Philadelphia is one of our nation’s oldest cities, founded by William Penn in 1682, and legally incorporated in 1701. An old city, built up rapidly before the rise of the automobile, it has a lot of residential areas built primarily for working class people. Now the city is cracking down on modern living in older neighborhoods.

PPA began cracking down on sidewalk parking and five other offenses. The results are in: There’s plenty of bad behavior.

Enforcement officers have been writing tickets in all neighborhoods in the city, though the violations are more prevalent in denser areas such as Fishtown, North Philadelphia, and South Philadelphia.

by Thomas Fitzgerald | Monday, July 1, 2024 | 5:00 AM EDT

Space is tight on the streets of Philadelphia, and some people seem to consider parking on the sidewalk or blocking an accessible curb cut as a necessity that harms nobody.

Yet those and similar offenses impede people with disabilities from getting around, and the Philadelphia Parking Authority launched a crackdown in mid-May.

The number of tickets issued for six mobility-related parking violations jumped 154% in the first 45 days of enhanced enforcement — a pilot to test the program — compared with the same period in 2023, according to a new PPA status report.

PPA officers wrote 25,797 tickets citywide during a trial period between May 13 and June 26, up from 10,124 for the same dates last year.

There’s more at the original.

I don’t normally include article illustrations from The Philadelphia Inquirer, but this one was important. The opposite side of the street is completely filled with parked cars, and some of these rowhouses are less than two full car-lengths wide. How do people live what has become the new normal, with both husband and wife — pardon me for assuming that people still actually marry — working outside the home, and need two cars? And that means only one side of the street; what about those on the other side?

700 block of East Madison Street. Photo via Google Maps, August 2019.

And that view isn’t even the worst place. We previously referenced East Madison Street, last August, on a separate issue, complete with a Google Maps streetscape photo, in the city’s infamous Kensington neighborhood. The 700 block of East Madison is a racially-integrated, semi-dilapidated rowhouse street, with several homes in which the owners have literally put themselves in jail, adding security bars to keep people off of their front porches. Extremely narrow, cars are shown parked entirely on the sidewalk on the left-hand side of the street, as the one-way traffic flows, and partially on the sidewalk on the right-hand side.

Some of the rowhouse neighborhoods in Philly have alleys behind them, down which people could have garages or dedicated parking spots, but a satellite view of the area shows that not to be the case on East Madison Street. The satellite photo also shows us that the row houses there are only one car-length wide, so good luck to those working married couples!

Satellite view 700 block East Madison, via Google Maps.

Think of what is happening here. In one of Philly’s poorest neighborhoods, wracked with the open-air drug market, and homeless junkies in the streets around SEPTA’s Allegheny elevated train station, on one of the streets in which the struggling poor are trying to work and make a living, the city is telling half of them that they really can’t have a car to get to work. Then, if the left get their way, and force everyone into plug-in electric cars, the people of East Madison Street will not only not have to really struggle to afford the silly things, but will have to fight for parking spaces in front of their own homes to be able to charge those cars.

It is supposedly an obvious good, to stop people from parking on the sidewalks or blocking handicap ramp curb cuts, but the relatively few Philadelphians in wheelchairs are being prioritized over dozens of families, hundreds of families, who are just trying scratch out a living in America’s poorest big city.

I can’t say that I am in the least surprised. The Democratic Party elite who run the City of Brotherly Love all tell us how much sympathy and compassion they have for the poor, but it seems as though all of their policies, regardless of how well-meaning they believe them to be, hurt the poor. Perhaps they don’t really intend to hurt the working poor, but that’s because they just don’t think things through.