Dan,
Good morning. Were you able to get back to town? As you know, Philadelphia’s been on disaster alert since early Saturday, waiting for the storm of the millennium, as I’ve heard it called several times already. Thus far, we’ve got less than an inch of crusty white stuff coating the windshields, and most of the roads are clear where I am. The radio is having a hard time keeping up its tone of doom for this long. You can only do so many standups in front of salt trucks being readied for the Big One before people start wondering where it is.
Nevertheless, our schools are closed today, which means my kids will be hanging in front of the computer, destroying cities and instant-messaging their buddies.
I’m vacillating about whether to get on the train and head for the office. There’s no pressing reason for me to be in the newsroom, and my home cable modem means I’m almost as wired up here as I am there. On the other hand, in the newsroom you don’t have to worry about somebody on the network getting carried away playing Age of Empires and bringing the whole thing down.
Days like this I give thanks for public transportation. SEPTA, Philadelphia’s network of commuter and subway lines, gets a lot of knocks, but it’s one of the things that works in this town. The tragedy, from an urban growth perspective, is that as more and more people move farther and farther away from Center City, the trains serve a smaller and smaller percentage of the region. I really feel for the folks who work in office parks out on the office park corridors in Pa. and South Jersey, who have no choice during this kind of weather other than their cars. I don’t understand why it isn’t more of a deterrent to the companies who locate out there in exurbia. But most of these folks will do almost anything rather than move closer or actually into Philadelphia itself. I remember talking to someone at Vanguard, the giant mutual fund group, a few years after a big storm. Scores of their employees had been stuck trying to get to work on Route 202, which threatened to leave the company without enough bodies to man its telephone banks. Vanguard execs vowed they’d never get stuck like that again–and opened satellite offices in Arizona and North Carolina.
One of the few occasions many suburbanites actually will use commuter trains, interestingly, is to get to the Philadelphia Flower Show. We went to the opening on Saturday and found ourselves in a much whiter, older and better-dressed group than the one you see moving through the Market East station on a typical workday morning. Upscale garden club types from the Main Line and Bucks County waited patiently for trains and squatted on those low wooden benches that clearly were designed to discourage the less affluent from lingering. The flower show is the biggest Center City draw of the year, and the thought occurred to me that it’s arguably Philadelphia’s version of Mardi Gras–a time during the year when the usual class rules are suspended, upper-crusters throw off their inhibitions and get down … even if that only means boarding a commuter train to Center City.
So, how’s the snow where you are?
