making jfk a two way street is a decent idea

Among the cooler ideas:

A light-rail transit line, à la Dublin, Ireland, running down Market Street, connecting 30th Street Station and burgeoning University City with all of Center City. The line would then branch out north and south along the Delaware.

A concerted effort to soften and animate the dead, concrete civic spaces left by another era. Imagine, next to City Hall, a green Dilworth Plaza, home to movie nights in the summer and a skating rink in winter. Imagine the City Hall courtyard as a city crossroads full of things to do. Similarly, visualize a Benjamin Franklin Parkway liberated from the tyranny of the car, some of its grand sweep reclaimed for pedestrians and pastimes, with smoother connections among its cultural treasures.

A saving injection of green and color for the seedy dead zone of West Market Street and JFK Boulevard between the office towers and the Schuylkill: linear green parks, flowered medians, a Brooklyn Heights-style promenade along the Schuylkill from JFK to Chestnut Street.

Development of an academic district on North Broad Street, akin to the cultural district of the Avenue of the Arts, linking the learning institutions lining that raggedy stretch of the city's spine.

An East Market Street with attractive retail, and a streetscape that soothes pedestrians and links them smoothly to Chinatown to the north, and the residential blocks to the south. Some smart public investments might unlock the long rumored, never realized private investments in East Market's underused tracts.

These ideas would cost money, but not fortunes. They mesh well with the separate Delaware riverfront planning process being led by Penn Praxis (which is exploring an ambitious, project-of-a-generation idea - sinking Interstate 95).