Give Respect, Get Respect

You've been there. What Philadelphian hasn't driven, walked, or biked through our city and thought, "get off your phone and watch the road"? Well the city has decided to do something about it.

Unfortunately this campaign started off on a vague foot, implying that police wouldn't only be targeting texting drivers and cyclists abusing the sidewalk, but also pedestrians cluelessly twittering away.

As much as I'd like to see that clumsy oaf Googling directions that lead him into oncoming traffic hauled off to City Hall and placed in the stocks, that kind of nanniness gives our historically macho men-in-blue a license to harass.

I'm too young to remember Frank Rizzo, but any more legislation aimed at saving me from my own stupidity is going to have me hightailing it back to the Libertarian hills of my motherland.

But I digress. "Give Respect, Get Respect" is a decency campaign aimed at enforcing commonly flouted laws that already exist but are regularly ignored, such as driving your car amid a frenzy of texts or riding your bike on the sidewalk.

Be careful what you wish for. Though they may be half assed, we got our bike lanes. Now we have to use them.

I have to give it to City Hall this time though. Making our city more livable by enforcing our existing laws is a step in the right direction. My only hope is that this is a first step.

Unfortunately Mayor Nutter recently tweeted that we already have a litter campaign, referring to the self-enforced Unlitter Us campaign. The city's reluctance to actively target litterbugs as part of this campaign is mind boggling. I guess I should just be happy that the Mayor wasn't tweeting-and-walking.

• @mrwrightnow1: Mayor we need to get a campaign on littering in this city?
• @Michael_Nutter: We have one...Unlitter Us spoken word artists

Obviously, Mayor Nutter, "mrwrightnow1" meant we need a littering campaign that works.