South Street Drag Strip

The new bridge is the idiot legacy of our auto-mania.

by Bruce Schimmel

From a distance, on a windy winter day, Philly looks as pretty as Oz — a city set between rivers, with sleek skyscrapers rising into a dark blue sky.

But much of the time, Philly is capped by a cloud of sepia. Greenhouse gases cover us in a pale, brown bubble.

Flying above the city's streets, in a light plane, you can feel the brute force of those rising gases. The updraft from Philly's heat island is so powerful that it tosses around my aircraft in a wave of turbulent, dirty air.

So, from a thousand feet up, it seems all so clear that constructing more expressways, and encouraging more traffic, is not a sensible path to the future.

And that the state's plan to replace the South Street Bridge with a high-speed traffic interchange is a dirty, dangerous mistake.

With me, circling the bridge, is Brad Maule, who runs a Web site that promotes good urban design, Phillyskyline.com.

Brad's telephoto hangs out the side window, as he snaps hundreds of aerial views of the sensitive neighborhoods bordering the bridge — Penn's campus and South Street West.

Under us, the bridge and express traffic is heavy stop-and-go. The odor rising from the cars and trucks smells like an oily fart, and Brad is getting nauseous.

"Get your eye out of the lens," I tell Brad. "Deep breaths. Focus on the horizon. Here, drink some cold water and suck on some ginger candy."

In a minute, the icy water and the ginger do their magic. Brad picks up his camera and keeps on clicking.

From 1,000 feet, it seems obvious that restoring Philadelphia to the green country town of its original design is also its best promise for the future. After decades of building to encourage more trucks and autos, it's time to favor pedestrians and bicyclists.

But this simple insight has yet to inform the intergovernmental juggernaut that's proposing to spend some $50 million to transform the current South Street Bridge into a dangerous mini-expressway.

The new design increases the number of lanes for traffic, and eliminates the guardrails that protect walkers. An accelerating semi could easily hop the low curb, joining pedestrians on the sidewalk.

It's the wrong kind of bridge in the wrong place. While other cities are remaking their highways into parkways, authorities here claim that this new bridge must be built to operate like an expressway because the money used to pay for it comes from highway funds.

This is the idiot legacy of our nation's auto-mania: What's currently on the drawing board is a six-lane overpass that's supposed to connect to the high-speed expressways effortlessly.

Only the new bridge will fail to do even that. After spending millions to rebuild the bridge to encourage fatter vehicles and higher speeds, its traffic still won't be able to slam down seamlessly to the expressway underneath.

According to PennDOT's own study, the on- and off-ramps that currently connect the bridge to the Schuylkill cannot be rebuilt to make traffic flow any faster or safer.

Drivers already know the drill for these short and nasty runs: Waiting at the bottom, you scan the traffic for a gap. You take a breath, put pedal to metal and pray.

The faster bridge will not only exacerbate these hazards, it will also create new woes for neighborhoods on either side. Headed toward Center City, several lanes of truck traffic will be squeezed onto one and a half lanes of little South Street.

Big trucks don't belong on South Street — a fact made painfully obvious in an accident I witnesseda couple of months ago. A truck traveling east at about 21st Street sheered the limbs from several overhanging trees, peeling back the truck's top like a tin of sardines.

The perpetrator wasn't even a semi. Just an ordinary Ryder moving truck that had moved a tad too far to the right. And you could hardly fault the out-of-town driver, who reasoned that a through street should have more than a single lane of clearance. Silly him.

The design of the new South Street Bridge is a dirty and dangerous holdover from another time. Which is why Brad and I are circling in this muck, getting nauseous. And getting sicker still at the prospect of a drag strip being built over the Schuylkill.

(bruce@schimmel.com)