A Quarter Per Order Won't Fill a Pothole on Kensington Ave
The potholes on Girard Avenue have been eating tires since February. You can hear them from inside the coffee shop on the corner. A low, percussive thud, followed by someone's muffled cursing through a rolled-up window. This is Philadelphia in March.
Mayor Cherelle Parker has a plan. Sort of.
Her proposed budget includes a 25-cent fee on every delivery order placed through apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats. The money would fund what she's calling "pothole squads." Dedicated crews. Real asphalt. The idea being that if you order pad thai to your apartment in Fairmount, you chip in a quarter toward fixing the street the driver just bottomed out on.
It sounds reasonable until you sit with it for a minute.
Philadelphia has roughly 1.6 million people. The streets belong to all of them, not just the ones ordering late-night cheesesteaks from Dalessandro's. The city's road repair backlog is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. A 25-cent surcharge on Grubhub orders is not a funding mechanism. It is a gesture dressed up as policy.
The fee would fall almost entirely on renters. On people who work long shifts and don't have time to cook. On older residents who can't drive to the grocery store on Aramingo. On the night-shift nurse in Kensington who orders dinner because she's been on her feet for twelve hours and the closest restaurant closed at nine.
These are not the people who should be subsidizing street maintenance. That bill belongs to the city's general fund. It belongs to the property tax structure. It belongs to the decisions made over decades to underfund the Streets Department while finding money for other things.
Parker inherited a mess, yes. But she's also the mayor now, which means the mess is hers to own and hers to fix honestly.
Who's Actually Paying
Let's be specific about what a delivery surcharge does in a city like Philadelphia.
In neighborhoods like West Philly around Baltimore Avenue, or along Frankford in the Northeast, delivery apps are infrastructure. Not a luxury. People without cars, people with mobility issues, people with young kids and no babysitter use these apps the way other people use a car trip to the grocery store. A quarter per order adds up. Ten orders a month is $2.50. That's not nothing when you're stretching a paycheck.
The delivery drivers themselves are already absorbing the cost of bad roads through wear on their vehicles. Ask anyone doing gig work in South Philly. The stretch of Washington Avenue near 10th Street has been a suspension test since the water main work wrapped up and apparently nobody came back to finish the repaving. Drivers know which blocks to avoid. They have mental maps of the worst corridors.
Taxing the transaction does not fix the road. It funds a squad that patches the road. There is a difference.
Pothole patching is reactive. It is the city filling holes after they form, after tires blow, after someone's axle snaps on Broad Street near City Hall. A real infrastructure commitment looks like resurfacing whole corridors before they deteriorate. It looks like the Streets Department having enough staff and equipment year-round, not a special squad conjured when the complaints get loud enough to make the news cycle.
What Council Should Ask
This proposal still has to move through City Council. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who represents parts of Kensington and Hunting Park, has been loud about infrastructure equity before. Councilmember Jim Harrity covers neighborhoods in the Northeast where roads take a serious beating from truck traffic off I-95. These are the people who should be pressing the administration on whether 25 cents per order is actually a plan or a press release.
The question Council needs to ask is simple. What is the total projected annual revenue from this fee, and what percentage of the actual road repair backlog does it address? If the answer is less than five percent, this is not a solution. It is an announcement.
Parker is good at announcements. The pothole squad rollout had a name, a logo, a social media moment. The streets on my walk from Chinatown down Callowhill to the Reading Viaduct still have cracks you could lose a bike wheel in. Branding does not fill those.
The Actual Problem
Philadelphia streets deteriorate faster than most American cities because of the freeze-thaw cycle, because of heavy bus and truck routes, and because the city has chronically underfunded maintenance for at least thirty years. This is not a new problem. It is not a DoorDash problem.
The money to fix streets exists in the city's budget. It competes with everything else, which is the real argument, the one Parker should be having out loud with residents instead of threading it through a delivery app surcharge that most people won't notice until their order total looks slightly off.
There is something uncomfortable about a city asking its most service-dependent residents to fund the basics. The person ordering groceries from the Associated Supermarket app because they live in a food-sparse part of North Philly is not the villain in Philadelphia's infrastructure story. The decades of deferred maintenance are.
Charge the quarter if you must. But do not call it a strategy. Call it a down payment on an apology, and then go find the rest of the money somewhere that makes more sense.