The City That Legislates One Thing at a Time
Philly wrote 3 separate ordinances for pigeons, carriages, and laser pointers — where other cities fit them in one or two chapters.
Most big-city codes have a “miscellaneous” chapter. Animal control, public nuisances, weird behaviors. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco each consolidate these prohibitions into one or two chapters. The legislative logic is: these are all minor behavioral rules, group them together, move on.
Philadelphia does not have a miscellaneous chapter. Philadelphia has § 10-110 for pigeon feeding, a section the Code marks as “Renumbered, 1986 Ordinances, p. 840” — meaning it predates the 1986 codification and is far older than the 2008 NBC Philadelphia story blaming a bad bag of seed for a pigeon problem in Northeast Philadelphia. Philadelphia has § 9-402 for horse-drawn carriages, an entire section that deals with the wagons you see in Center City, written separately and updated separately. Philadelphia has § 9-625 for laser pointers, added by Bill No. 980657-A in February 1999 around the same time a published case report of laser-pointer retinal injury drew national attention to the devices.
Three behaviors. Three separate sections. Three separate legislative histories. None of them has been consolidated, and none of them looks like it will be.
The pattern is not new. The pattern is the whole code. Philadelphia writes single-purpose ordinances. Something happens, a Councilmember introduces a bill, the bill gets a section number, the section lives forever. The code grows by accretion. The pigeon rule does not amend a generic “feeding of animals in public” section. It becomes its own section.
This is not the worst way to legislate. There is an argument for it. Single-purpose sections are easier to find. They have clearer legislative histories. A lawyer researching the laser-pointer rule can read every word that was said about laser pointers in 1999, not a generic debate about “public nuisances.” If the law is enforceable, the enforceability is in the precision.
The downside is the volume. The code is 22 titles, hundreds of chapters, thousands of sections, and the structure is so granular that nobody outside a small set of lawyers knows what is in it. The pigeon-feeding rule is its own little law. The carriage-horse rule is its own little law. The laser-pointer rule is its own little law. The public, dealing with pigeons, carriages, or lasers, has no idea that there is a code at all, and the code is not designed to surface itself.
Most other cities solve this by writing general rules and trusting the courts to interpret them. Philadelphia solves it by writing a new rule for every new problem, and the rules pile up, and the code grows, and the pigeons keep getting fed.
It is a Philadelphian approach. Specific. Slow. Hard to navigate. Hard to argue with.