A sad dog this Greyhound

By Ariel
Recently I traveled to Hilton Head, South Carolina via Greyhound. A friend of mine who had been abroad for the past two years was vacationing with family in the Palmetto state. I was both broke and eager to see the South, so Greyhound seemed like a wonderful idea, despite the twenty hour trip time.

Greyhound is a critical part of our national transportation system; not only does it serve those who cannot afford to travel via rail or air, it provides access to rural areas not served by the same. Thus it is a national shame that its such a terrible way to travel.

I suppose the first indication of the problematic trip to come was the four scheduled transfers I would have to make; every time one has to change vehicles there is an opportunity for something wrong to happen. Thing is, the trip had at least seven changes between Philadelphia and Beaufort. While the trip down was without incident coming back a bus driver not only placed an unscheduled pit stop, but his break took four times as long as he mandated us to have (he said, “be back in five” but he took twenty, minutes). This meant that we were forty five minutes late for our 3 AM connecting bus to DC. Greyhound, which was normally pretty scrupulous about having an extra bus to accommodate excess passengers, did not have any buses ready to take the entire bus full of people traveling north and we waited until six in the morning before we caught the next transfer. Miscommunication and lack of information was endemic on the return trip, drivers not sure of connections, ticket agents giving information contrary to drivers’ understandings, etc. Transportation is as much about information as it is about reliability, and Greyhound failed on both regards.

What was even more ironic was how little of the US I actually got to see. While I had not made it out west to the grand deserts, or long plains of Kansas and Nevada, I had assumed that the difference between the South Carolina and Delaware would be more pronounced. Good Magazine recently profiled the loss of distinctive highway rest-stops across the country, shuttering due to shrinking state budgets and ballooning McDonald’s concessions dotting interchanges and the like. However its not just a matter of unique architecture. It’s the entire roadway, the landscape of the system. While states have begun to build “context sensitive” road ways, highways and interstates that are more sensitive to the topography and local context, our national highways are still anonymous and say little about where we are driving. I mean any state with such towns as Coosawatchie should celebrate its local heritage along the highways in more ways than just signage.

Its this anonymity, lack of reliability and misinformation that drives most Greyhound customers crazy. I did not see one person happy to be traveling by Greyhound. It wasn’t just that the drivers were forced to lecture us about good behavior at the start of each trip; sad not simply because of the resigned and exasperated tone with which they gave that speech but that it was necessary at all. Rather people were obsessed with people cutting in line and the manners of the people around them; with so much out of their control people looked for some way to exert control of their environment. The only point of humanity during the whole trip was when the bus driver woke us up to announce that Michael Jackson was dead.

Greg Heller notes that BoltBus a subsidiary of Greyhound, is proof that Greyhound discriminates against the poor. I.E. if BoltBus can run on time and with friendly customer service, why can it not do that for the rest of the system. While I suspect that there are matters of scale that wouldn’t translate, the criticism at the heart of this is right. However this is not a matter of one single carrier. In their recommendations for the next transportation authorization bill, “The Route to Reform,” Transportation for America calls for a national transportation system “that allows for seamless travel using multiple modes, vehicles, or transportation providers.” Traveling from a big city in Pennsylvania to a small town in South Carolina should be easy and reliable (and multi-modal) for people of all income levels.

What Is the Planner's Job?

By Greg

I attended a community planning meeting last night in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Tioga. The several dozen residents in this disinvested area surrounded by Temple University’s health system buildings, congregated in a local church and listened as the planners discussed the latest ideas for improving their community.

Tioga is one of a handful of communities in Philadelphia that has seen lots of planning and little action. Some of the residents have watched and participated in over 50 years of planning. Yet vacant homes and lots dot every block. Trash blows in the streets. There is crime, drugs, and lack of basic services.

The meeting ran nearly an hour late. The residents had lots to say. Some community members expressed distrust of the planners. Others wanted to see a certain issue addressed. Some were afraid that the plan would bring gentrification, rising taxes, and displacement. Others were afraid of the opposite: that nothing at all would come of this plan, just as with decades of prior plans.

The planners attempted to answer the residents’ questions, while moving through their market analysis and urban design ideas. However, many in the crowd seemed unsatisfied. When it came to issues like realizing the concepts in the plan or protecting residents from gentrification, the planners had little to contribute. Their answer was largely that this was the job of City Council. The plan was just a set of concepts, the planners explained to the crowd. Transforming the plan to reality relied on City Council introducing legislation, active community groups taking initiative, and private developers investing.

The planners were answering honestly, but this meeting (and dozens of others like it that I have attended) exhibited an important question. By passing off implementation to policy makers, are planners really satisfying the needs of communities? Does the planner perhaps have a new responsibility in today’s world?

Planners in Philadelphia and nationally have dramatically reshaped their roles over the past forty or so years. Today planning necessarily is a balance of offering expert design ideas, while not standing in the way of the community’s ability to have a voice and shape its own destiny. This democratization of the planning profession was once groundbreaking; now it is commonplace. The new question is: what is the planner’s role once the plan is complete?

Often planners see the plan as the end of the journey. They step away, and leave it up to policy makers to implement the plan. The problem is, too often the policy makers don’t really understand how to go about it. Of course the planners in Tioga cannot really be blamed. We have processes, agencies, roles, funding constraints, and hierarchy that set the boundaries of how far the planners can and should go.

But perhaps this paradigm could change. What if the plan were the beginning of a process, rather than the end? What if part of the planner’s job were to connect the plan concepts with the appropriate policy makers, and to help those policy makers follow through? What if high-level city officials gave the planners a stronger role in the process of spending city money and enacting policies?

Is the planning profession ready for this paradigm shift to planner as facilitator of plan implementation? Are other city officials? Will the city power structure allow it or embrace it? How will communities react? These are the questions I will discuss in the next few posts. Stay tuned.

More Food Access

Source

By Greg

I want to continue my food access discussion by mentioning that some folks have been working on the issue of developing designs for urban markets that can be community assets and anchors. The Community Design Collaborative's Infill Philadelphia initiative focused on this topic, and exhibited designs back in February. They included a prototype for the new Weaver's Way store in West Oak Lane, a community food co-op in Chester, and a supermarket in Brewerytown.

This project was supported by some of the same folks who are running the Fresh Food Financing Initiative, showing an awareness of the intersection of these issues — food access and community development. However, awareness is not enough. The City needs to take proactive steps to ensure that through incentives, regulations, zoning, design guidelines, and/or public education that the next wave of urban markets look more like the renderings in the Infill Philadelphia document than the stores that have been built on the ground.

Picking our readers' brains.

By Ariel

Folks, I know you read this, some of you for some reason read us again and again (and we thank you for it). Generally we are content to do the research and thinking for you, but today I hope you can help us.

For some time I have had a theory that the general population explosion in the South could not have been made possible without the creation of the air-conditioning unit. Recently, while in South Carolina, I made that assertion in mixed company. By mixed company I mean I was the only Yankee amidst an assortment of Southerners... So now I want to test my theory. While it should be fairly easy to track Southern demographic growth via the census, figuring out how to track the spread of air conditioning in the south is a bit harder. Any suggestions? Or comments? (I am sure the massive electrification of the south also had something to do with it as well, though I would welcome any sources on that as well, aside from Robert Caro's biography of Johnson)

Food Access, Meet Community Development

Carrot image source, House image source

By Greg

I received a lot of interest via email regarding my recent post on local food. One thing I neglected to do in my previous post was to put in a good word for the Greenworks Philadelphia plan, which includes this target goal: “Bring local food within 10 minutes of 75% of residents.” I look forward to seeing Philadelphia’s strategies for reaching this goal.

One of the programs that will probably help the city along is the state-wide Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (PFFI). This program was recently featured in The New York Times, profiling the new ShopRite in the West Philadelphia Parkside neighborhood. This financing program is extremely valuable in helping to make urban stores feasible. However, while the Parkside supermarket fulfills a valuable need in the community, I would argue that in another way it is far less successful — even damaging to other important goals.

The Times article profiled residents who walk to the new supermarket, but what the Times does not explain is that there are precious few people who can do this. The new supermarket is not an urban store in any sense of the word. It is a stand-alone, suburban-style structure in the middle of a brand new strip mall, surrounded by a sea of parking. Only a few dozen homes are within reasonable walking distance of the store, and even then residents have to walk through a gigantic parking lot.

Here's a view of the new Parkside shopping center:

Source

And here is what the surrounding neighborhood looks like:

Many of these new supermarkets in Philadelphia are mainly accessible by car, and require a huge amount of space, designed at a scale that makes sense in the suburbs, but that is not appropriate for dense, urban communities. The stores are not very transit accessible, and do not contribute to uplifting older, struggling, commercial corridors. These supermarkets are physically in neighborhoods, but not part of communities.

Often in Philadelphia we seem to be satisfied to take what we can get — especially for poorer communities — rather than pushing for excellence. In the same article, the Times discusses New York City’s proposed zoning changes to include incentives for developers to integrate supermarkets in their mixed-use projects, and to reduce the parking requirements for urban supermarkets. At the same time New York is implementing its own food access financing program.

While New York is taking steps focusing on both local food access and making sure that new stores are seamless contributors to community vitality, Philadelphia has only gotten half of the equation right. Sure, we can argue that local food access is ultimately more important, and we should appreciate how far we have come. We can argue that Philly does not have the development market of New York; Supermarkets are certainly difficult to finance and sustain.

These are very real issues. However, I think we can do better if just set our mind to it.

Not too far from Parkside is the Fresh Grocer by the University of Pennsylvania’s campus. This supermarket got it all right: urban, walkable, built right up to the street edge, integrated into the surrounding area, parking stored in an upper-level garage. While the area around the Parkside supermarket is barren, the area around the Fresh Grocer is vibrant and booming. There are other examples of successful urban-style supermarkets in Philadelphia, such as a Trader Joe's in the ground floor of an apartment building at 22nd and Market, and the urban-style WholeFoods and SuperFresh on South Street.

Just because a neighborhood is poor, does not mean that it should have to settle for a half-baked supermarket. We should find the resources, the political will, and the incentives to bring supermarkets within close proximity to every community, and ensure that those stores can be positive contributors to community revitalization. These new stores should be a stimulus for reviving commercial corridors, and should be built for residents who rely on walking and transit. If built right, a supermarket can provide local food access and also act as a positive force for reviving communities.

Too often in urban policy we tend to separate issues, and then frame them as if they were in conflict with each other. If we want to provide both supermarkets and generators for community revitalization, then Philadelphia needs to set the bar higher, make new policies, and work harder to truly give our neighborhoods the resources they need for a healthy and prosperous future.

Bike Art

The Moore College of Art has a new art exhibit devoted to Bicycles. Check it out.

Light Reading about Heavy Matters

By Ariel

Recently a bunch of interesting articles have crossed my path that I thought I would share for a variety of reasons; the article on Philadelphia, Panama and Shipping will appeal to those of you who, like Heller and me, are obsessed with all things Philadelphia while the article on Paris should appeal to a few more of you.

I suppose I should no longer be surprised that Philebrity brings in some interesting news for the dorks in all of us (it does a surprisingly good job on politics big and small around Philly). However I have to thank them for finding the following article about a shipping agreement between Philadelphia Ports and Panama. This is big news. Rendell clashed publicly with Corzine across the river (and with tons of environmentalists and other skeptics) to dredge the bottom of the Delaware to widen it by some five feet. Philadelphia has historically thrived when its ports have, as an Economy League report notes.

Philadelphia’s ports rank sixth in the U.S. in imported cargo value and 22nd in export value. The Delaware River ports employ 4,056 workers who earn $326 million and generate $1.3 billion in economic output annually.

Port activity in Greater Philadelphia supports 12,121 jobs, creates $772 million in income and generates $2.4 billion in economic output annually.

But Philadelphia’s ports are relatively shallow for modern container shipping. The deal reported in the JOC suggests that Philadelphia Ports are proactively taking advantage of this upcoming new depth.

I am skeptical that the added benefit of this dredging (and this added volume of shipping signaled by this deal) will out weight not only the environmental damage done by the dredging, but what the $379 million could have been spent on instead. While talks of “missed opportunity costs” are not always applicable in big projects such as these (that amount of money would never be spent on housing for instance, unfortunately), one really can only hope that this deal brings in lots of ships if only to justify all the work Rendell put into getting the dredging.

In other news, one more bone for me to pick with the French; they turn to architects to re-imagine their city, in this piece in the NYT Magazine. While architects are indeed great at “visioning.” etc., many of their answers to Paris’s plans smack of physical determinism and the idea that great buildings will lift the smallest soul. This is not to say that great architecture can’t do great things, its just that the plans covered here seem to ignore market realities or are just too theatrical in concept. It could very easily be that I am full of professional jealousy that architects and not planners are planning Paris, and I would love to have such grand visions for Philly be as seriously considered here as they are there.

Operational Sustainability

Source

By Ariel

Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter has made a concerted effort to make Philadelphia the greenest city in America. Early in his administration he established the Mayor's Office of Sustainability, hired a Bike-Ped Coordinator and has increased recycling frequency in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, and recycling opportunities in the central business district.

In April of 2009, the Mayor and his Office of Sustainability announced a Greenworks, “sustainability plan” for Philadelphia, one that targets the City’s own energy consumption, the promotion of mass transit and bicycling and “green” jobs and infrastructure. While Greenworks outlines a variety of large institutional changes from how the city monitors and pays for its energy to how disposes of waste, there remains opportunities for further “sustainable reform.” More importantly there are opportunities for making sustainable operational, part of everyday municipal functions.

The West Coast has long been a pioneer in sustainable practices and they are often praised for such larger initiatives as urban growth boundaries or new transit lines. However their efforts have also targeted less ambitious municipal practices; since the 1990’s cities such as Los Angeles, Seattle and San Fransisco have used goats to manage over grown vegetation in vacant lots and landfills. Goat aided vegetation management has the ability to both boost “green jobs,” save the city money and reduce the city’s carbon footprint.

Goats were first used in Los Angeles in the early 90s as an “effective tool for clearing underbrush on fire-prone hillsides” (McDonald). Not only did Sierra Nevada and Oakland quickly adopt this practice, but other departments within Los Angeles, adopted them the use of goats. The Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (LA CRA) began using goats to clear vacant lots and “won't collect a pension or charge for working overtime and won't call in sick” (Pool).

Today private land owners use goats to clear lots as well, and its not just large property owners such as Google who used over 200 goats to mow their 26 acres of property in Mountain View California. Small contractors such as John Iwanczuk of Seattle use goats on sites a as small as a quarter acre. In an article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer Iwanczuk related that he was

“faced with a steep quarter-acre lot on Dearborn Street covered with impenetrable brush. He figured it would take a crew at least a week to clear the lot, filling eight to10 trucks with waste. Four days and 60 goats later, the blackberry vines and Scotch broom were gone, and Iwanczuk had risen to neighborhood hero status. Elementary school groups came to watch and pet the goats as they dozed on the sidewalk. Moms brought freshly baked cookies. Local gardeners lusting for free fertilizer scooped the lot clean of droppings. Iwanczuk estimates he saved $6,000 to $9,000 on the job.”

Google, the LA CRA and Iwanczuk all hired goats from what are essentially professional goatherds, such as Goat Trimmers or California Grazing who for a fee transport a herd of goats and manage their consumption of thistles, shrubs and weeds. It is a practice that “Redevelopment agency head Cecilia Estolano said the goats were being rented for $3,000. The cost of hiring workmen to clear the 2 1/2 -acre hillside would have totaled as much as $7,500” (Pool). With savings ranging anywhere from $4,500–$9000 it is clear that their use could provide serious cost efficiencies to Philadelphia’s land management operations.

While the project has significant potential, there are serious questions that would shape its implementation in the City of Philadelphia. Any analysis of the use of goats in land management must analyze a variety of issues such as

• The portfolio of land used by Philadelphia, where would the use of goats be most appropriate, in vacant lots, at the Philadelphia International Airport or in Fairmount Park
  
  
• The management issues associated with the use of goats, their care, transportation and waste removal
  
  
• The actual cost savings associated with their use

Goat aided vegetation management has the ability to both boost “green jobs,” save the city money and reduce the city’s carbon footprint. With such a large municipal commitment to sustainability, one that is evidenced at all political levels, it is time to see if such practices can be put to use here in Philadelphia.

What’s a Henweigh?

Source: Chicken Owners Outside Philadelphia

By Greg

As most of my friends know, my father and his partner, Nancy, keep a flock of chickens in their backyard in Springfield Township, just outside the Philadelphia city limits. Not only do they keep chickens, but they run a chicken owners’ co-op called Chicken Owners Outside Philadelphia (COOP). Yesterday, Nancy, the chickens, and COOP were featured in Philadelphia CityPaper, in Bruce Schimmel’s column. Check it out!

So what do suburban chickens have to do with the future of urban America? As the CityPaper article touts, “in this little hamlet just outside Chestnut Hill, suburbia is slowly reverting to rural.” The COOP website lists 30 active members within this small community. On Dad and Nancy’s block, several families raise chickens, others have backyard gardens, and one family has goats.

For the past sixty years, most American metro areas have gotten used to the trend of urban decentralization and sprawling suburbs. Could backyard farming start to change this adopted land-use pattern by reclaiming inner-ring suburbs as semi-rural land? My parents’ backyard farm community, adjacent to the pristine, 426-acre Erdenheim Farm (recently permanently preserved) makes me wonder. When I take visitors out there they often are amazed that this is the closest inner-ring suburb to one of America’s largest cities. What does this mean for land-use and for local food production?

By farming their own eggs, these suburban chicken owners are part of the emerging local food movement in America. There are several important impacts of the local food movement: to reconnect people to where their food comes from, to build local food economies, enhance regional security, promote environmental sustainability, and to combat hunger and obesity. By now there are a number of books and organizations devoted to these issues.

In the Philadelphia region, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission is running the Greater Philadelphia Food Study aimed at “a broad range of food supply issues, such as agricultural production trends, natural resource constraints, processing and distribution facilities, the origins and destinations of food imports and exports, and the efficiency of transporting from farm to plate.”

From an urban perspective, access for low-income communities to affordable, healthy food is a major problem. There are so-called “food deserts” in many inner-city areas, where there is no supermarket or outlet for purchasing affordable produce, meat, and dairy. Philadelphia is lucky to have two organizations working on this issue: the Food Trust and Farm to City. In addition the city is lucky to have a number of active urban farms.

On Monday the Philadelphia Daily News featured West Philly’s Mill Creek Farm in an article called “The little half-acre that could: Urban minifarms, like Mill Creek, are keeping many Philadelphians from going hungry.” Philadelphia has an impressive amount of urban farmland, from the Walter B. Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences, to Weavers Way Farm, to Greensgrow Farms.

It its 2008 sustainability rankings, SustainLane ranked Philadelphia 7^th in the nation in the category of “Local Food and Agriculture.” This ranking was based on farmers markets, community gardens, and urban farms per capita. Philadelphia was the only city with a population over one million in the top ten for this category. New York was number 25 and Chicago was number 27. In other words, for a city its size, Philadelphia is really a leader on urban farming and local food access.

One of the major arguments for local food has to do with transportation. On average, Americans’ food travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate. By promoting local food production, we can significantly cut down on a major culprit in America’s greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, local food production ensures greater access for a region’s communities. In other words, by focusing and investing in the local economy, residents can have access to fresh food closer to home.

As some of you know, my girlfriend, Annie, did an experiment last summer trying to only eat food that had not been transported by car or truck. While some items (like salt) are not produced locally, I was shocked by how much success she found. She grew food in her local community garden. She discovered that Weavers Way Farm transports some of its food by bike and commuter train to the Reading Terminal Market. She obtained local meat by biking to Saul High School, and dairy from Merrymeade Farm in Montgomery County, accessible by train and bike.

Of course, just because it is possible to eat almost 100% local and carbon free does not mean it is easy, or that it can go mainstream. However, it does show that in Philadelphia at least, it is possible. And that gives us a strong foundation to build up local food access and create a more sustainable and accessible food system for our region’s residents. We are going to get there through big-picture policy like the work that DVRPC is developing, and grassroots efforts by people who create a market for local food, and who produce their own (like the backyard chicken owners).

The CityPaper article points out that while chicken owning is legal in Springfield Township, it is not legal in the city of Philadelphia. However, there is a movement to lobby City Council to legalize chicken owning and egg farming in Philadelphia. According to thecitychicken.com, chicken owning is legal in a number of U.S. cities including Denver, Miami, Atlanta, Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis, St. Louis, New York, and Seattle.

If Philadelphia is serious about wanting to increase its access to local food for its residents, perhaps this would be a smart step forward. Meanwhile, here is a list of municipalities in the Philadelphia suburbs that are chicken friendly.

And for the record, the answer to the title question is three to ten pounds, depending on the breed and age.

I want to land a dirigible on the Comcast Building; or Airports and Economic Development

By Ariel

Key to understanding urban growth is the transportation and land use connection. On this blog, Heller and I tend to focus on issues surrounding transit and pedestrian oriented development; the benefit of living near transit or in walkable communities. The size of city blocks, the width of city streets and the availability of transit are all markers of what makes a city livable. However there is a different, older and more fundamental connection between transportation and cities. The earliest cities all grew up around trade routes, rivers, oceans or cross-roads. America’s major metropolises sit atop major transportation hubs, the ports of New York and Los Angeles and the rail road yards of Chicago.

Philadelphia’s street car suburbs of West Philadelphia or Mt. Airy, or the rail lines that stretch through north Philadelphia, are a testament to Philadelphia’s rich transportation and land use heritage. However Philadelphia’s earliest success was related to the nature of its freshwater ports which were a boon to early wooden ships. The City’s early aristocracy grew rich off of the trade from the piers and luminaries such as Stephen Girard built their fortunes by controlling fleets and docks. For a whole slew of reasons (though it starts when those pesky New Yorkers built the Erie Canal) Philadelphia’s port is no longer the pre-eminent port in the U.S; ports such as Los Angeles and New York which can handle much larger container ships see much more cargo passing through their docks. None the less as the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia notes in their recent report Maritime Commerce In Greater Philadelphia the “Delaware River ports employ 4,056 workers who earn $326 million and generate $1.3 billion in economic output.”

However these ports were also important not simply because of the goods they moved, but the people they moved as well. New York, Philadelphia and Los Angeles were the historic ports of call for the Italians, Germans, Chinese, Japanese, Jews (and the list goes on) who built this country. There are many who suggest that Philadelphia’s ability to attract new immigrants (which will account for 66% of America’s population growth over the next 50 years) relies on our airport. They argue that the more countries that first touchdown in a city (such as Philadelphia) the more likely immigrants are to settle in that city.

Airports are not just about moving people, in a New Yorker article (4/18/2005) “Out in the Sort” John McPhee describes the inner workings and impact of UPS’s cargo sorting and shipping hub in Louisville Kentucky. These hubs employee people around the clock, and in the case of UPS also pays for them to go to college; these hubs are economic and workforce development engines. Jon Ostrower of Flightblogger (more on him shortly) suggests that UPS might even be the largest private employer in Kentucy.

So what about the Philadelphia International Airport? UPS does in fact have workers and sorters at a facility at Philadelphia International Airport (PHI) though I doubt it is as large as complex as the UPS or FedEx hubs at Louisville or Memphis or even their satellite hubs in such as those in Indianapolis, Anchorage, Oakland, etc. Moreover some studies suggest that Philadelphia’s airport is threatened by rising sea levels and storm surges. It is also an airport plagued by expansion woes and busy airspace caused by neighboring smaller, regional airports.

To get a better understanding of the airport, and its potential for economic development I spoke with Jon Ostrower of FlightBlogger, an industry expert who blogs about the Airline industry for Flightglobal, “the world’s leading provider of aerospace news and data.”

To talk about the future of airports one has to get a better understanding of the airline industry. I began by asking Ostrower to describe the future of the industry, and what we as consumers can begin to expect. Ostrower noted that “From a passenger point of view, in terms of trends for business prospect, you are not going to pay one price for a ticket, one lower price, and then you will have to pay for everything else, bags, food. There business model has been found not to have worked. Oil is going up, the economy is going the other direction and fares not high enough to justify the flight.” In other words, over the long run, we can expect fewer and fewer flights that are likely to be more and more expensive.

However this gradual loss of passengers does not mean that airports necessarily close, even though nationwide there may be around fifty airports (Toledo, Ohio and Meridian, Mississippi) that have recently lost all commercial service. While there is, as Ostrower puts it “there is a net loss of runway ever year” airports keep running, though they tend to rely more on business and general aviation; that is to say charter flights and recreational flying. Airports make their money off of landing fees, gate fees and food services contracts, and they serve airlines shipping cargo nationwide as well. Which is to say, that there is a significant amount of business going on at airports, and with airlines, that we simply don’t know about or see on a regular basis as we are waiting in line to take off our shoes, belts and key chains. In fact Ostrower notes that if you really want to gauge the health of the Airline industry, or the economy as a whole, one should track the health of the cargo market; cargo numbers dropped long before other indicators of economic collapsed. The complex nature of airports, built off of trade and travel are holistic gauges of an areas health, the desire of people to go there, and their buying power.

While they are important gauges of urban economic health the important thing to look at when it comes to airports, as it always is with all transportation related issues, is access. While Ostrower notes that you can judge the success of an airport by the incentives used to bring airlines in, the cost of fuel, the length of the runway, quality of food or the on time performance, the key really should be the ability to move people and goods through the hub. Which means that in many ways the airport only as good as its connections to people and goods; i.e. an airport is only as good as its multi modal connections to different markets of people and goods.

Ironically, some of the most vociferous opponents of high speed rail are the representatives from districts with small regional airports. As Ostrower puts it “the US market is the largest market in the world for single isle short haul air craft” for flights between Boston and DC. These smaller airports see high speed rail as direct competition for the delivery of people into the hinterlands.

However the questions should be not whether an airport is thriving, but is it connected to other ports and other people? The development of the Philadelphia International Airport depends on its ability to be connected by rail to thriving regions in and around Philadelphia (which is the 8th richest metropolitan region in the world) and to its system of ports around the Delaware river.