COLUMN: Not just for driving

From Tom Nessinger's, "Insepoarable My Nose and Thumb," Fall '96 From Tom Nessinger's, "Insepoarable My Nose and Thumb," Fall '96Philadelphia used to be one of America's greatFrom Tom Nessinger's, "Insepoarable My Nose and Thumb," Fall '96Philadelphia used to be one of America's great'walking cities.' Don't try hoofing it now. From Tom Nessinger's, "Insepoarable My Nose and Thumb," Fall '96Philadelphia used to be one of America's great'walking cities.' Don't try hoofing it now. OK, this is Philadelphia. You think all you need to get around is a couple of SEPTA tokens, cab fare, a bicycle or, God forbid, your own two feet. And you may be right. Auto insurance premiums in this city are only slightly higher than Ivana Trump's alimony payments. Parking spaces in Center City are scarcer than NRA members at the Democratic convention. And Philadelphia has its own, somewhat unique set of rules that dictate what happens on those streets, both in and out of automobiles. Besides, how people in a city drive is a reflection of their personality, their culture, their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Or maybe not. Stare at enough sociology books and you can read personality traits into pretty much any behavior. The first thing you notice is that Philadelphia's favorite pastime, after eating cheesesteaks and booing the Sixers, is running red lights. I really think that after you pass the Pennsylvania Driver's Exam, they give you a little sticker to affix to your dashboard that reads something like this: Green light: "Go." Yellow light: "Warp Factor 3, Mr. Sulu." Red light (if within 30 seconds of a yellow light): "Re-route all power to the warp core, Mr. LaForge. Engage!" Spend a few minutes at an intersection some time and watch how the people react. You can always spot the native Philadelphian. She's the one who, after the light turns green for her to cross the street, does a silent 10-count before actually setting foot on the pavement. She knows, you see, that odds are some schmuck in a deuce-and-a-quarter is gonna Rahal through the intersection at 45 per. So, first rule of survival: never trust a green light. What's truly amazing about this is that the same folks who feel that the Lord God Himself has ordained the practice of rocketing through red lights do a complete 180 at four-way stops. You couldn't pay a Philly driver to take the lead at a four-way stop. Suddenly all that red-light aggression gets re-channeled into a sort of Chip-and-Dale pantomime of, "After you." "No, after you." "Indubitably?" etc. etc., until finally one person gets tired of gesturing or runs out of gas, whichever occurs first. This basic inconsistency totally floored me when I first moved out here from L.A. See, the city motto of Los Angeles is, "Me first!" At a four-way stop in southern California, people make complete stops the way Schwarzenegger uses complete sentences: seldom and at random intervals. If your average L.A. drivers had their way, they'd all plow through the intersection simultaneously, hoods fusing together at the middle, leaving only a steel-and-aluminum plus-sign sculpture. Only the overriding desire to preserve all that expensive foreign rolling stock keeps every intersection in the Los Angeles basin from looking like "Addition is Commutative Night" at the demolition derby. But at least you don't have to wait until the next Ice Age for someone to take the right-of-way. However, what truly amazes me, even more than this Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior at the intersections, is the way streets here are used for commerce. I'm not necessarily talking about how I always seem to be behind the guy who's fishing through the gum wrappers in his ash tray, looking for change to buy the Daily News from a median-strip vendor while traffic behind him backs up into the next area code (although that grates like tinfoil on dental work). I'm talking about how, every weekend that the temperature is above freezing, every pre-teen and teenager in the Delaware Valley goes to stand in the middle of the street collecting money for the soccer team or the band or the Junior Shining Path Terror Society or whatever damn thing. You'll be sitting there, minding your own business, when some drape-ape sticks a bucket or a boot or some other creative receptacle in your vent window, expecting some coin of the realm. Think about it. This is the 1990s. I guarantee that most of these kids have parents who spent years stuffing them into Kryptonite-reinforced car seats, childproofing their houses until nary an electrical outlet was uncovered, protecting them from any conceivable danger to their well-being -- only to let them go out on the weekends and walk between ranks of cars, every one of which is piloted by a pathological red-light runner. I'm sure this leads to some amazingly incongruous household scenes: "Johnny, make sure you wear your bike helmet and knee pads! I don't want you getting hurt on your way to street-begging for the school luge team!" Still, I don't know why I even bother to point these things out anymore. I'm the one who once suggested that driver's licenses ought to be as hard to get as licenses to practice law, reasoning in my own unique way that more people die annually from bad driving than from bad lawyering. But they didn't listen to me then and probably won't now. If they did, I'd tell them to take the whole lot -- red-light runners, four-way overpoliters, parents who send their kids into the streets to mooch for money -- and send 'em all someplace where they'd be out of our hair. Besides, Camden has enough problems as it is.