, driving in Philly is less limited by the presence of other vehicles (which are much more a threat to your safety than schedule in general) than by the presence of such a great many stop signs and traffic lights. The 25 MPH speed limit can in some instances seem unobtainably fast in this proto-industrial grid land.
Of course, the city was designed with a 5 mile per hour speed limit in mind, and what is now north Philadelphia was untamed wilderness when the since extrapolated gridlines were first laid. For those fortunate enough to live and work a walking life in Center City, that kind of speed might work fine, but if Philadelphia’s population should return to or exceed its historic peak, those of us driving cars around the rest of the city and suburbs may be slowed to a similar pace.
Part of the ‘solution’ Philadelphia has de facto adopted is immobility. Parking problems are prevent many people from doing many things. In general, People just don’t leave their neighborhoods all that much. Instead of thinking about things in terms of parking problems, lets think about them in terms of transit problems. If transit could get you where you need to go as fast or faster than driving, you wouldn’t need to park at all, and nobody would have to drive home from a bar.
So, what might the transportation situation in the birthplace of freedom look like in 2040? If some serious investments in Transit infrastructure are not implemented, the best case is a city encased in gridlock. The worst case would be the city not growing at all, and remaining economically depressed. So let’s plan on the city growing, and make room for it to do so. Let’s plan to have less traffic than we do now, with double the population. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that no amount of traffic flow optimization, highway expansion, or even driverless car technology could accommodate that goal.
The answer is transit, but for a city that is rather accustomed to an automobile lifestyle, the transit system is going to have to be really good, and really affordable to get people to make the switch. Car sharing services are making it easier for people to give up vehicle ownership, but for the more prideful occasional user of the future, perhaps a culture of off-street storage combined with driverless valet technology will come to replace street parking as the preference of the so-enabled. Some people will always need to use a car, the goal should be to make transit competitive with vehicle ownership in terms of reach, speed, and comfort, so that transit will actually become a viable and preferable method of moving about rather than a last resort, as it is considered by so many.