Cynic’s Choice

In the 12 years I’ve lived in this city, almost everything has improved. SEPTA, however, just keeps getting worse.

Reasons to Stay

Property taxes: Yeah, it sucks when the government takes a bigger bite, but think for a minute about what it means: The values of homes are rising. A lot. People are paying $400,000 for rowhomes in some neighborhoods. Rowhomes! This is the kind of problem you want to have.

Penn’s Landing: It took a few years, but we finally got out of our loveless marriage with developer Mel Simon. Now maybe we can find someone who can conceive of greater things for our waterfront than another frickin' mall.

Council members David Cohen, Michael Nutter and Jim Kenney: Possessing finely tuned bullshit meters, these three can give hope to the most jaded City Hall watchers.

The Inquirer: Recent fawning revisions of Bob Rosenthal's leadership aside, the Inky is a much better paper today than it was a year ago. And despite all the hand-wringing over suburban readers, the most dramatic improvement has been in city coverage.

Upcoming elections: Ed Rendell, the best friend this city ever had, is going to be governor, and Sam Katz hasn't completely ruled out a comeback in '03.

“Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto: He could have gone anywhere, but he chose Philly. That's gotta count for something, right?

Reasons to Run Away

SEPTA: Waiting 30, 40, even 50 minutes for a bus that supposedly runs every 20. Struggling to keep yourself and your kid on your feet when it's standing room only and the driver peels out of every stop as if there won't be another in a couple hundred feet. Paying $5 for a one-way ride because you're boarding the subway in one of the many stations that don't sell tokens or give change. Standing on a platform and trying to remember the last time you saw a SEPTA cop (who wasn't sitting in a car), as hyperactive teens on their way home from school scream, smoke, wrestle and accidentally-on-purpose bump into you as if hoping you'll complain. And those are just the routine annoyances (space limitations prevent me from getting into SEPTA's apathetic reaction to the time a bus driver trapped my wife and then-infant son in the rear exit door, then smiled, waved and blew a kiss at me when I roared at him through the front door to open it). In the 12 years I've lived in this city, almost everything has improved. SEPTA, however, just keeps getting worse. If anything ever drives me out, it will be the fact that the best one can hope for when using public transit in this city is that it won't be a horrible experience.

Car culture: Is it contradictory to complain about SEPTA and the dominance of the automobile? Perhaps, but the latter is still a grave and gathering threat. The way all discussions of development, tourism and residency revolve around the use of cars, it's only a matter of time before we're replacing Penn's Landing and Rittenhouse Square with parking garages. Separate but related is the rampant lawlessness on the roads. At least once a day, often when pushing a stroller, I am nearly run down by someone who is speeding, blowing through a stop sign or red light, yapping on a cell phone, or all of the above. If there were a Pedestrian Liberation Organization, I'd join.

Love Park: Purely by accident, we had in our midst the mecca of the worldwide skateboarding community (which also happens to be a $300-million industry run almost entirely by enthusiastic young people, which no city can ever have enough of). And what did we do? Turn it into another sterile park for old ladies and office drones.

The SS United States: Easily the largest symbol of our collective blindness, the SS United States, the longest and fastest passenger ship ever built, is rusting away off the coast of South Philly, largely because no one in the local political or business communities seems to have the slightest desire to seize this opportunity. And now the clock is ticking more loudly than ever, with the recent news (www.ssunitedstates.org) that the owner intends to sell this grand (OK, once-grand) vessel for scrap. Long Beach, Calif., has turned the RMS Queen Mary into a tourist attraction (www.queenmary.com), and for lack of a return phone call two years ago from the Street administration we lost a former Soviet sub -- a real friggin' Soviet sub! -- to Providence, R.I. (www.saratogamuseum.org). Are we going to let some other city steal this gem from under our noses as well?

John Street: At the end of the Republican National Convention in 2000, Mayor Street declared that we'd host the Democrats in 2004. But when the Dems released their short list of possible sites earlier this year, Philly wasn't on it. Why? Because we'd never even applied. Boasts and missed deadlines are the hallmarks of this administration. Street is intelligent and seemingly driven, but apparently his desire to be mayor is the closest thing he has to a vision for the city.

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