Sister Act

First, the article that could have been:

We've all been hearing a whole lot lately about the process of evacuating major cities, and how this process may need an overhaul. With this in mind, it seemed fairly obvious to me that since getting in and out of Philadelphia on even a normal day is a complete nightmare, it isn't even worth trying to overhaul it and make it more efficient because our highways will never be able to handle that much volume (since about 1.5 million people live in Philly, and an additional 4.7 million live in the surrounding area). Never. Forget about it. If we want traffic jams that aren't 100 miles long, we're doing to need to literally double the amount of traffic our highways can handle.

I considered backing this up purely with anecdotal evidence (tales of sitting on the Schuylkill Expressway and moving about half a mile in 45 minutes... at 11:30 p.m. on a Saturday night), but decided to make a more convincing argument and dig a little deeper. So off I went in search of facts to support my argument, when I realized that I'm not a city planner, and would have to learn an entire canon of knowledge to make a convincing argument (I started looking into local highway capacities vs. population densities, etc.), and that in the end, the facts might not support my claim anyway. So that post is gone the way of Freddie Mitchell's contract with the Kansas City Chiefs (ba-zing!), because somebody at Slate is bound to do it more thoroughly in the next couple days anyway.

Instead, here's an interesting tidbit I found while looking up demographic information about Philadelphia: "Philadelphia has ten sister cities, as designated by Sister Cities International, Inc.: Douala (Cameroon), Florence (Italy), Incheon (South Korea), Nizhni Novgorod (Russia), Tel Aviv (Israel), Tianjin (China), Torun (Poland), Aix-en-Provence (France), Kobe (Japan), and Mosul (Iraq)."

If you'd asked me what Philadelphia's sister cities were, I'd probably have answered, "Camden, NJ, and... Upper Darby?" I honestly had no idea that "sister cities" and "twin cities" were a big program undertaken by places all over the world. I'd always thought that the entire concept of "twin cities" was a half-baked explanation for why Minneapolis and St. Paul only have one international airport between them (this is where my one Minnesotan reader will tell me that's not actually true, assuming she actually reads this).

So now, if somebody asks me what connection I have with Florence, Italy, I'll have a real answer! Or at least I'll have a better answer than, "I read Hannibal, and parts of that take place in Florence." And the next time I read about a suicide bombing in Mosul, I'll pause a little longer, and reflect on my fallen brothers and sisters.

Sister cities are fun! Who wants to undertake a world tour with me, to visit all of our brothers and sisters, bringing good tidings from the City of Brotherly Love?

And we'll hook them up with some Eagles gear while we're at it, because they probably have geographic neighbors that are sisters with Boston or Atlanta... and Phillies caps for those situated near a sister of Houston or... ok, still Atlanta. I'm just saying, Florence or Aix-en-Provence, if you want to swap some soccer jerseys for some (American) football or baseball gear, I'll trade some sports karma with you.