Cities around the world have figured out how to ease congestion. Here are five fixes for Philly.

Just try traveling in a straight line for any distance in Center City Philadelphia.

Moving, by any means, requires navigating around myriad obstacles: jaywalkers, construction fencing, an illegally parked delivery truck. Sometimes, all these things at once.

The Inquirer dispatched a team of reporters, photographers, and videographers in December to bike, bus, walk, and drive along Chestnut and 15th Streets, two of Center City’s busiest thruways. One reporter tagged along on a UPS delivery route.

Each had a different perspective on what caused the most frustration, with fingers justly pointed at every kind of traveler. People on foot bemoaned construction crews, a driver complained about careless pedestrians, and a bus passenger noticed how cars' sloppy parking seriously hindered public transit.

More people, more construction, more drivers, and more businesses all contribute to the morass. Center City added 16,558 jobs from 2008 to 2017 in a place where almost 60 percent of workers commute by car. Nearly 7,000 vehicles a day travel Chestnut Street east of Broad Street, up 17 percent since 2011, according to the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. The proliferation of Uber and Lyfts in the city has added to the number of cars on the road, and drawn riders away from public transportation. And our online-shopping-addicted culture leads to an estimated 18,000 deliveries a day in Center City.

Since 2007, Philadelphians are spending more hours hung up in traffic, a 2015 study from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute found.

Jason Laughlin / Staff Eli Salim unloads cargo from his UPS truck in Center City.

“Cities became really cool,” said Mike Carroll, Philadelphia’s deputy managing director for the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability (OTIS). “People are moving around more, and they’re finding new ways to move around, and those new ways seem to contribute to congestion.”

Many big cities are facing the same pressures, so we reached out to planners, city officials, and transit experts worldwide to explore what they are doing to manage congestion. Philadelphia is only now experimenting with ideas that are commonplace elsewhere. In part, that’s because traffic here still isn’t as bad as in other places. (Philadelphia as a whole ranks 16th worst among major American cities in hours spent in traffic each year.) But if the population and employment continue to increase as projected, traffic will only worsen, to the detriment of the city’s livability and economy.

Here’s what other cities are doing to address some of the same challenges facing Philadelphia:

Some solutions are natural fits for Philadelphia, while others may be harder to adapt. Some would require major financial investments, while others would task city government with shifting policy in a big way. None of the solutions is a silver bullet, and some examples show how successful policy can falter without maintenance and modernization. Still, it’s clear Philadelphia hasn’t engaged with congestion as aggressively as other cities.

“For big cities, we’re really far behind the curve,” said Erick Guerra, a professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania, speaking of construction site management, one of the causes of congestion, “to the point where it looks like indifference.”