Me.

Her car jerks to a stop. She leans on the horn and yells, "I'm turning here." Not yet, dearie. I'm walking here first.

In the daily clash between vehicles and people, score another for the home team. And thank Billy Penn—with his skinny, bumpy, old streets—for keeping cars slow and me from becoming pasta puttanesca on this lady's hood.

Philadelphia's horse-and-buggy heritage may also help save this city from an impending vehicular invasion. But these old streets also need some help from the 21st century.

Seems like everyone is worried about the traffic. Traffic is the talk of Queen Village [News, "One-Way Oust," Jenna Portnoy, May 25, 2006], where cars are clogging up Christian Street. In Northern Liberties and the river wards, an infestation of automobiles tops the woes that gambling will bring. And at a button-down event at the Union League, "The Car in the City" was the topic of a recent Center City District forum. CDC showcased a couple internationally renowned urban planners. Their conclusion, simply put, is that Philadelphia would thrive to the degree that automobiles disappear. (Check out their excellent presentation at: www.centercityphila.org/aboutus/cpdc_forum03.aspx.)

Fifty years ago, the car was worshipped as this and every city's salvation. Many believed that bringing interstate highways into and even through Philly neighborhoods would bolster a decaying city by connecting it to its burgeoning suburbs.

And though activists in the 1960s did save South Street from becoming an expressway, moving cars became the only thing that mattered. Today, Center City is hemmed in by expressways. We accommodated cars by widening streets, timing traffic lights and keeping parking cheap. We believed that more cars would cure the city's ills.

Only the plan failed.

City planners now say that cars became the vehicles of urban flight. Cars emptied our communities, destroyed neighborhood businesses and undercut mass transit. And it's even worse than that, because the more we built to suit the car, the more congested it became. As road engineer Walter Kulash told the CDC forum, building for cars was like chasing our tails.

In the 1970s, before the Vine Street Expressway, it took 20 minutes to go from river to river during rush hour. Just about anytime today, it takes longer—while thousands of idling vehicles fill the air. There's progress for you.

Accommodating cars is like negotiating with terrorists. Making Christian Street one way will certainly make it easier for cars to whiz through, but pedestrians and community life will surely lose out. Likewise, you can't corral thousands of casino-bound cars through tiny streets without destroying neighborhoods. And adding more on and off ramps to I-95 will only increase congestion and pollution.

"Being sweet to people is being sweet to the economy," said urban planner Jan Gehl at the Union League. Cities like Gehl's Copenhagen have cashed in on tourism by making the city sweetest to its walkers, cyclists and those who take mass transit. Millennium Park, in the center of Chicago, has hundreds of parking spaces for bikes. Cincinnati, Nashville and Pittsburgh are likewise pampering pedestrians. Cities are narrowing, slowing and greening their former urban highways. They're reuniting walkers with their rivers.

Today, Philly's waterfront is at risk, and Penn's classic plan alone can't save it. We need a riverfront master plan that's sweet to pedestrians in place, and soon—before the city is divorced permanently from the Delaware.

Ironically, 50 years ago, Philadelphia had an urban planner who understood that cars must be kept in their place. Louis Kahn proposed a ring of parking garages around Center City. Commuters would walk or take public transit into the heart of town, creating a paradise for pedestrians.

At the time, Philadelphia's official planner, Edmund Bacon, dismissed Kahn's scheme, calling it impractical. Now Kahn's notions don't seem quite so crazy. Because today, either we begin to run cars out of town, or risk being overrun by them.