Perhaps it’s wrong of me to expect more in-depth coverage from The Philadelphia Inquirer, and my $285.48 annual subscription, but this one jumped out at me:
These Philadelphians got rid of their cars in the past year. They haven’t looked back.
“Now that I’m forced to walk, I’m seeing the city more than I did before,” said one newly car-less resident. She used to pay about $400 a month on her car payment and insurance.
by Erin McCarthy | Friday, February 9, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST
Dajé Walker’s Hyundai Elantra was stolen from a Brewerytown parking lot in July, only to be found a week later on the side of a local highway.
The car that Walker had driven for three years was “in shambles,” Walker said, and the insurance company deemed it a total loss.
“I had that existential crisis moment where I was like, ‘Do I need a car or do I want a car?” she said.
Around the same time, Walker, 28, got a new, completely remote job as a project manager. The news sealed her decision: She took the insurance payout of about $15,000, putting some of the money in savings and using the rest to move from Brewerytown to Old City, and never looked back.
She no longer has to set aside $300 a month for her car payment and another $100 for insurance. When she recently moved to Old City, she didn’t have to worry about securing a convenient and safe parking spot, which can cost at least $250 a month at private lots.
There’s a nice photo of Miss Walker, with her dog, on the narrow, brick streets, streets wide enough for a horse-and-buggy back in 1776, in the historic Old City, a really nice area in Philly, if you can afford it.
But while Miss Walker was able to get a new, 100% work from home job, published at the very same time was the article “IBX’s (Independence Blue Cross) new in-person office policy has some workers feeling betrayed. Others are job-hunting. Senior employees say they are worried that their teams will quit to find more flexible or better-paying positions at other companies,” which was a follow on to the Groundhog Day article, “Independence Blue Cross changes its work-from-home policy, the latest big Philly employer to require more in-office days: The insurance company had been allowing most employees to work remote as much as they liked. Now, they’ll be required onsite a majority of the work week.”
So, more and more employees are being expected to do something really radical and actually come to work in Philly; won’t those workers need a way to get to work?
More people are back in the office, but commuters say SEPTA service isn’t back to pre-pandemic norms
SEPTA service isn’t back to 100%, but it’s still outpacing ridership, even as employers push more in-office time. Would workers be more willing to commute if transportation schedules bulked up?
by Lizzy McLellan Ravitch | Friday, October 6, 2023 | 9:18 AM EDT
On Wednesday morning, SEPTA sent 39 notifications of Regional Rail trains running at least 10 minutes late and warned of potential delays or cancellations on 18 bus and trolley lines “due to operator unavailability.”
“It’s a gamble” trying to catch the bus, said a Pennsylvania state employee from West Philadelphia, who asked to remain nameless out of concern for their job. “There were times I would wake up earlier to get an earlier bus, and that wouldn’t show up.”
SEPTA’s mismanagement by CEO Leslie Richards is famed far and wide in Philly.
They have taken a rideshare to work on multiple occasions because their bus route options were canceled or late. Walking to a further bus stop isn’t an option because they have a disability. A lifelong bus rider, they said the system was more dependable before COVID-19.
[Sigh!] In English grammar, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine, meaning that the singular masculine pronouns are used to refer to one person, even when that person’s sex is not known or specified. Anything else is sloppy writing.
“You have to laugh to keep from crying,” the West Philly bus rider said. “People could lose their jobs” if they’re late for work.
Septa’s ridership is down 39% from 2019, the year prior to the panicdemic, though the bus service alone was back up to 75% last October.
Back to the first cited article:
After a surge in car-buying statewide at the height of the pandemic, there are signs that some Philadelphians like Walker have made the decision to do away with their cars in recent years, bucking larger trends.
In 2022, more than 638,000 passenger vehicles were registered in the city, about 24,000 fewer cars than were registered here a year prior, according to the most recent state data. That represents a 3.6% decline in registered vehicles over a period when the city’s population decreased 1.4%, the largest one year drop in 45 years.
Do all of these things make sense together? Car ownership is down significantly from the population decrease, public transportation ridership has significantly decreased, and more people are being required to return to their employers’ offices? We reported, just two days ago, that the newspaper did not report politically inconvenient facts about vehicle ownership, that while the Inquirer reported on the surge in automobile insurance rates, completely ignored was the possibility the city’s huge auto theft and carjacking rates had anything to do with that surge.
Well, here they go again. The newspaper has previously reported:
Philadelphia has seen a surge in plateless vehicles. Some are abandoned, but others are the result of drivers attempting to evade law enforcement, parking tickets, or toll-by-plate systems.
There was also this:
How rampant phony license plates are being used to get away with crimes in Philadelphia
Fraudulent temporary tags have flooded into Philadelphia from states with looser rules — like Delaware.
by Ryan W. Briggs and Dylan Purcell | November 18, 2022 | 5:00 AM EST | Updated: 12:11 PM EST
(F)ake license plates are an old tool of criminal trades, what’s new is the flood of fraudulent temporary tags into Philadelphia from states with looser issuance rules — like Texas and Delaware. These phony plates have shown up increasingly in police investigations into shootings, carjackings, hit-and-runs, and car thefts. (In addition to counterfeit plates, thefts of auto tags this year to date were 2,378, a more than 60% increase over the same period in 2018.)
How, I have to ask, is it good and reliable reporting to tell the newspaper’s readers that fewer people own cars without mentioning that the city has seen a surge in vehicles on the street which some people possess, though “own” might not be the proper word? There was not the first word in Erin McCarthy’s article to even hint that, Heaven forfend!, there might be more cars on the road possessed by scofflaws and criminals.
Miss McCarthy’s article was entirely upbeat, telling readers that there are good and reasonable ways to live in the City of Brotherly Love, that Philly “is known for being one of the best cities to live in without a car (though historically not all neighborhoods have the same access to public transit),” which, I would guess, will be something referenced in yet another article telling us that we must give up cars to save Mother Gaia.
William Teach reported, just this morning, that we are being told by Our Betters that the behavior of the public as a whole must be changed to fight global warming climate change, but at least Miss McCarthy’s article is trying to be persuasive rather than authoritarian.