The world’s largest (fully functional) pipe organ is not in a cathedral in Europe, or in fact a church or cathedral anywhere. It’s in an office building in Philadelphia, where I happen to work. It’s shame because it was part of a our Center City Macy’s which closed recently and it is not clear if the organ will need to be moved. Perhaps not if this website is accurate and still up-to-date. Anyway, I always had the impression it had been built specifically for the space it is in and would therefore be difficult to move, but I was wrong about that – it was built for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and later moved to the Wanamaker Department Store here. So it could be moved again if it needs to be. With a pipe organ though, the space it is in is part of the instrument in a way, so if you move it that particular sound you got from the combination of the organ and the space will never happen again. It would be like moving your guitar or violin strings to another completely different instrument. Anyway, they still play it daily because apparently it needs to be played to stay in good shape. It rattles the walls throughout the building, which is cool.
I do have one more question – how common are not-fully-functional pipe organs and where are they? Maybe they are hard to maintain in good condition, and therefore for every fully operational one there are a bunch of old broken ones lying around? I don’t know.
It’s sad – Philadelphia’s public transportation, which was already creaky and unreliable due to decades of deferred maintenance and capital investment, is being financially starved due to dysfunctional politics at the state level. At the heart of the political game is a willful misunderstanding of a fundamental truth – most economic activity occurs where the most people are. Is this really not so obvious that we need to debate it? And this means that most taxes in a state like Pennsylvania are paid in its metropolitan areas. It makes sense to spend some of that money disproportionately in rural areas which by definition can’t generate the net economic activity to support themselves. But people and politicians in these rural areas not only do not appreciate this, they believe the exact opposite thing to be true – that they are subsidizing metropolitan areas. Which is logically, financially, and physically impossible. But mirroring the larger country, these irrational rural politicians have disproportionate political power relative to the number of people they represent. I have no political answers to this political problem, and I am getting closer to considering leaving the state. Delaware and New Jersey have their own problems but are much more rationally governed.
Anyway, having said all that, Philadelphia’s public transportation is not exactly cutting edge or visionary. It’s dirty, old, slow, and communication is poor. And it’s not cheap – one person riding a bus can save money relative to Uber, assuming they don’t place a high value on time. But several people traveling together will not save money. Tourists and business travelers have no hope of understanding it, if they were willing to brave the urine and feces and garbage and rats in the stations and bus stops and on the vehicles themselves. A system like this is at risk of losing out to more innovative competition, even if that innovative competition is bad for the environment and dangerous for people. So let’s look at some of the alternatives mentioned in this ABC article.
ride sharing databases – The local one is run by our metropolitan planning organization. Basically just a message board for people to find each other who want to carpool. Makes sense, just seems low tech and clunky. Enterprising individuals could probably build a business around this, which may or may not be against the rules.
Rideshare (Uber, etc.) – Sure they’ve been around for awhile, but they have some new ideas. With “Group Rides”, you can invite specific friends to share your ride. “The company’s latest option, Route Share, is designed to function like a commuter shuttle running every 20 minutes during peak times from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.. with designated pick-up and drop-off points.” … “For even more significant savings, try Uber Transit, which provides a public transit route, sometimes combined with an Uber ride.”
van pools run by rental car companies – “The rental car company teams up with companies to match employees who live near each other, then provides them with vehicles to use… Each ride consists of 4-15 riders who live near each other or along a route, and share rides to and from work. Enterprise takes care of maintenance and vehicle liability insurance.”
New Jersey and Delaware also have “Transportation Management Associations” which seem vague to me but again have something to do with organizing carpools and vanpools.
A couple thoughts. First, we see tech solutions like Uber adapting to public transportation, and starting to cover the gap between whatever public transportation can provide and what people actually need to get from Point A to Point B. This is basically good, although if public transportation can’t compete on cost it may eventually disappear. Governments might do the math and decide to subsidize the more flexible private options instead. Self-driving and self-parking wheeled vehicles may change the dynamics of how all this works, and relatively soon. All of this is likely to exacerbating sprawling land uses rather than the more compact urban areas we know are best for economic growth, innovation, human health, and the environment. But that has been the trend for a century at least.
I have some hope that self-parking vehicles may enable less waste of the most economically valuable land for parking. Because the point of parking is to make transportation easily accessible where you are working/shopping/recreating, and a self-driving vehicle can park efficiently farther away but still show up when and where you need it. Instead of a store having to have a parking lot that is bigger than the store, you can now have two stores next to each other and a large parking lot/garage out of sight on the edge of town. And that garage or lot won’t have to be as big because the self-parking cars will be able to maneuver more efficiently not to mention infinitely patiently compared to human drivers.
The (paywalled) Philadelphia Inquirer reports on a citizen science bird count showing a massive drop in the pigeon population over the last few years. At the same time, raptor populations like red-tailed hawks and Peregrine falcons are up. There are reasons the data are uncertain, but this is still pretty cool.
I’ve had some memorable raptor sitings in Philly over the years. Recently, I heard a significant commotion and looked up to see a red-tailed hawk in a tree very close to my front door. This was early spring before there were leaves on the trees, so I imagine it had a good line of site to the ground. Mice and rats were the first prey species that popped into my mind, but yeah there are pigeons around too.
Peregrine falcons are not very shy in urban environments. I remember seeing one sitting on a street map above a busy street, next to a park that I know from personal experience is full of mice, rats, and pigeons.
Once I saw a falcon that had trapped a squirrel under a bench in Rittenhouse Square. Like I said, they are not shy around people, but when the park is busy they will tend to be hire up in the trees or on buildings. This was very early in the morning, and the falcon was just sitting there on the bench with the squirrel underneath. The squirrel would try to run out, and the falcon would swoop out and try to get its talons around the squirrel, and the squirrel would slip out and dart back under the bench. Falcons are big birds. I gave this one a respectful distance, but it took no notice of me whatsoever.
We have a presumptive mayor-elect who won less than a third of the vote. This is because we have a first-past-the-post system. It is not a democratic system because the absolute lowest bar you can set for a democratic system is majority rule. Cherelle Parker is a Black woman who beat a Jewish woman and an Asian-American woman who (the latter two) had very similar policy positions and together won about 45% of the vote. I mention race here not because it should matter, but because racial politics are a reality in this city and some voters are never going to cross racial lines no matter what policy positions or records of achievement are on display.
https://vote.phila.gov/results/
Now, I wish presumptive Mayor-elect Parker well. I promise to give her some time and ultimately judge her by her actions and not just her rhetoric. But during her campaign, she did not speak to issues that matter most to me. She spoke mostly about violence and education. Of course, I care about violence and education. I am raising (incidentally, mixed-race, not that it should matter) children in this city. But the mayor ultimately has limited control over these issues. Nobody knows, absolutely 100%, what has caused the current spike in gun violence. You can come up with some ideas, look at the evidence for what has worked in the past and in other cities, and try some things. But Cherrelle Parker is not a candidate who talked about evaluating evidence or best practices from other cities. In fact, a large part of her campaign pitch was that other candidates had spent time in other cities and were bringing ideas from elsewhere, and Philadelphia voters do not want people from elsewhere “telling us what to do”. As for schools, they are controlled by the School District of Philadelphia, which the mayor has only some limited control over, and which is limited by decisions of state legislators, some with pointy white hoods in their closets. Again, you can look at evidence and best practices and try some things, but her campaign platform if anything had an anti-intellectual bent, and that seemed to appeal to a plurality of voters in this city. Cherelle Parker was a state legislator at one point, and she is clearly a talented, successful politician, so maybe she will have some ideas on how to get more state funding and remove barriers imposed by the anti-city pointy white hood crowd in the middle of the state.
Philadelphia has outdated sanitation practices. Mayors have 100% direct control over these practices. The trash situation is a major nuisance, and the Atlantic Ocean will be full of Philadelphia trash for 10,000 years after our civilization is gone. I am a civil engineer and an environmentalist, and I am morally outraged by this. I somewhat doubt Mayor Parker is going to fix it, but again I will give her the benefit of the doubt.
Philadelphia has outdated and, I will just say it, incompetent street design practices. Whether children are dying on our city streets from gun violence or car violence, they are dying and this is morally outrageous. I somewhat doubt Mayor Parker is going to fix it, but again I will give her the benefit of the doubt.
You see my point here. Competent leadership at the Philadelphia Streets Department, which oversees sanitation and street design and maintenance, is absolutely crucial. Our city is decades behind even average practice elsewhere in the county, let alone the world, and people and the environment are suffering as a result. Part of Cherelle Parker’s campaign pitch, which apparently resonated with voters, is that she has spent her whole life in Philadelphia and never lived anywhere else. Will she be the one to bring our city up to even average standards of safety? Prove me wrong, presumptive Mayor-elect Parker.
Here are some insights into what happened.
This is so obviously a false choice. Safe, modern street designs, along with reliable public transportation, allow people to get to work and earn a living. They keep children from dying on public streets. But people don’t see it this way. Philadelphia has a concentrated poverty problem. The field of economics predicts that people whose basic needs are not met will not be advocates for what are seen as luxuries, such as environmental quality and convenient, safe travel. People whose basic needs are not met are going to be advocates for the basic needs such as food and shelter. Then, when people whose basic needs are met advocate for a higher level of services, such as safe streets, people whose basic needs are not met resent this. People also just tend to be resistant to change, and opposition to upgrades to safe street design reflect this, even if they would mean fewer dead children.
Sadly, concentrated poverty is the result of a century or more of racist land use and housing policy. It can’t be solved within the narrow political jurisdictions where it occurs, but rather needs to be solved by some income distribution and basic service provision at the state and federal scale. The working class and middle class in Philadelphia is absolutely tapped out when it comes to taxes, so even those of us who might support some level of income redistribution at the state and federal level are struggling to get by. Meanwhile, our local politicians try to address concentrated poverty by narrowing the tax base, restricting development, and creating disincentives for affluent taxpayers to move into the city or university graduates to stay and join the tax base. We were a city of 2 million people at our peak and are down to about 1.6 million. Like it or not, growing the tax base would benefit the poor. Safe modern streets, excellent public transportation, and schools that just meet modern building codes would all help. But our politicians just can’t get out of their own way.
I love you, Philadelphia. Prove me wrong, Mayor Parker.
Brookings has a report on crime in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Seattle. Homicides are up sharply in all these cities, but the overall crime picture is more nuanced. The actual stats show that while homicide is way up, other violent crimes are up only slightly. Central business districts are generally pretty safe, with violent crime and property crime mostly happening in residential neighborhoods. Nonetheless, office workers have an impression that central business districts are less safe than before the pandemic. I share that perception. This article points out that my perception may have more to do with the visible disorder of homelessness, drug use, and just general filth on the streets and on public transit. I witness all of this daily in Philadelphia. At the same time I know that these things are for the most part not a physical threat to my person. And I always try to remind myself that the person annoying me by experiencing homelessness or drug addiction on the streets of my city is having a much worse day than I am. Brookings has a solution salad at the end of their article – politicians, please do these things.
It’s the morning of Super Bowl Sunday as I write this, and I don’t know if the Philadelphia Eagles will win tonight. If you are reading this, you will probably know or you can look it up. In the meantime, if you want to watch eagles on TV there are at least twolive streams of bald eagle nests in Pennsylvania. When I checked just now, one had an eagle in it and one was empty. Even an empty bald eagle nest is an impressive structure worth a look.
The Philadelphia District Attorney has come under pressure for a drop in violent crime convictions. I generally support efforts to reduce arrests and trials for non-violent crimes, although a lot more tickets need to be written for speeding and reckless driving in the city – not doing this is killing people, both drivers and pedestrians, at alarming rates, and I don’t know how you can call this “non-violent”.
Nonetheless, the statistics on violent crime convictions do look somewhat bad, and the downward trend started before the 2020 pandemic so you can’t blame it on that alone. I like the data transparency that the District Attorney’s office provides. This, along with police data, could allow journalists to provide a lot more context on individual cases and short-term statistics than they do. I think they could do this without giving up the blood-soaked entertainment value that seems to be necessary to pay the bills in our messed up society.
This isn’t the sort of thing I usually post, and there was the thing with the dogs later on, but what the heck, it’s football season and I am low on queued posts.
Here is Michael Vick as an Eagle in 2010. Unfortunately he didn’t look like this in every game as a pro player.
Michael Vick against the Redskins in 2010
413 total yards 6 total TDs (career high) 150.7 passer rating (career high)
But in college, he was just simply the most fun player to watch of all time, in my opinion. And I am not really a Virginia Tech partisan although there are a couple alums in the family.
I’ll vote for Joe Burrow as the second most fun college quarterback to watch of all time. And I am most definitely, most certainly not an LSU partisan. Those people are barely civilized down there, although they are certainly passionate.
This article in the (paywalled) Philadelphia Inquirer says people in neighborhoods with large numbers of shootings are asking for more police cameras. I surprises me a little because it goes against the idea that people in these neighborhoods do not trust the police. This would support the idea that people want to be policed, i.e. protected from violence, as long as they feel they are being policed fairly. A certain level of fear seems to be the tipping point where people are more willing to give up some privacy in return for safety.
People want violent crimes to be solved and violent people to be brought to justice. They don’t want to be harassed. So it’s a fine line – police could use these cameras along with facial recognition to track people on probation or parole, for example, or even just people who have been arrested in the past. I don’t know if police are allowed to access driver’s license or passport photo databases, but if they are they could probably track anybody. I’m not paranoid about these things because the technology of tyranny has clearly existed for some time, and we have to work through our political system to make sure our rights are protected. We are hearing that there is “no constitutional right to privacy”. As wonderful as our 18th century founding fathers were, they could not have imagined these technologies. Maybe it is time for a 21st century bill of rights.
Pew has a nice “state of the city” report, including interesting crime statistics over multiple decades. One thing that is clear is that homicide and overall crime do not move in tandem, although the media tends to use the terms interchangeably. While homicide is way up, and homicide is the most horrible crime because, well, people don’t come back from being dead, “major crime” and “violent crime” are still low by historical standards, and this has happened as the jail population has decreased significantly.
A couple other things I found interesting, though far from uplifting:
Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh all have higher homicide rates on a population basis. I think these stats are at the municipal level. New York and Los Angeles are notably absent from these lists – maybe they were not included as “peer cities”?
Drug overdose deaths in our city are at a historic high at around 1200 people per year. This has been going on since at least 2017 so we can’t just blame the pandemic. And this is more than double than horrific homicide total (which doesn’t make either one better, it makes both added together worse. And this article doesn’t cover suicide.)
Of the major cities presented, only Baltimore has a worse drug overdose toll than Philadelphia on a population basis though. It might be a bit misleading though because the statistics are for the county that includes the major city, and some counties are going to include (economically if not racially segregated) suburban areas while others do not.
The racial composition of Philadelphia (the municipality) has changed significantly over the last 30 years. In 1990, it was about half white, 40% black, 10% hispanic/Asian/other. In 2020, it is still about 40% black, but only 35% white and 25% hispanic/Asian/other. I do wonder though if changes in how people have reported being white, Hispanic, mixed race, or combinations of these over time have something to do with these changes.
Pew does a good job of reporting stats on a population-normalized basis, which the press does not do. I would like to see a bit more and a bit clearer reporting on metro areas vs. municipalities, and putting the latter in the context of the former. I don’t fund county-level data helpful at all when comparing across metropolitan and state lines. It would be particularly useful to understand how regional poverty is concentrated (or not) within the largest political jurisdiction of a metro area, and how that plays into these statistics. In other words, a metro area as a whole may not be poor or have low tax revenues compared to peer metro areas, but the central municipality where economic and cultural activity are concentrated (at least historically) may have its hands tied by a narrow tax base and high expenses (underfunded pensions for example) that make providing quality services to its poor and working classes difficult. Although this conundrum might have a fairly obvious logical solution of sharing resources across the metro area, it is politically intractable. I don’t have great solutions to offer other than my half-joking one of metro areas applying for statehood.
