Last week, we had some back and forth between Jared — who argued, in part, that removing parking on Cooper Street was an example of development focused on suburban commuters — and John Kunkle who wrote that we have to be careful about leveling system critiques on policies that might be common sense. Today, Jared dives back into the debate.
John’s a good friend, so I’ll do my best to be nice and sweet, but I wanted to address some of the points he made in his latest post – ecstatic he’s joining the conversation! Some great points made here, and to be frank some of my points in the initial post were slightly (meant to be) biased, specifically -ism-based arguments about jaywalkers; I too relish the moments I can understand those with whom I disagree.
All of these points were in accusation of lack of community/resident/parent perspective as waterfront development increases within a concentrated portion of the city where a lot of residents don’t actually live; especially given the fact that all of the parking we’re discussing was nestled right against LEAP’s campus.
Aside from diving too deep into what might be misconstrued (again), I want to focus mainly on the points made about parking availability. It’s great that TIGER funding is available to fix many of the roads in North Camden; those roads are way past their current call and I’m glad attention is being directed that way. What I have an issue with, simply, is that as these roads are fixed they’re actually less available as well – reconstructing roads takes time and also reduces traffic flow. So not only is parking permanently removed from a major Camden “artery” but now many of the backchannel roads people would use are going to be closed off too; luckily this is only temporary, but the timing is poor.
And speaking of timing, my other point of contention is a simple question: why now? The soon to be complete American Water/Conner Strong/Michaels headquarters building and the renovation of Cooper Street are purposefully timed – this makes sense in terms of the development plans. What doesn’t add to me is that you would almost completely shut down a major portion of the entire city (Cooper Grant and Pyne Poynt) for both the waterfront’s red-carpet debut and the reconstruction of the roads necessary to navigate it.
One last point about the road construction in North Camden. I’ve done a little research on sewage maps in Camden and had a very interesting conversation a while back with an elected official about capital investment. One thing they mentioned was that in considering reconstruction of roads, you have to also consider what’s underneath them. Looking at the sewage map from the CCMUA you can see that all of the water flows from North Camden into the Delaware and Cooper Rivers with three major discharge points all currently closed; and so reconstructing roads also means pipe maintenance (with good implementation) or water flow redirection (with mediocre or poor implementation) which affects more southern areas of the city – like the area of the city where parking was just stripped. Sure, you could rip up the cobbled mess on Main Street, but if the timing is poor in implementing capital investments, you’re wasting federal money to sweep a larger issue for North Camden residents under the rug.
Love you, John!
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